Aligning to Objectives Before Values
After my session at LearnTec in Karlsruhe last week, a small group of us ended up at the side of the hall picking apart something I’d touched on in passing: where L&D should plant its flag when it comes to organisational alignment. Objectives or values? Where people worked seemed to shape their answer more than I had considered.
My view, after years of consulting across a wide range of organisations, is pragmatic rather than idealistic. In most businesses, aligning your interventions, whatever form they take, to organisational objectives is the safer choice, and the one more likely to demonstrate value.
The first reason is measurement. Objectives, in any organisation worth its salt, come with clear and agreed measures: revenue, retention, productivity, time-to-competence, customer satisfaction; all measurable, and all open to interrogation. Values rarely have anything like the same clarity. Ask three people in the same business what “integrity” or “courage” looks like in their day-to-day work, and you’ll get three different answers, none of which will be wrong.
The second reason is buy-in. Most organisations have values because organisations are supposed to have values. They were drafted by an external agency, signed off by the board, painted on a wall, and ignored thereafter. The senior leadership team would, if pushed, jettison the whole lot tomorrow if it meant a better quarter. I don’t say that as a criticism; it’s a different set of priorities, and the pressure to perform in most sectors makes it close to inevitable.
A small minority of organisations have done the work properly; consulted their people, built values from the inside out, and aligned the top team behind them. In those places, aligning L&D to values makes complete sense. They are the exception rather than the rule, and the giveaway is almost always that the values were grown internally rather than imported from a consultancy. Culture, after all, emerges from how people work together over time; it isn’t installed.
If you’re in one of those organisations, align to the values. If you’re in the other 90%, align to the objectives, and sleep easier at night.
Thanks Tom. I've noticed myself repeating a phrase of late, along the lines of "no-one exists in any org other than to contribute to its objectives, ie deliver performance." If this is so, then that org's purpose, values, culture code, brand slogans etc etc are all there to support goal achievement. I'd go further and say that if anything isn't aligned to objectives it is questionable (does this make the boat go faster etc).