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5 Core Values for the Workplace

09/03/2013 11:35 am ET | Updated Nov 03, 2013

justified. Once a company starts to condone lying

as a matter of course, it is headed for serious
trouble. In such businesses, lying becomes a
game. And success goes to those who play it best.

Robert L. Dilenschneider
Founder, The Dilenschneider Group
There are many fine values, such as courtesy,
confidence, ingenuity, thrift, and so on. The trouble
is that the list of values grows easily and can cause
many employees to lose their focus. They fail to
prioritize. A short list of values is far more useful in
putting the workplace back on track.
Moreover, when the core values exceed four or five
points, it becomes difficult to communicate and
reinforce them. The following are five candidates
for the practical values having foremost importance:
1.
Integrity
2.
Accountability
3.
Diligence
4.
Perseverance
5.
Discipline
I know companies strong organizations
centered on these values. They are invariably
successful. Almost always, these core values
generate other values in employees.
But what if all our organizations started with the
same short list? Wouldnt that give American
industry, or the industry of any culture, an important
leg up?
INTEGRITY
Integrity is no simple matter. It is particularly easy
for business people to lie. I compiled a list of 46
reasons that executives lie. They include:
If I didnt lie about my loyalty to the firm, they would
never have promoted me.
If I hadnt lied, I would have exposed our firm to an
unfair lawsuit.
If the union knew our real profit prospects, they
would beat us black-and-blue at the bargaining
table.
There seems to be some compelling reasons to lie
in certain situations. Although Ive heard a few
plausible defenses of lying, Im not sure it is ever

In an article titled, Where Lying Was Business as

Usual, Businessweek reviewed a book on the
Wedtech Scandal, a Washington scandal of the late
80s in which a few government officials fed fat
contracts to a dubious supplier. The reviewer,
Harris Collingwood, concludes his piece, saying, In
the end, whats remarkable about the Wedtech
gangsters isnt that they were crude and thuggish.
Its that among the sharp-elbowed hordes pushing
through Washingtons corridors of power, they
didnt even stand out.
ACCOUNTABILITY
The value of accountability is the willingness to take
responsibility for ones own actions.
Bob Waterman has written a penetrating little
book, Adhocracy: The Power to Change. It narrates
an engaging story about accountability in an
energy-cogenerating firm called AES. The people in
the Beaver Valley, Pennsylvania, AES plant learned
what many workers and managers know across the
country: They learned who is responsible for the
way things run. The answer, of course, is
thatthey are. They, however, is not anyone of
them, but rather a nameless, faceless force hiding
in the organization. These powerful secret
terrorists, these mega-gremlins they are
always there to gum up the works.
They send the wrong material handling
orders. They misprocess the medical
claims. They forget to clean and maintain the
machinery.
A courageous top manager in this firm, Bob
Hemphill who is a leader, no doubt about it
decided to declare war on they. He sent out coffee
mugs emblazoned with, Who is they anyway? He
put up posters that read: Send they a letter.
With a healthy sense of humor, AES eliminated the
rationalization, They make us do it. It was no
longer an acceptable excuse. In a particularly
clever step, the workers created a system of
organization called the honeycomb structure and
organized themselves into families: the turbine
family, the coal-pile family and the scrubber family.
Workers were also encouraged to move from family

to family to expand their range of skills. In this way,

AES was able to make the breakthrough on
accountability, as each family also provided a
framework of values that, in turn, became a basis
for improving accountability.
DILIGENCE
There are scores of individuals who equate
diligence with drudgery. Too often, managers
demand diligence about the wrong things: filling out
forms is one, glaring example.
According to Arno Penzias, the head of research at
Bell Labs, the mother of one of his teachers at
Columbia used to ask her son persistently when he
was just a young school child, Did you ask any
good questions today, Isaac? The question was
not what did you learn in school today, but what
good questions did you ask. The mothers priority
must have had an impact on Penzias, because he
eventually helped institutionalize the practice of
asking useful questions at AT&T Ben Labs. Asking
tough questions has become a hallmark of AT&T
research culture and has helped to establish Bell
Laboratories as one of the great creative
institutions in America. The best firms are diligent
about uncommon things for example, asking
creative questions.
Im afraid that we lose the value of diligence as a
positive force early in life. Too often, schools turn
diligence into drudgery. Peter Drucker has pointed
out that our educational system is obsessed with
peoples weaknesses. Rather than making their
powerful writing skills even stronger, children weak
in geography waste time on remedial geography
with few results. How do we make our strengths
stronger? is a positive, productive question that we
should ask ourselves each day.
Diligence that nurtures strength makes a difference.
Indeed, a diligent commitment to improving their
already powerful position is what makes the
Japanese a formidable competitor in the electronic
and automotive industries. Similarly, the Japanese
philosophy of perpetual quality improvement is a
restless, but positive diligence.
PERSEVERANCE
The developers of the ulcer drug at G.D. Searle
knew they had something when they invented
aspartame. It took years to learn, however, that

aspartame was not an ulcer drug but the heart of

the revolutionary sugar substitute NutraSweet.
Perseverance presupposes confidence, and few
companies can match Xerox for its sense of
confidence and determination. Xerox, which
pioneered the photocopying business, lost
important ground to the Japanese on price. Now,
Xerox is reviving its copying business by focusing
on the value added by advanced technologies and
color copying. Focused leadership over time
implies productive, useful perseverance.
In the 80s, cutting your losses quickly was
fashionable thinking. In the future, companies wont
be able to exit and enter businesses as quickly as
in the last decade. The initial costs of entry,
especially for marketing, will be prohibitive. Once
the massive investment has been made, it
becomes increasingly awkward to justify
abandoning the business. The vice chairman of the
holding company that includes Revlon said in
the Wall Street Journal, [W]e arent going to spend
$30 million to launch a deodorant. The minimum
stakes can be staggering, and the entry costs for
other kinds of products are, in fact, much higher.
Employees must be prepared for prolonged
competitive horizons. The battles of entrenched
foes, such as Pepsi and Coke, will be more the
norm than the exception. Just think: The Cola Wars
between Pepsi and Coke have already lasted
longer than the Cold War between the United
States and the Soviet Union.
DISCIPLINE
How little we know about discipline in modern
business! Because of our passion to make things
simple, we err and also try to make them easy. As
the great battlefield strategist von Clausewitz
pointed out, the simple and the easy are not
synonymous.
AI Neuharth launched Today, the prototype for USA
Today, in Florida back in 1966. Two weeks before
the first issue, Neuharth reported that his
employees produced complete prototypes of the
paper every day printed them, put them on
trucks, dropped them at delivery points to pinpoint
timing, then picked them up and burned them at the
local dump to keep them out of the hands of the
competition. In my view, USA Today is assured
great commercial success in journalism. In no small

measure, it stems from the remarkable discipline

that went into building the paper.
Discipline does not always imply following orders.
Sometimes, it points in the opposite
direction. Business Month named MCI one of the
five best-managed companies in 1990. The late Bill
McCowan, MCIs former Chairman and CEO, did
his best to ban... standard procedures and
practices. He would get up in front of his people
and say: I know that somewhere, someone out
there is trying to write up a manual on procedures.
Well, one of these days Im going to find out who
you are, and when I do, Im going to fire you. For
McCowan, I think, discipline meant that individuals
are required to think on their feet. They have to
solve problems sensibly from the earliest days of
their careers.
Obviously, there are many ways to sort and define
the five cornerstone values: integrity, accountability,
diligence, perseverance, and, discipline. Its hard to
contain the focus to these attributes before other
supporting values come into play. Diligence
presumes a sense of urgency, for example,
because you cant be just busy; you must be busy
in the context of time. Perseverance also requires
judgment because no one would ever persist in a
patently wrongheaded course. Although they may
presume other values, the five cornerstone values
are a credible starting point, and, I think, can be
considered a priority list of the key workplace
values.
In my view, management now has no choice but to
teach values. Business leaders in the United States
have shunned talking about values, because they
seem to suggest a religious or moral outlook. This
implication is not necessarily the case. Further, its
not possible to sustain industrial competitiveness
without attention to them. Ask a Japanese CEO to
define his primary job, and hes likely to tell you that
his role is to harmonize values. It is to help
employees to adjust to the ever-shifting structure of
priorities and demands. Values are what motivate
and sustain behavior over the long run, and this
perseverance is something the Japanese
understand particularly well.
Copyright Robert L. Dilenschneider, author of A
Briefing for Leaders: Communication As the
Ultimate Exercise of Power from which this piece
was excerpted.

INSTRUMENTAL VALUES and TERMINAL

VALUES
THE TWO TYPES OF VALUES
By
VIKRAM KARVE

Values are of two types, both in the personal and

organizational domains.
The two types of values are:
INSTRUMENTAL VALUES
and
TERMINAL VALUES

INSTRUMENTAL VALUES
Instrumental Values are core values, permanent in
nature, comprise personal characteristics and
character traits.
Instrumental Values refer to preferable modes of
behavior and include values like honesty, sincerity,
ambition, independence, obedience,
imaginativeness, courageousness,
competitiveness, and also some negative traits too.
Organizations also have Instrumental Values
(which can be ascertained from the organizational
culture) and these are permanent in nature and
difficult to change.

For example, the instrumental values of a PSU will

differ from that of an MNC though both may be in
the same business.
Instrumental Values are difficult to change.

TERMINAL VALUES
In our personal lives, Terminal Values are those
things that we can work towards or we think are
most important and we feel are most desirable
terminal values are desirable states of existence.
Terminal Values include things like happiness, selfrespect, family security, recognition, freedom, inner
harmony, comfortable life, professional excellence,
etc.
In a nutshell, Terminal Values signify the objectives
of the life of a person the ultimate things the

person wants to achieve through his or her

behavior (the destination he wants to reach in life)
whereas Instrumental Values indicate the methods
an individual would like to adopt for achieving his
lifes aim (the path he would like to take to reach his
destination).
This applies to organizations as well, and
organizations too exhibit Terminal Values. However,
Terminal Values can be changed and this can be
seen when there is a change of top management or
CEO.

Integrity
An important aspect of workplace values and ethics
is integrity, or displaying honest behavior at all
times. For instance, an employee who works at a
cash register is expected to balance the drawer and
deposit the correct amount of money at the end of
the night. Integrity in the business world also might
mean being honest when turning in an expense
report or not attempting to steal a sales account
from a co-worker.

Accountability
Read this Before you take up a Job (or Before
Recruiting a Candidate)

ORGANIZATIONAL VALUES AND

ORGANIZATION BEHAVIOUR
Organizational Values are the key to organizational
behavior.
So, before you join an organization you must
ensure that there is no conflict in your instrumental
values and the organizations instrumental values,
since instrumental values are difficult to change.
Conversely, the organisation must consider this
aspect while interviewing a prospective candidate
for recruitment.
Of course, any mismatch in terminal values can be
corrected by suitable induction training, since
terminal values can be inculcated or realigned or
changed.

Dedication
How hard an employee works, or how much effort
she puts forth, can go a long way. Obviously,
companies want results, but most employers prefer
a worker who gives an honest effort to one who
might be considered a natural at the job, but is
otherwise disruptive. Either way, when an
employee signs on with a business, they must be in
agreement to perform to the best of their ability and
their behaviour must be in alignment with the
companies core values and expected ethical
conduct.

Employees in all companies are expected to be

accountable for their actions and their assigned
responsibilities. At a basic level, that means
showing up when they are scheduled and on time,
and not taking advantage of time allotted for
breaks. It also means carrying out assigned
responsibilities, meeting deadlines, accepting
responsibility when things go wrong and willingly
working toward a resolution of problems or issues.
And sometimes it might mean working longer than
planned to see a project or task through to
completion.

Collaboration
In almost every business, workplace values and
ethics consist of teamwork. Thats because most
companies believe that when morale is high and
everyone is working together, success will follow.
So it is important for employees to be team
playerswhether assisting co-workers on a project,
teaching new hires new tasks, or following the
instructions of a supervisor.

Respect
Employee conduct is an integral aspect of
workplace values and ethics. Respectful behaviour
honours the dignity and contribution of each
employee. It promotes positive behaviours in
communication and interpersonal relations, as well
as with external partners, clients and stakeholders,
Respect earns trust. Employees must not only treat
others with respect, but exhibit appropriate
behavior in all facets of the job. That includes
wearing proper attire, using language that is
considered suitable around the office and
conducting themselves with professionalism.

Employee Code of Conduct

Every company should articulate its core values,
define expected behaviours that are both
aspirational and positive and also have its own
specific rules on certain types of conduct. These
should be made extremely clear in an Employee

Code of Conduct document. This document sets

out both the overarching principles or core values
of the organization and the behaviours and conduct
expected of employees.