Defrag your strategy - values

In the second of a series of articles on defragging your strategy, April Co-founder Tim Westall examines organisational values and how to prevent them becoming fragmented and misunderstood.

What are values? 

There is a reasonable consensus around what values are in an organisational context.  Values are the guiding principles and beliefs that shape an organisation’s culture, behaviours and decisions and they are an essential companion to ‘purpose’. Taken as a set, they articulate the organisation’s core ideology and signal what it stands for. 

Why values matter 

Values anchor alignment, help create competitive distinctiveness, and support long-term sustainability in ways transactional business-speak cannot. They increasingly drive employee preference - people want to work where they feel an affinity with the organisation’s values. 

What ‘good’ looks like 

Effective values are short, specific, memorable and tied to observable behaviours. They endure.  For example, one April client continues to display values we developed with them ten years ago. Even though their strategy has changed four times, the values have remained constant and are regularly quoted by anyone who works there. 

When values fragment  

Over 20 years of advising on strategy and implementation, we’ve seen some common mistakes leaders make when trying to manage values: 

• Treating them as something that can be defined and implemented by leadership decree, rather than something to discover and evolve with the involvement of the whole organisation 

• Treating them as a marketing asset with a focus on straplines, posters, perks or one-off campaigns 

• Failure to incentivise or embed values into everyday processes 

• Over-reliance on HR or appointed ‘culture champions’ who may lack authority or credibility 

• Failure to integrate values into the broader narrative of change, including honest discussion of trade-offs 

How to keep values integrated 

To prevent this fragmentation, there are some steps to ensure values remain integrated in an organisation’s strategy and behaviour. Organisational values are most effective when they tell a compelling story so use them as part of the overall strategic narrative. 

Organisations should road-test wording with a representative group of employees to ensure it is authentic. Keep it simple – a handful of values that are concise and directional mean people can figure them out for themselves rather than be told or have it spelled out. 

The values must then be reinforced through everyday practice by embedding them into performance management, reward systems, and regular measurement frameworks, with regular measurement and continuous learning.  

Finally, celebrate and communicate success stories across the business and perhaps share the occasional cautionary tale of counter examples to reinforce what values do and don’t mean in practice. 

Tim’s next article in the defrag your strategy series will focus on the third foundation of strategy – vision.