In the sociology of religion, there are the 3 Bs*:
Behaving - What you do. The rituals and actions that you undertake.
Belonging - Who you hang with. Many religions are really cultures with added incense.
Believing - What you understand the nature of reality and human existence to be.
All religions have these three elements. But they don’t express them in the same ways. For example, belonging in Judaism is linked to your heritage whereas Christianity is much more flexible on that score.
In particular, Protestant Christianities have a heavy focus on individual Belief. In stripping away many of the rituals of the Catholic Church, Protestants focus on individual reading of scripture, individual praying to God, and the individual expression of non-negotiable beliefs. How you Behave matters but your convictions matter more. And you get to Belonging via a creedal expression of the values and beliefs of the group.
Protestants Believe before they Behave and Belong.
So it should not be surprising that it is the largely Protestant business culture of the United States that is responsible for the current vogue for Values-based Leadership. This model of management says that the organization should define what its core values are and ensure that all employees subscribe to and follow those values. The idea being that managers can worry less about managing their people because the common values will do a lot of the work for them.
In effect, the executive sets up a series of creedal beliefs that the churchgoers employees need to espouse. I have written elsewhere about some of the problems with this approach.
What I want to focus on is an alternative. I think it is much more productive to talk about Behaviours than Values. This is very UnProtestant but it is common in other religious traditions. You can believe what you like. I don’t care what is in your heart. I am only interested in what you do. For example, saying that we have a value of “Customer Centricity” is not helpful. Saying that we will honour our commitments when we say we are going to contact a customer and that we’ll call them again in 48 hours to update them when we are working on something is much more practical and doable.
Now obviously there is the risk of mindlessly institutionalizing behaviours whether they are appropriate or not. But we often change our behaviours where as we distrust people who change their values too frequently. Overall behaviours are easier to manage than values.
This do in remembrance of me
“So is Customer Centricity in or not?”
*Not the same as these 3 Bs.