What Are My Values II

To work in an organization whose value system is unacceptable or incompatible with one's own condemns a person both to frustration and to nonperformance.





What is ethical behavior in one kind of organization or situation is ethical behavior in another. But ethics is only part of a value system--especially an organization's value system. To work in an organization whose value system is unacceptable or incompatible with one's own condemns a person both to frustration and to nonperformance.


Consider the experience of a highly successful human resources executive whose company was acquired by a bigger organization. After the acquisition, she was promoted to do the kind of work she did best, which included selecting people for important positions. The executive deeply believed that a company should hire people for such positions form the outside only after exhausting all the inside possibilities. But her new company believed in first looking outside "to bring in fresh blood." There is something to be said for both approaches--in my experience, the proper one is to do some of both. They are, however, fundamentally incompatible--not as policies but as values. They bespeak different views of the relationship between organizations and people; different views of the responsibility of an organization to its people and their development; and different views of a person's most important contribution to an enterprise. After several years of frustration, the executive quit--at considerable financial loss. Her values and the values and the values of the organization simply were not compatible.


Similarly, whether a pharmaceutical company tries to obtain results by asking constant, small improvements or by achieving occasional, highly expensive, and risky "breakthroughs" is not primarily an economic question. The results of either strategy may be pretty much the same. At bottom, there is conflict between a value system that sees the company's contribution in terms of helping physicians do better what they already do and a value system that is oriented toward making scientific discoveries.


ACTION POINT: Understand your organizations values to ensure compatibility with your own.