Values 2.0: A Culture of Trust

In my last post I wrote,

Values unify when shared, divide when not. Values create culture. Values guide culture, build trust in relationships, and strengthen a group of people to do the impossible.

In a Values 1.0 world, values are treated as Icons, as symbolic emblems that have meaning but little relevance. In fact, the iconic values are in competition with the actual values of a company.

There is no choice about whether to have values or not. They are fundamental to who we are as human beings. You cannot escape their impact upon the functioning of any social environment. They are basic expressions of human nature. When ignored, they become competitive, divisive and a constraint on the business' ability to create impact.  When they are developed, they build unity and a culture of trust.

In a Values 2.0 world, leaders understand that to build their corporate culture around a clearly identified and embraced set of values provides the conditions for creating a culture of trust. This diagram illustrates this connection.

Values are ideas that unify relationships and guide an organizational structure to create a culture of trust.

Is trust really that important? Ask the former employees and shareholders of Enron.  Ask the spouses of politicians caught in prostitution rings. Ask your children if trust is important.  In fact, ask them about their friends, or supposed friends, and you'll find that much of what passes for human relationships in a business setting is at the same level as a 15 year high school sophomore. It can be mean, nasty, petty and emotionally destructive. Ask your kids. They understand trust in a more immediate, fundamental way than we adults who play our word games with the idea.

Trust is at the heart of the respect that a company seeks to earn by its integrity and impact. Violate that trust, and the culture of the company is ripped in two.

The culture of an organization is representative of all the people, not just senior leadership. It is an exchange of attitudes towards one another. We could say that senior leaders express respect down through the organization chart, while employees express trust up through it. In each case, at the heart of this exchange is a set of values that are shared, mutually believed in, and that create the unity that enable the company to do more.

How do they do more? That's for another posting. But let's just assume that creating a culture of trust has the effect of increasing ROEI, return-on-employee-investment, by more than cost cutting can increase the bottomline.