Consider the character of your values
When did values become divorced from character? In his book “The Algebra of Wealth”, professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway suggests a timeline. While commenting on a shift in literature between pre-and post-WWII he notes, “older works encouraged readers to build success based on virtues like temperance, industriousness and patience. The more recent advice, on the other hand, focused on how to change merely your personality: how you present yourself to others.”
In heralding the beginnings of the self-improvement era, he captured something I’ve long wrestled when working on values. Reconciling how an organisation wants to appear versus who it is and wants to be—its character.
Getting below default signalling to genuine virtue is never easy. Alongside purpose, values too often get messaged and massaged as public persona writ good, divorced from people’s everyday work and experience.
Perhaps rethinking values as character might bridge the chasm. The first recorded use of character was in 13th-century Latin meaning the mark made by an engraving tool. Fast forward seven centuries, and today it’s the collective attributes which mark people’s choices, both big and small.
From Seneca to Martin Luther King, plenty have touted character as essential for a well-examined and successful life. Sadly today’s superficial landscape renders the idea as quaint. Yet, if how you do things isn’t rooted in character, you risk sacrificing more than meaning for mere sentiment. Because while every enterprise begins with an idea of what matters, failing to mature beyond what is aspired to can leave it open to the relentless push and pull of other’s whims.
In his book The Road to Character, David Brooks encapsulates why maturity matters.
“Occasionally, even today, you come across certain people who seem to possess an impressive inner cohesion. They are not leading fragmented, scattershot lives. They have achieved inner integration. They are calm, settled, and rooted. They are not blown off course by storms. They don’t crumble in adversity. Their minds are consistent and their hearts are dependable. Their virtues are not the blooming virtues you see in smart college students; they are the ripening virtues you see in people who have lived…”
Replace people with organisation, and you begin to see the role character can play. In the early stages, it is akin to Brooks’ smart students. Then, as the enterprise endures and grows up, it becomes marked by characteristics people can count on. And this, far from making it stodgy and slow, supports a lasting success.
If surface self-improvement has taken over your organisation or endeavours. Look to character. Ditch the polished and packaged values of website-ready soundbites. Give people something solid to stand alongside. So they not only feel pride in the products and services but also in how you develop and deliver them. So they are “rooted and grounded” in what matters and guided by attributes which extend beyond platitudes of “living the values”.
The relationship between brand and (core) values makes this work existentially important. Values are, after all, how people do things, and culture is them done repeatedly. They show up in promises, which are kept or broken in people’s experience. So, for their efforts to contribute value, first consider the character of the values you choose.
Thanks for reading.
P.S. Turning the desert green
P.S.S. Share The Brand Article with a friend (or two)