Determining Organizational Values and Priorities — Professed versus Revealed Articulations

“I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do”

— James Baldwin

All organizations exist to serve some purpose. Public, private, for-profit, not-for-profit, large, small — every formal organization was created to achieve an outcome, to perform a function, to undertake activities towards a specific goal.

How do we do know what it is, however, that a given entity is supposed to do? How do we know what a given entity is supposed to be? How do we know its raison d’être?

The answer appears obvious. Indeed, highly obvious. But appearances can be misleading.

I. Professed Purpose

Formal organizations have a plethora of documents that seek to define the purpose of the entity, and to guide the activities of the entity and its employees.

There are many components and variants of this process. Different entities can have combinations and permutations of the following:

• Articles of incorporation
• Organizational bylaws
• Legislative status
• Regulatory status
• Mission statements
• Vision statements
• Value statements
• Codes of conduct
• Organizational policies
• Job descriptions

These and other instruments are what we shall call professed purpose — these instruments articulate, usually in a written form, what an organization is, does, seeks to achieve. These instruments can also cover the past, and they can even touch, through aspirational statements, the vision of what the organization seeks to one day be.

These documents can be grand and inspirational — think the constitution of the United States. Or they can be understated and administrative — think the constitution of Canada. The documents can specify the minutia of a task — think a section of a job description. Or they can set forth a ambition that has never been achieved before — think of NASA and landing a human on the surface of the moon.

In whatever guise — legal or informal, large or small, banal or grand, detailed or visionary — professed purpose is an organization telling you — in words — what it is. What it does. What it believes. What it wants to achieve. What it wants to be in the future.

But an organization, like a person, is not necessarily what it tells us it is. Perhaps a more useful way to determine the nature of an organization is not to read what it writes or listen to what its management says. Perhaps a more useful insight into its nature can be found not in its professed values but from its revealed articulations.

II. Revealed Purpose

An organization tells us what it is like. An organization tells us its purpose. An organization tells us its beliefs. An organization tells us its aspirations. An organization tells us its values.

It tells us these things, as noted in the previous section, in law, in organization charts, in corporate slogans, in mission statements. Organizational executives also articulate these values in speeches and in presentations and in letters and in annual reports. Indeed, if you think about it, organizations try to tell you who and what they are in dozens of different professed ways. Including by spending billions of aggregate dollars annually on advertisements.

But organizations also act. And through these actions, a second way to understand an organization comes into focus — through the revealed articulations of its actions. In this respect, in turn, there are three critical aspects of organizational action which reveals organizational purpose and organizational values:

• organizational structure;
• organizational budget; and
• organizational activities.

Or, more parochially and more explicitly, how an organization structures itself, how it spends its money, and how it spends its time.

(a) Organizational Structure — How does it Face the World?

Organizations are aggregations of assets to meet objectives and to interact with the outside world. How organizations are structured, then, says a lot of who are what they are, exactly because this is how they concretely interact with the outside world, and exactly because this is how they organize their assets.

Does an organization tell us — a professed articulation — that they are obsessed with service? That they are agile? That they are innovative? That they are “a flat organization”? That they are “transformative”? That they “empower their employees”?

Then how does that organization institutionally structure itself to make those values and orientations manifest? Does it structure itself so that it can make same-day decisions? Does it structure itself so that service problems are brought to the attention of senior management as a matter of course? Does it have a part of its organization dedicated exclusively to innovating its products and its services? Is that part of the organization of a scale that is appropriate to be meaningful? Or is the part of the organization dedicated to innovation so small relative to the size of the organization that it is effectively immaterial? Does the organization have mechanisms through which its employees are empowered to make decisions? Does the organization have a management structure that interacts with its employees constantly to take actions in real time? Does the organization profess to be agile yet take two years to procure a critical component of its business?

Organizational structures are critically important. They are, as noted above, how an entity structures its assets — and the most critical of its assets are its people. An organizational structure is also how the entity interacts with the world. How many people are in customer service? How are they empowered to service the customer? How does the customer interact for service? What are the service channels? How friendly are they? How difficult are they to use?

Divisions within an organization have revealed values. Having an “Enforcement Division” means, at some level, you value the function of enforcement. The very act of having a division implies some valuation of that concept — independent of whether or not you discharge that function well or not. Conversely, not having a division also implies that the things you have divisions for are more important than the things that have no institutional expression within your organization. So a city has a “Sanitation Division” because sanitation has been given organizational structure. Some cities might have “Business Attraction” divisions. Or even “Innovative Business Attraction” divisions. Or even greater specificity still— “Artificial Intelligence Business Support” division. Each business attraction in the three examples have different values.

If you have it institutionally existent and resourced in your organization, it expresses a revealed value. It gives institutional resources (and institutional life) towards an objective or a value or a purpose. The more you relatively have of it, the more institutional support you are giving it. The less you relatively have of it, the less institutional support you are giving it.

But organizational status is just one key revealed purpose. Another is how you spend your money

(b) Organizational Budgets — Follow the Money

The old expression of “follow the money” is a great rule of thumb in many areas, including in establishing values and purpose. Indeed, if an organization has a professed value without budgeting for that value, or budgeting only immaterially for that value, then it is clear that this value exists in the realm of words alone.

Back to our examples. Does an organization tell us — a professed articulation — that they are obsessed with outstanding service? That they are agile? That they are innovative? That they are “a flat organization”? That they “empower their employees”?

How much do they spend on customer service? Is their customer service infrastructure modern? Is it ancient? Is it state of the art? Is it best in class? All of those things are budgetary decisions — either current year, or cumulative previous year(s). If your professed value is customer obsession yet your revealed value does not support that in budgetary terms …..

Innovation. More and more entities profess to be innovative organizations. Wonderful — how much do they spend on innovation? What kind of innovation do they spend money on? Do they do research? Do they implement the consequences of their research? Do they buy innovation? Who do they buy it from? Is it best in class for what they are buying? Or is it “innovation” from three product generations ago?

You empower your employees? Wonderful — what kind of resource control do they have? Can they make financial decisions? Can they make commitments with an empowering combination of autonomy and control? Or is it mostly control, with little, if any, autonomy?

How you spend your budgets in an organization is not just about dollars. Instead, how you spend your budgets is also a values proposition. If you spend nothing on security, you place no value on security. If you spend a little bit on security, you only value security a little bit. If you keep your IT infrastructure current by spending on timely upgrades, you value your IT infrastructure. If you do not make those expenditures, then your revealed value is that you do not believe that having current IT infrastructure is important. If you value your employees, you spend on their welfare. Your employees work in clean and safe facilities. They work with functioning and efficient tools. If employees work in unsafe facilities, then the organization does not value its employees. If you value the skills of your employees, you spend money on their learning and training and upskilling.

The revealed value of the expenditure — or the lack thereof — is more telling than the explicitly professed and overtly articulated value. The budgetary expenditure professes a value that is more powerful than the slogan written on the cafeteria bulletin board, or in the mission statement of the glossy annual report.

The expression that started this section was “follow the money”. The expression that closes this section is even better known — “talk is cheap”.

(c ) Organizational Activities — Where Does your organization Spend Time?

For all intents and purposes, time for an organization is finite. There can always be more people. There can always be more money. There can always be more org charts. What there can never be is more than 24 hours in a day. What there can never be is more than 7 days a week. What there can never be is more than 12 months in a year.

Where do people in an organization spend their time? Are they at their desk? Are they at meetings? Are they on the road? Are they with customers? Are they with people that report to them? Are they with people that they themselves report to?

How you spend your most finite resource — your time — is a powerful revelatory value for an organization. Do people — senior people — spend time on product development? On supply chain redundancy and resiliency? On hiring? On managing? On strategy? On tactics? On fixing problems? On disaster preparation? On out-running problems?

It is often striking that how people in organizations spend their time is entirely at variance with the professed values or purpose of their organizations. How can you claim that your organization “values people first” if leaders in an organization spend no time with their people? How can you claim that your organizational mission is to “Provide the best possible widget in our industry” if your organization does not spend time obsessing about that widget. Is the widget as customer-friendly as it can be? Is the widget durable? What happens to the widget if it gets dropped? What happens to the widget in heat? What happens to the widget in cold? What happens to the comparable widget made by our main competitor when it is dropped? What comes next after this generation of widget?

People in organizations, organizations big and small, live the values of their organization every day through how they spend their time. And time spent is values exposed.

Concluding Thoughts

“Power”, wrote the great biographer Robert Caro, “always reveals”.

The same is true of structure, money, and time. In combination, those three aspects of an organization are revelatory in accuracy in ways that words can never be. How an organization — any organization — structures itself, how it allocates and spends its budget, and how it spends its time — those things give you virtually the totality of the values and the purpose of that organization. It is not the mission statement. It is not the vision statement. It is not the values statement. It is not the slogan. The values and the purpose of any organization are revealed through a combination of its structure, its spending, and how its people spend their time.

Why, then, do some organizations spend so much time on the words? If you organizationally live the words, then time spent on the development and refinement of those words is critical. It is more than critical — it is magic. “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action”, wrote Shakespeare. Organizations that do this have employees that know their jobs. Organizations that do this have management teams which function with a common and coherent purpose. Organizations that have minimal to no daylight between what is said and what is done have positive cascading interactions every single day.

What of organizations that profess a given set of values but reveal a different set of values? Those organizations have employees that have difficulties doing their jobs. For employees, for customers, for stakeholders — the conflict between what is said and what is lived is eventually, and inevitably, resolved in favour of what is lived. Yet, as long as the what is said is at variance with what is lived, a type of cynicism is bred that is poisonous to organizational health. Organizations that have daylight between what is said and what is lived have confused management teams. Organizations that have conflict between the professed and the revealed have negative cascading interactions every single day.

The best organizations align all their assets — including their words — with their values. Mediocre organizations confuse their professed and their revealed values. Dysfunctional organizations often go beyond this, and use their professed values to mask their manifest values.

How an organization is structured, how it spends its money, and how it spends its time reveals its values in a more meaningful sense than any professed value statements. Indeed, all organizations, from outstanding to dysfunctional and everywhere in between, live their values.