Culture with Consequence
When it comes to company values, substance trumps style every time.
Kirstin Piening, Jenna Stephan & Zoe Zambakides
Company value statements are a fascinating thing. They take countless hours to develop, often require endless rounds of engagement and buy-in with leaders, are rolled out with much fanfare and ado...then promptly never get used. We’d wager that’s probably for one of two reasons:
They are so broad and generic that we’d be seriously concerned that you were a company of psychopaths and / or breaking the law to not act on them (See: Enron and its value “Integrity”).
No one has ever worked out how they should be used when the going gets tough which means they sit in a desk drawer, because in today’s climate, the going is always tough.
The case of the vanishing values is an all too familiar one. When faced with crisis, uncertainty or constraints, the pull to incumbent thinking is stronger than ever. We start to favour the safe and the short-term, we don’t stray from our comfort zone and we dogmatically follow “the way things have always been done” – even if the company values on our wall say we should be doing the opposite.
But really, it’s in times like this that our values should be guiding us more than ever. This should be when they shine brightest, not when they fizzle out like a damp sparkler. And that’s what Challenger values (which we’d call ‘articles’) are designed to do – give you direction when s**t hits the fan, and keep your team hunting as a pack, thinking bold and resisting the pull back to incumbency.
Less is More
When most companies are defining their values, the temptation is often to drown people in content – long lists of values, reams of process and ways of working – often, with little effect.
But Back Market, a European tech scale-up, did the opposite.
Back Market’s Bordeaux office
It might seem counterintuitive, but a single value, carefully chosen, can provide far more clarity than a long list. The more values you have, the more space there is to hide and for inconsistencies and contradictions to muddy their meaning.
And for Back Market, that notion of sabotage meant there was no room for misunderstanding the kind of attitude and behaviours expected of you. As Back Market co-founder Vianney Vaute told us, “[Sabotage] says we need a particular mindset and behaviour, which is about the relationship we need to have with the resources we have at our disposal. We’re here to explode the bridge, but we have just three people and one stick of dynamite, how can we be street smart enough to make it happen?”
While a handful of additional behaviours have been added since then, they’re all rooted in that singular, directional, provocative value. And it’s what continues to guide Back Marketers through new challenges and constraints – of which there are plenty, as they go head-to-head against Big Tech’s market leaders.
Divide the World
While most organisations shy away from critique and scrutiny, we’d argue it’s the sign of a job well done to court it. As we know from studying Challenger brands, being directional often goes hand in hand with being divisive, and the same is often true of Challenger cultures.
Now, we aren’t the first to talk about Netflix’s culture – every op-ed under the sun has been written proclaiming it to be game-changing, over-hyped, a one-hit wonder or just plain toxic (and everything in between). But for Netflix, they don’t waste time contracting the fundamental behaviours we all employ to be decent human beings – like integrity and honesty. Those are brilliant basics, and where most people focus when trying to articulate team or organisational behaviours.
Netflix’s LA office
Instead, Netflix focuses on the compelling differences: the critical behaviours needed to deliver on the ambitions of the business. From expenses to performance reviews, everything their behaviours dictate is designed to help teams move at pace, keep high performers and constantly innovate.
As a business, they have an incredibly clear ambition – to create a refurb revolution. However, they quickly realised this wasn’t enough to ensure every single employee was delivering on that strategy in the same way. So, they helped their entire team hunt as a pack using just one single word – sabotage.
Practice, Practice, Practice
You don’t just wake up one day and decide to be bold and brave. And what isn’t often talked about is the long, hard graft to get there. Those behaviours take years of continual practice and embedding to become the natural response.
KFC
KFC has long been a brand that’s embraced the Challenger Mindset – and is often lauded for the boldness and bravery that comes from it, like the fawning responses to its infamous ‘FCK’ advert after the 2018 chicken crisis. As Monica Pool, CMO of KFC UK and Ireland, told us, “I think we, as a brand, we have become much braver and part of that is adopting the challenger brand mindset...[which] has helped us to be braver in our brand communications and find our confidence even during really hard times [like the 2018 chicken crisis].”
This is the least sexy part of building a strong Challenger culture – it takes patience and radical commitment. And that’s something that most brands aren’t willing to do – they assume that once they’ve written the words the job is done.
Just look at Budweiser – a brand that’s faced its own fair share of controversy over the past year. Despite professing to have values of togetherness and supporting various communities (which are more like brilliant basics anyway), these were nowhere to be seen when it was navigating its own FCK moment.
If, after having read this, you realise your values are in need of some TLC – you aren’t alone. Despite bold proclamations from CEOs and business types that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, values all too often fall to the wayside.
The road to values with substance can feel like a long one, but what we’ve learnt in 25 years studying Challengers is that these companies rarely succeed without the culture and behaviours to reinforce their strategic decisions. So – ignore them at your peril.