Put Values into Practice
In a television interview, General Electric CEO Jack Welch was asked how he evaluated people at GE. He responded, “I look at two things: Do they make their numbers (i.e., do they produce)? And, do they live GE values?”
Welch said it was easy to deal with productive employees who also exemplify GE values. You obviously would want as many in your organization as you can get.
Handling people who don’t produce and who also don't behave in accordance with GE values was also easy. Welch simply said, “You get rid of them!”
More complicated are those who adhere to GE’s values but are not as productive as they need to be. Welch said * you should try to help them be successful*, perhaps through training, or by reassigning them to work that better matches their abilities.
Finally Welch addressed employees who are very productive and help GE succeed financially but who also exemplify the wrong values. For example, they may wear out their subordinates, refuse to collaborate with colleagues, or focus more on personal status than team results.
He said this was a hard group for most managers to deal with. You want their performance and losing it could damage your financial results. But can you live with their behavior?
What’s the right answer? What would you do?
While Welch said these people are the hardest group to deal with, he was nevertheless extraordinarily clear about how to handle them. He referred to these people as cancer. By behaving inconsistently with GE values while also producing financially, these employees destroy the company from the inside. They, too, have to go.
TAKEAWAY
When developing strategy, teams invariably spend considerable time talking about these three important prerequisites:
- Mission — Why do we exist?
- Vision — Where do we want to go?
- Values — How do we behave?
In my experience, discussions of values often simply don’t measure up to the important role values play inside organizations. Drawing Jack Welch’s “values versus performance” grid on a flip chart or whiteboard has been an effective way to demonstrate just how important values really are.
Values should be used to help make the most consequential decisions, especially hiring and firing. It’s also essential that leadership behave consistently with the values or no one else will. As Patrick Lencioni says, simple in concept, very hard to do.
Resources
Most of what I’ve learned about the different types of values (core, aspirational, permission-to-play) comes from Lencioni, starting with his 2002 Harvard Business Review article, Make Your Values Mean Something. Lencioni expanded on those ideas in his excellent 2012 book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business.
Here's a brief Lencioni talk about values:
Note: An earlier version of this article was published on LinkedIn.