How to Promote Core Values in the Workplace: Full Guide

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive" by Patrick Lencioni. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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Want to know how to promote core values in the workplace? How can you build and communicate a system of values in your organization?

Considering the benefits of well-defined core values, it can be tempting to simply dictate values to your staff, says Patrick Lencioni. However, employees struggle to embrace assigned values. Lencioni advises you to instead identify the values that employees already strive for and turn them into official policy.

Keep reading to learn how to promote core values in the workplace, according to Lencioni’s advice.

Promoting Core Values in the Workplace

According to entrepreneur, author, and speaker Patrick Lencioni, once your organization’s core values have been identified, your next objective is to determine how to promote the core values in the workplace. Promoting core values throughout your entire organization is the ongoing process of getting your employees to embrace your values. Successful promotion of core values improves performance by allowing each employee to connect their role to the big picture. Additionally, Lencioni believes individual employees who have internalized core values are more motivated and more likely to stick with an organization through hard times. 

(Shortform note: Experts agree that promoting core values throughout your organization helps increase productivity and morale. Additionally, they specify that it’s best to promote your core values early in the organization’s history, while the team is still relatively small. While promoting core values is an ongoing process, starting that process as soon as possible ensures that your values influence your organization’s growth.)

In describing how to promote core values in the workplace, the first technique Lencioni offers is repetition. While it may seem counterintuitive, repeating values ad nauseam actually increases retention—people need to hear an idea many times in order to fully internalize it. Especially in modern workplaces, where employees receive a near-constant stream of information from Slack, email, and social media, your job is to make sure each member of your team has many opportunities to absorb important information.

Communicate Your Core Values Simply

Repetition alone might not be enough to ensure that employees internalize your message. In addition to repetition, experts recommend that keeping your messaging simple helps improve employee retention. Specifically, stick to one value per communication, and keep phrasing consistent across each instance of communication. If you find you need to communicate in more detail, limit yourself to a maximum of three sub-points.

Simple messaging helps counteract the effects of information overload. Information overload occurs when you receive a high volume of low-quality information and results in fatigue, confusion, and sometimes anger. Employees in contemporary workplaces are at especially high risk for information overload. Keeping your communication simple helps prevent overload and protects employee morale.

Along with repetition, Lencioni advises you to communicate core values across a variety of media, including both traditional tools such as face-to-face meetings as well as more modern options, like company-wide email bulletins. This is necessary because individuals have unique learning and communication styles—different people communicate differently. 

For example, suppose you have a friend who moved to a rural area with the intent of “getting off the grid,” and you’d like to find the best way to keep in touch with them. Given your friend’s disdain for technology, you probably wouldn’t have much success trying to contact them via email or social media. Instead, knowing how your friend communicates, you’d take the time to write a letter, or better yet, visit them in person.

(Shortform note: Using a wide variety of media is a strong strategy because new communication technologies offer specific advantages. For example, one study found that on average, people spend 140% as much time on web pages with video as compared to pages with text only. This increased engagement can help your communications get through to your staff. Similarly, tools like Slack can help your team communicate more efficiently—teams using Slack respond to each other more quickly and close more deals. Making use of a range of new tools like these allows you to bring their unique advantages to your team.)

How to Promote Core Values in Workplace Systems

To promote core values in the workplace, Lencioni’s next step is to build your values into the systems that shape your organization’s daily life. When your organization is able to successfully incorporate its values into its systems, it will hire the right people, promote the right people, and fire the right people when necessary. According to Lencioni, this results in high morale and a competitive advantage in terms of acquiring and keeping talent. Moving forward, we’ll discuss how to incorporate your core values into your hiring process, your performance management, and your firing process.

(Shortform note: Data supports Lencioni’s assertion that core values should play a major role in personnel decisions. According to a 2021 survey, 44% of millennials and 49% of Gen Z participants reported making career decisions based on values. Incorporating core values into your human systems allows you to speak to the massive segment of the workforce who prioritize values. Without strong core values, many of these individuals will leave your organization, and some will be discouraged from applying in the first place.)

Strategies for Building Values Into Hiring Procedures

To promote core values in the workplace, it’s also important to determine how to build them into your organization’s hiring procedures. At the front end of this process is values-based hiring. Successful organizations will always have plenty of qualified candidates for open positions—hiring based on core values gives you a surefire way to choose between them. And, according to Lencioni, a candidate’s alignment with your organization’s core values is a much better indicator of their potential than their résumé.

Additionally, Lencioni believes potential candidates should be interviewed by as many members of your team as possible, both to assess their values and to determine how well candidates gel with each member of your team. In addition to this, as previously suggested, you should spend a few hours each week with new employees, monitoring their progress, answering questions, and using repetition to ensure new hires have many opportunities to absorb core values.

How to Promote Core Values in the Workplace: Full Guide

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Emily Kitazawa

Emily found her love of reading and writing at a young age, learning to enjoy these activities thanks to being taught them by her mom—Goodnight Moon will forever be a favorite. As a young adult, Emily graduated with her English degree, specializing in Creative Writing and TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), from the University of Central Florida. She later earned her master’s degree in Higher Education from Pennsylvania State University. Emily loves reading fiction, especially modern Japanese, historical, crime, and philosophical fiction. Her personal writing is inspired by observations of people and nature.

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