Keep Leading!® Podcast 114 | The Value of Values | David Cohen

Eddie Turner:

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of executive coaching, masterful facilitation, and motivational speaking.

Today I want to talk about values and specifically values in organizations. We see them on mission statements and company placards but what do they really mean and how can we improve in executing and living company values. Well, we’re going to talk about the value of values with educator and consultant Dr. David Cohen. Dr. David Cohen is recognized as a global thought leader on the people side of business. He has presented and consulted on five continents, working with corporate leaders and employees to improve people practices enabling productivity and business success. Among other things, he’s the author of two books and numerous articles in professional journals. He’s a fellow member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and most recently was selected as one of the world’s Top 30 Organizational Cultural Professionals for 2021. Here with me today to talk about the value of values is Dr. David Cohen.

David, welcome to the program.

Dr. David Cohen:

Thank you. A pleasure to be here.

Eddie Turner:

Tell me what I missed.

Dr. David Cohen:

I don’t think you missed anything really. You covered it all. The only thing you missed is I have five grandchildren who I wish I could spend a lot of time with but pandemic prevents that.

Eddie Turner:

All right. Well, when you talk about five grandchildren, I suspect that there’s some value behind values dealing with them.

Dr. David Cohen:

No, there is. That’s something that I’ve been working on. And in the Jewish tradition, there’s a thing called an ethical will where you pass on to your children and grandchildren the belief system you hold that you hope they understand it and can be a legacy to make you proud. So, I’ve been working on one for a long time.

Eddie Turner:

Wonderful. How do we do that in companies?

Dr. David Cohen:

That’s a great idea. I’ve been thinking about doing that. The more I got into this, the more I think about “What is the ethical will?” because one of the things that I talk to leaders about, especially the HR leaders, they say “Don’t talk to your CEO or your executive team about values and vision because they’re just going to think that that’s your job as HR. That’s the bunny hugging tree kissing stuff. There’s a lynch word that gets them too excited about the concept. So, the back door into this is to talk about your legacy. What do you hope is your legacy? What do you hope to hear, you’re retired, you’re on vacation in Europe and you hear it on the table next to you a young person who is going back to work after the vacation’s over and really excited to join what was your organization for all the reasons you hoped that they would join it and you get really excited. What is your legacy going to be? Why is your legacy? What are the behaviors that created that legacy and where did that come from?” And, in essence, it comes from your belief system, your values. So, that’s how I got into it.

Eddie Turner:

All right. Well, what are values?

Dr. David Cohen:

Values, by my definition, are four things – strongly held beliefs, emotionally charged, resistant to change, universally – applied meaning that it doesn’t matter whether you’re the intern who just started as a college co-op or whether you’re the CEO, the values are the same for everybody in the organization, universally applied. And those values make it a psychologically safe place to work because the values are the norms of behavior that are accepted over time to differentiate right from wrong. So, one of the things which I always find sad and humorous at the same time is when I hear about people coming in to change corporate culture. And culture doesn’t change. If the foundation for culture is the values, it’s really hard to change our values. And if we can’t change our values, then how can you change corporate culture?

Eddie Turner:

Why is it hard to change values.

Dr. David Cohen:

Because it’s our belief system that’s strongly held, emotionally charged, resists change. That’s the definition, to me, of a value. As a result of that, we have built up those values over time. We have learned that this is our belief system because this is what either our parents taught us or something happened in adolescence, it gets reinforced through college or university. And by the time we hit young adulthood, we have a pretty set belief system that’s not going to change unless there’s a significant emotional event in our life such as having a child, losing a loved one or even this pandemic could cause somebody to change their perspective. That, to me, is probably the only incidents that are going to cause people without even realizing it perhaps to change what they find is important, what they cherish, how they treat people is acceptable or unacceptable.

Eddie Turner:

Well, every company is trying to establish values and rally people around a common set of core values but since they’re so deeply personal, as you mentioned, how do you do that when everyone has a different sense of what’s right or wrong or what’s important?

Dr. David Cohen:

Well, that’s a great question. First of all, I always find it interesting that we want to find out what our values are. Whether you have a defined set of values or not, you have a set of values, you have a corporate culture that exists. You might not have taken the time to define it but believe me your employees know exactly what it is. And people often ask me what’s a successful culture, what does it look like. I say “Are your people staying with you, are they engaged, are your retention numbers high and your profit, your bottom-line cash flow is really strong, you have a successful culture” but you’re right, different people have different value sense. So, in order, to me, to have a successful employee experience, you have to know what the behaviors are that define your values. So, for instance, to say that we value trust, well, what does trust mean, what are the behaviors that define trust. And once you identify that, you can identify what makes your definition of trust different from the definition of trust at the person across the street because no two organizations have exactly the same culture. We’ve all heard of the person who gets stolen away by the competition and within a week or two is coming back asking for their job back because they found out the grass isn’t greener on the other side and they don’t like working there. It’s the same company basically doing the same thing, the same products, same industry. The only difference was the way one organization behaves internally versus the others. And what the person finds out is the other organization has a different set of internal behaviors, has a different belief system, has a different way they treat their customers, they treat their employees, management makes decisions. They’re unhappy with it. They realize they were happy at the other one and they go back. So, no two organizations have exactly the same. So, how do you do this? The first thing is you have to identify what your values are. Unfortunately, most organizations, in my opinion, identify aspirational values.

Eddie Turner:

Such as.

Dr. David Cohen:

Such as any of them, any values. I mean, I’m working with a company right now, she’ll go nameless. The CEO claimed they didn’t have to live the values because they’re aspirational, all right? And one of them, let’s say, was caring. And they made a decision on the executive team where he allowed one of his direct reports to do things which didn’t demonstrate the behaviors of caring to her people. And people got really upset because it felt like that this woman had special privilege, he was getting away with things, etc., etc. And when I confronted him on it, he said “Well, the values are aspirational. We’re moving towards them.” And I said “Once you publish them, people will expect that they’re going to be lived. They no longer are aspirational.” He, unfortunately, didn’t agree with that and I don’t work with them anymore but the fact is that the values, the way I go about defining them, are from what I call the corporate legends within the organization – what are the stories that exemplify people having lived your values.

Eddie Turner:

It sounds as if this client was using the idea that they’re aspirational as an excuse for inaction.

Dr. David Cohen:

Yes. No, as an excuse, yeah, for inaction. I’m not following him. And then he went into this whole thing “Well, we live some of the values some of the time and other values other times.” And I said “No, the concept of values are all of equal importance.” You mentioned the word that, to me, is like rubbing chalk inappropriately on a chalkboard in the old days, showing my age, and the reality is there’s no such thing as core values. And it’s a philosophical thing, I know, but core values indicate there might be a backup set of values like I got my core indicators here and then I got my surrounding indicators there. No, we have a set of values. And reality is we all think we have values but they turn out to be beliefs if they’re challenged and we give them up. What we don’t give up, we don’t compromise on are values.

Eddie Turner:

Well, that’s a really good definition. Difference between a belief and a value – we will change our beliefs but we will not compromise on our values. I like that definition.

Dr. David Cohen:

And, to me, one of the best examples on the corporate world was what Howard Schultz did at Starbucks when he gave out same-sex insurance to his employees, part-time and full-time, and he got challenged at the next board meeting by a gentleman saying how could he do this and what could he do and it goes on and on and Shultz looks at him and says respectfully “If you don’t like the way what we’re doing … In the last year our share price has gone up 37%. If you don’t like it, please take your money and go somewhere else” because he would not give in to this myth that shareholders have a hold over leadership of the company. He will do the right thing no matter what. There was an interview that, forgot his name, the Canadian, Mr. Wonderful Dragon’s Den, he accused Starbucks of worrying more about employees and worrying about the bottom line, that the corporate purpose is to create wealth for shareholders. That’s not the purpose. That’s a byproduct of doing business correctly. And once you do business correctly, then you’ve got the right set of values, you’ve got the right behaviors and you’re successful.

Eddie Turner:

So, is that the value of values?

Dr. David Cohen:

The value of values is, yeah, you will make the right decision in difficult times. And the value of values is you set a psychologically safe environment. The problem is that there’s usually in organizations two sets of values. There are overt and covert values. The overt values are the ones on the boardroom wall or your website, which every time an employee looks at, they kind of scoff at it and becomes cynical because nobody in leadership ever lives them and probably most of the employees don’t. And then there’s a covert set of values. The covert set of values are what you don’t learn at orientation or onboarding. You learn just before you make a mistake and somebody who likes you tells you “We don’t do it that way around here” or “That’s not how you approach senior leaders.” Now, the values might indicate that it’s an open environment where there’s freedom of communication but in reality, everybody’s got the old carbon copy in their desk proving that they had 12 approvals of it before they went ahead and did it. So, to me, there’s two sets of values. When the overt and covert values are one and the same, you have a healthy organization, you have an organization that believes in itself, makes the right decisions regardless of what’s going on around them.

Eddie Turner:

Should organizations, if they’re going to live values, hire for values?

Dr. David Cohen:

Yes. Now, this is a big debate because there’s a lot of people who say that “If I hire for values, I’m perpetuating the old boys school.” And I’m glad you brought that up because there’s this concept that we hire like ourselves, which in some cases, unfortunately, is true. You are in the southern US. I’m in Canada. You got somebody in Asia. You got somebody in India. You got somebody in Saudi Arabia. We can all have a very similar belief system within, I call it, the curb stones. It’s like a four-lane highway. So, there’s a belief system and we all have a common understanding. We can all join that same company and we can all come at things with our own background, our own perspective, our own diversity but yet we will treat each other the way each other wants to be treated. Therefore, when you hire for values, you hire people who will make the right decision in difficult times, will do the right thing when nobody’s watching them. So, hiring for values has got a bad reputation where people have mistakenly, in my opinion, said “Well, no, if you hire for value, everybody’s the same.” I worked in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia with the Islamic Development Corporation. I worked with the University of Notre Dame with senior leadership on performance management and values. I’m not roman catholic and I’m not Muslim but I enjoyed those two organizations in particular because there was a similarity in belief systems, there was a similarity in outlook on making the world a better place. I mean, University of Notre Dame is very focused on that. University of Notre Dame would not compromise athletic teams. The president of the university with a great deal of pride said to me “None of our teams have ever missed more than one day of class to go to a ball game. Education comes first.” That’s a values-based organization that is very focused on, yeah, winning football is really important but it’s not the purpose of the school. The purpose of the school is to give a solid education, a religious-based education to our students who choose to go here. The Islamic Development Bank has representation from, I think, it is 72 different Muslim countries. People from all over the world work there but they have a purpose which is rooted in a set of values which says “We are giving funding to improve healthcare, improve infrastructure, improve schools.” There’s a purpose to it. So, it doesn’t really matter where you’re coming from in the world. If you have a similar set of values, you can now have people from diverse backgrounds, economic systems, geographic systems that all have a similar belief system and get along very well and create the kind of ideas that were never created before.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. Well, we’re talking about the value of values with Dr. David Cohen. I’m enjoying this discussion and we will continue to learn more from Dr. David Cohen right after this.

Eddie Turner:

We’re back. I’m talking to Dr. David Cohen. Dr. David Cohen is an educator and a consultant. He is also one of the world’s top 30 Organizational Culture Professionals for 2021 as ranked by Global Gurus.

Now, David, you were explaining to us before the break the difference between values and beliefs. I loved your definition that your beliefs can change but our values, we’re going to hold on to those. And then we talked about why that matters for organizations but you also mentioned culture. And many of us who worked in the talent development space or organizational development space, we hear the phrase “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Is that true?

Dr. David Cohen:

Yes, it is, but Peter Drucker says he never said it. So, we don’t really know who said it and what is confusing to me is when organizations and consultants talk about changing their culture. And when you analyze it, they’re changing their strategy. And so, I challenge anybody to say you’re changing the culture if you’re not changing the values. A change of strategy is going to be more successful if you celebrate your values, celebrate your culture, get people excited and understanding what it means to move forward. That’s why I often call the work I do a back to the future exercise. Strayed from what made us great. New CEOs have come in, they tried to put their stamp on it and there’s always those employees that have been there a while who say “In the old days, it was good because they were more successful. People did get along better.” So, often, it’s simply about finding about your roots and finding out where you’re from and what made you great and then celebrating that. Culture is stronger because of the value system, as I said, evolve, they don’t change. Values evolve slowly. So, if we can celebrate our values, we will make strategy stronger. If we use our changing strategy to say there’s a change in culture, I think you confuse the inmates and there’s a psychological safety that you’re pulling out from underneath them.

Eddie Turner:

Well, you shared with us some of the biggest mistakes you see companies making earlier in terms of number one, having these and not living them and calling them aspirational but who’s getting it right in this space?

Dr. David Cohen:

There’s a lot of people are getting it right in this space. I mean, to name a few, there’s a company I work with in Fort Lauderdale, Florida called HEICO Aerospace and they make all decisions based on their value set. They don’t call them values. They call them factors for success because at the time, the CEO didn’t want to call them values. So, they’re factors for success. For instance, they have a certain way they’d treat people in that values and they’ve grown exponentially because of purchase and growth. And when they bought a firm, for instance, in Arizona, a right to work state, they could have fired everybody but that’s not the way they treat people, that’s not their policy. And when they sat everybody down, it was a small firm and they set the 40 people down before letting them go, they also told them that they would get one-week salary for every year they worked there. Some people worked there 20 something years. And these peoples basically started to cry. They were in a state of shock. They all wanted to come work for the company. They couldn’t if they’d have to move locations and they were not going to pay for anybody to move. So, values, you know that when something happens, you’ll do the right thing.

I’ll give you another example, one of my favorite examples, of a corporate legend which means living your values is when Michelin Tires in the 1980s when there was a global recession, depression actually, and cars weren’t being made. Therefore, they don’t have to make new tires and they closed down three plants in Canada. And that was for almost two years. And for every two weeks, every employee got their paycheck. Nobody misses. They don’t lay anybody off or anything else. However, here’s the advantage to it. Not only they lived their values, they also were the first ones making tires. And therefore, they sold more tires and made up the difference. It was a strategic move based on their values. Another move that happened at Michelin is a young employee who was working there a very short period time, hourly employee, had a very sick child, had to be flown to Toronto for the hospital for children here. And Michelin, to tell the story in short order, basically paid for him to go with his family, which isn’t covered by provincial insurance, and they also paid for his hotel and some of his food while he was here because the honorarium the province gives him basically didn’t even pay for parking in Toronto. And when he got upset and said “I can’t go because I’ve only worked here for 10 months and I got to pay my bills, etc., etc.,” the general manager of manufacturing said to him “Now your job assignment is to be with your kids, your wife and child until further notice.” Now, fast forward some 35 years and one of the senior people at the corporate head office had a wife who was severely ill needed to be treated for in Philadelphia and they paid for him. They didn’t stop paying his salary. He was supposed to be in France every four or five weeks. He didn’t go to France. He didn’t even go to the office for almost a year. He did everything on telephone long before the pandemic. So, they treated him as a CHLO the same way they treated their hourly employee 30 years before that. So, that to me is when organizations live their values. Starbucks lives their values.

There’s a lot of organizations out there that actually do a pretty good job with this. It’s not storybook. It’s real. And as a result of that, they have people that … Home Depot has regained its values it lost under Nardelli and when Nardelli left with a nice payout of 260 million dollars, the replacement CEO went to the founders and said “What made this organization so great? Why did people bleed orange? What do I do to bring it back to the way it was?” And it all had to do with the treatment of people. And it didn’t have to do with a change in strategy because some of the Nardelli’s strategies were really good. So, that’s why I’m saying that strategy is great but first you have to define your values, then you define your vision and what is that future state you hope to achieve but never probably will, it’s that North Star I call it, the golden ring on the merry-go-round you’re always after, you’re always focused on it, and then you put your strategy together because the test of the correctness of your strategy is it will move you towards your vision and treat your people according to the values.

One of the hospitals I worked with, Mass General Hospital, is over 200 years old and they are a values-based organization that will treat their people the same way, make similar decisions that were made 200 years ago when it was founded. It’s about people first and care first. So, it’s very interesting. There are a lot of hospitals today that are worried about money first, not care, unfortunately. And so, to me, that’s when organizations make a difference.

The other thing I want to say to really cause people to think, I hope, is integrity is not a value. Everybody argues that integrity is a value. When you try to define integrity, you start defining your other values – caring about people, respect, doing what we say we’re going to do, etc., etc. And one of the organizations I worked with was the Calgary Police Service which had a G8 meeting and only four arrests and no property damage because they lived their values. And the chief of police Christine Silverberg actually, while we were discussing this, sort of came up with what I consider a brilliant idea. She said “The Calgary Police Service will have integrity when we live our values.” So, I think integrity is an outcome of living your values. It’s not a value unto itself.

Eddie Turner:

Very nice. Thank you, David. And David, you’ve written a couple of books. Can you tell us, if we’re listening to this conversation and we want to learn more about your work, tell us both books, what they’re called, which one should we pick up first?

Dr. David Cohen:

Well, if it’s the subject of leadership values, corporate legends, it’s Inside the Box. It’s called Inside the Box for two reasons. One, I don’t believe your values can go outside. You can’t get creative with your values and do things that are not aligned to your values plus the fact that my family, my grandfather, my father were both in the box business. And there’s stories in the beginning and in the end of the book about how they lived their values and put their values first. So, it’s called Inside the Box. It’s available only now as an e-reader and the best place to get it is download it directly from the publisher Wiley as any reader. The other one is called The Talent Edge and it’s about how to rate behavioral competencies and do structured behavioral interviewing so you can hire successfully to fit the culture of the organization, also by Wiley and also downloadable at any place but I think people find them more accessible at Wiley or they can go to my website which is SagLtd.com. And I have numerous articles there or at my LinkedIn site, numerous articles on culture, values, leadership, etc.

Eddie Turner:

Excellent. Well, we’re going to drop a link to your website and to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes so people can connect with you and follow your work.

Dr. David Cohen:

That’d be great. Thank you very much.

Eddie Turner:

Thank you for spending time with me today talking about the value of values so we can keep leading.

All right, everyone, that concludes this episode. This is Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our position or our title. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.