The Connection Between Personal Values and Business Ethics
If the course your business follows leaves a wave of destruction in its wake, are you a success? Your business may be highly profitable and sought-after, but are you a success? You are responsible for the ethics that underlie how your business operates. When you hire staff, you ask them to act as if they shared those values.
There should be a profound connection between your personal values and those of the company you create.
Establishing Personal Values
Values frame action. Most people probably feel they are pretty clear about what they believe to be the right way to live. But personal values are rooted in cultural values and are supported by myths, magical formulas, and material and social resources.
In our personal lives, it’s possible to trot out any number of value statements without thinking about what they mean because our actions are monitored by a small community of people who know us quite well and who understand what we mean by the things we say. If someone among our acquaintances questions whether we hold the values we claim for ourselves, it is based on their knowledge of us.
If someone outside our group questions our values, it is unsettling. If they question a core values, it can feel threatening, unless we realize that they are giving us an opportunity to evaluate what we believe and why. This can clarify and strengthen our values or it can help us recognize that something we thought we believed doesn’t fit it with other values we hold.
Corporate Values
Companies operate by a set of principles, but they don’t have a conscience. They are incapable of deciding if the results of their actions are acceptable because they don’t make decisions and they don’t have a concept of “acceptable”. Only the people who work in and manage the company can make those appraisals.
Nevertheless the guiding principles of the business affect decision-making throughout the company and over its entire lifetime. If a company holds the value that stock-holder profits are more important than the comfort of employees, this affects working conditions, safety conditions, wages, employee rights, unionization, pensions, layoffs, and so on.
If a company believes “buyer beware” is a fair motto, this affects quality controls, sales and customer service.
The more clarity you have regarding your personal values, the more far-sighted you will be in laying down the ethical foundations of your company, which will in turn, affect all of the decisions you and your staff make over time.
Clarifying Your Values
I’ve been explicit about my values so far, but you should take time now to consider your own. Consider what you value in a life, what you would want to leave as a reputation in death, and how that affects the type of business you want to build.
Typically, at this stage, a business coach would give you some homework such as “Write down 10 things that are important in your life.” If you are in a workshop situation, you may have 10 minutes to jot down your top 10 list. A business coach may give you a couple of weeks.
The result will be a list of 10 socially acceptable topics. Typically it includes items such as family, helping others, and spending time with friends. It might as well say smell the roses, watch rainbows and listen to the bluebirds. It’s a nonsense list because it is thought-less. Since you know someone else is reading your list, and judging you by it, you will choose 5 or 6 categories of things you are supposed to value, and a couple of hobbies.
Instead, you should think about the things you value and what they mean to you in detail.
For example It may well be that family is on your list, but what does that mean? It could mean
- Playing games with your kids because you love winning
- Knowing you raised children who can earn their own way
- Taking care of your aging mother and any other relative who needs your help because that is your duty
- Sticking to the vows you made to your spouse because your vows were made before God
- Having as many children as you can
- Passing on the family stories to the next generation
You could mean a nuclear family or an extended one; the family you have or the one you wish you had.
Don’t worry if family isn’t on your list. It doesn’t have to be. Proving the existence of aliens may be more important to you, or finding a cure for pancreatic cancer, writing opera, walking barefoot around the world. … It’s your list and the task should be about self-knowledge and establishing in your mind what you value.
- Your mind
- What you value
And don’t worry if there aren’t 10 items on your list. You may be obsessive about only one or 2 things that dominate your life. If you filled out the list further, it would be with trivialities.
Core Values
Establishing your values is a “reaching in” kind of exercise. You need to reach inside yourself to find the answers. You also need to recognize that people, yourself included, change, so many of the things you think are important now will be less so over time as your circumstances change and you gain experience.
There is one set of values that most people hold through most or all of their lives. These are core values. The fundamental principles that define why we do the things we do.
The values that are going to guide you in establishing your business should be core values: values that you will probably hold for a long time, if not forever. Your business, hopefully, will succeed for a long time and you don’t want the two of you to drift apart.
Core values are intrinsic to you and in many cases they are so basic to your sense of who you are that they are unspoken. But they are the guiding principles you will use in making decisions in your business.
You and your business have different needs and a different future, but the core values are part of what the link of you together. Your business will suit you better and you will be happier working in your business if the two of you share some basic attitudes and beliefs about what is acceptable behaviour.
Core values don’t require justification. But they should be clear to you so that you can use them to help you make decisions, hire, and sell your services to the right people.