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When business over-promises and under-delivers on their corporate values, they devalue society.
By Theran Knighton-Fitt
I want to tell you about company X. They lied about their company values. They over-promised and under-delivered on their brand.
I won’t tell you what company it was. (I’m not in the business of trying to pull others down.) But all you need to know is that they are a massive company, with a strong consumer brand in my home country of South Africa. They have a lot of power in society.
As we know, with power comes responsibility. And when it comes to the power of large business in the market, the responsibility is to society at every level. But the way that responsibility plays out will treat society in different ways. Either with value and an understanding that the business can add value to society, or else seeing society only as valuable for their own purposes.
When a company over-promises and under-delivers on who they say they will be in the world, they devalue us all.
A number of years ago the company X was the subject of a scandal that caused a lot of reputational damage to their brand. I wont give you the specifics, but in summary, they stole IP and product designs from a small local community-upliftment business. They refused to respond to the victim through multiple attempts at seeking answers from them. The way they behaved was tantamount to saying, “We’re a big company, with a lot of power. We can bully the ‘little man’ and do whatever we want. Shhh, you, go play somewhere else!”
After repeated attempts to recieve justice, the last option available to the victim was social media.
In “the court of public opinion” this spread like wildfire. It was a powerful expose of the lack of congruence of the espoused values and the lived-out values of this brand. She had names and emails, she had a perfectly mapped out money-trail, she could convincingly show when, and how, and by whom, she had been taken advantage of. It was a masterful appeal to our collective common sense and the moral code of society.
I remember at the time being shocked. I was disgusted and disappointed (and this brand has never truly recovered their dignity, in my opinion). What made it even more inexcusable was that it wasn’t the first time company X had been proven guilty of this exact same type of abuse of the community they serve. (They had stolen IP a few years ealier from another small business, and it had been made public at the time as well.)
When I read this lady’s story online, the first thing I did was go to company X’s website to look for a list of their company values. I had a suspicion that the website would reveal values in contradiction to their behaviour – and I wasn’t disspointed. (Well, technically speaking, I was disappointed.) I was right. Their behaviour in private (with this individual and her small company) did not match how they talked about their character as an organisation in the public space.
The specificity of one of their main values was so blatantly antithetical to their behaviour that it was vicariously embarrassing to read. They talked about how they value community and want to support small enterprises, seeking to uplift local suppliers. (By the way, I checked the site again today. They no longer have this value written in such specific terms, just vague abstractions. But what they do still have (which I remember from before) is an opening paragraph in the values section about how their values are “not just words” … they give them “direction to guide their behaviour” … Apparently.)
… Apparently not.
Company X made the mistake of thinking that the power they have in the economy (which is substantial) means they can just extract value wherever they want. Instead of realising that if the values they said they had on their website were actually manifested, it would give them power to impact society positively.
Now of course, in moments like this, when a response is called for, its very easy for leaders to say things like:
– “We deeply regret the actions of a few individuals…” or
– “This is an isolated incident, it does not reflect who we are at our heart…”
Nonsense. How you act in the most mundane specifics, at the grassroots level, is the truest reflection of who you are.
So when they scrambled to fix the PR problem and tell us that these actions didn’t define them, I took offense. I remember thinking: “No… this IS who you are – this is just the moment when we all find that out…It was the moment when we realised you were not who you said you were, but actually something very different.”
In a moment like this, the task of leadership is not to show up with deflection and denial, and then throw a few people under the bus to save face. The task of leadership, when it comes to values, is to model them in all seasons, at all levels, so they are lived out, in all seasons, by all employees, in all instances – even down to the specific interactions with the individual person. It’s the only way to make values really matter. It’s the only way to appropriately value society.
Now I dont want to be too hard on them, values alignment is hard. We all know that. It’s a big organisation, so making sure everyone “sings from the same values songsheet” is a challenge. But if this story tells us anything, it’s that the behaviour of the people/employees/leaders/staff is what actually tells us who a company is, and how their power values or devalues the society in which they live.
It doesnmt matter what the website says. It matters how the company shows up in the world. Words are not truth. Words serve truth – they either serve truth well, or they do it poorly. In this case, the words they chose to explain their values on their website didn’t serve the truth of their values very well at all. Their espoused values were “other” than the behaviour, on the ground, in the community. The “abstract” means nothing apart from the concrete expressions of it.
Fir me the crime is simple, and its a crime that dehumanises us all. Instead of appreciating the intrinsic value of society, and appreciating their own power to ADD value TO society, company X only saw the resource-value of the community to serve as fuel to help them achieve their own ends, and to grow their power.
It’s a nuanced difference, but the perspectives on value and power need to change.
When we look at the world in a healthy way it is the OTHER that has value, and we have power to recognise, appreciate, and realise that value in them. When we look at the world selfishly we approach the other thinking WE have value, and power to extract THEIR value to increase our own power and value.
So how do we rectify this? Well we need to increase and improve capitalisms ability to value society. This is not simply an ESG issue. This is an issue of the right relations between things. The right prdering of priorities and realising the human person has immense value. To recognise this and live in that direction takles a secret tool, and one that might not seem obvious at surface level. Emotional Intelligence.
Emotional Intelligence is a set of skills that help us to manage ourselves and interact effectively with others. Emotional Intelligence leads to health and mutual reward in every system, because at its heart, Emotional Intelligence increases the value, and awareness of value, in all agents within the system. One thing we so desperately need more of in our societies, our businesses, and in the individuals, is Emotional Intelligence – in every agent in the system, at every level.
What many people still arent realising is that the values we say we value, need to be driven by behaviour that aligns with the value-output, And all behaviour finds it root in emotion. If we say we want to show up in the world in a certain way, according to certain values, then the behaviour is primary, and the foundation for all healthy behaviour is a strong foundation of Emotional Intelligence.
If you want your organisation to show up in the world (in society at large, and in specific communities) the way you say you will show up, then you have to develop the Emotional Intelligence within the agents of your organisation – at all levels (from the denying and deflecting CEO, all the way down to the guilty party who sees an opportinity to extract value cheaply from the community).
If we can accomplish that then that’s a future worth having: an Emotionally Intelligent world, where values are lived out, and value is recognised, in, and for, the community in all its forms.
About the author:
Theran is co-founder and Chief Humanising Officer at Mygrow, the Emotional Intelligence Platform. Theran writes and speak about capitalism, company character, culture, values, Emotional Intelligence and the future of wellbeing at work and home.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theranknighton-fitt/
Website: www.mygrow.me