How - Dov Seidman [137]
More recently, Xerox Corporation made “Living our values” one of its five central performance objectives, and chairman and CEO Anne Mulcahy credits it as part of the company’s remarkable turnaround. “Corporate values helped save Xerox during the worst crisis in our history,” Mulcahy said at the Annual Conference of Business for Corporate Social Responsibility in 2004. Xerox went far beyond a vague statement of purpose and infused its central values into every facet of the organization, with a high level of accountability and vigilance. “Far from words on a piece of paper,” she said, “[our values] are accompanied by specific objectives and hard measures.”23
Clearly articulated values keep everyone on the same course. Values place governance within each person rather than in persons or rule sets external to them, establishing the conditions for a very different type of culture to grow.
A JOURNEY TO CULTURE
How does a culture become more self-governing? Methodist Hospital System in Houston tackled that challenge in a very systematic way. In 1998, the board came to the conclusion that the nonprofit hospital chain had become too much like a for-profit enterprise, managing to the bottom line, and had lost touch with its values-based roots. To rectify this drift, they embarked on a major effort to change the nature of HOW they do WHAT they do. Rather than institute new rules, policies, and procedures or simply plaster the walls with inspirational posters, they chose to approach the challenge from the inside out, to govern through culture. Workforce Management magazine reported their compelling story in early 2005.24
They began their process where it counted the most, with the 8,600 employees who would live and breathe it every day. Through ongoing workshops, they developed three documents: a vision statement, a belief statement, and a new mission statement, all based on the idea of integrating spiritual values—broadly and inclusively defined—throughout the workplace. The core values they came up with made an appropriate acronym for a hospital, ICARE: integrity, compassion, accountability, respect, and excellence.
Values-based self-governing cultures, as we have discussed, require dedication to education and vigilance, so Methodist’s next step was to develop a system that built an understanding of these new values in meaningful ways. They polled their employees extensively and developed a clear baseline matrix against which to measure their progress toward their goal of values integration. This matrix later became a powerful HR educational tool used throughout the organization.
Most important to increasing self-governance around these values was helping each group of employees translate ICARE into daily behaviors and decision making, in a sense marrying a HOW to every WHAT. Putting values into action, after all, is the core effort of self-governing cultures. They asked each employee work group to interpret and apply each value to their specific discipline. What does compassion look like? How do we express respect every day? Every discipline came up with its own answers. Nurses internalized accountability with, “Don’t ask why; ask why not. Follow though and correct mistakes,” while the information technology (IT) department forwarded, “If I do not understand, I will ask questions.” Pharmacy workers tackled integrity by vowing, “We will always do our best whether the boss is here or not,” while no less than the CEOs of the five-hospital system dared themselves to “challenge each other with respect.” This process helped to turn values into self-governable behaviors that could be embraced and applied by each worker on a daily basis.
Given how difficult it sometimes seems to quantify the results of attempting to govern