More than 30% of companies say honesty is a core value – but is it?

Everyone agrees that honesty matters, yet so many companies and leaders lie. How do HR leaders and managers help close the gap? writes Dominic Thurbon.

You won’t hear anyone arguing that honesty doesn’t matter. Everyone agrees it is important. More than important, even. A “core value”. We say so all the time. “Integrity” is the most common value across Fortune 500 companies, and it (and its synonyms) appear in over 65 per cent of corporate value statements.

But when we look at behaviour, rather than words, our belief in the unassailable value of truth breaks down. Less than 19 per cent of staff trust their corporate leaders to tell the truth (it’s even worse for politicians, where in some geographies less than 9 per cent of people trust politicians to be honest). Measures of trust show we are plumbing new depths of a trust crisis, and the World Economic Forum just listed “misinformation” as the number one short-term global risk.

That’s the number one risk in a world where major powers are literally at war.

Of course, the truth is that much of the work around “values” in organisations – whether it be the value of honesty, or other commonly cited ones like agility, collaboration, and excellence – shows a similar disconnect between stated value and actual behaviour. This is news to no one.

Only two out of 10 workers feel connected to their company’s culture, and only about 23 per cent feel they can actually apply their company’s values daily. In other words, what’s happening in the halls shows little resemblance to the words hung up on the walls. No wonder that while 86 per cent of executives rate their company’s culture as good or excellent, only about half of managers, and less than half of non-managers, do.

When you add to this the fact that barely a week goes by without another high-profile example of corporations misleading customers, investors, or staff, I don’t believe it is controversial to answer the question in the headline of this article with a simple, unqualified “no”. While honesty is a stated value of most companies, it is not a lived, embodied practice in anywhere near that number.

So, while some would use this as a chance to call for a “values audit” or to “reconnect with purpose”, I suggest that may well be a waste of time. A focus on coming up with lists of values or statements of purpose is, in my view, how we got here in the first place. Instead, I believe we should focus on a behaviour audit – a focus on how truth happens (or does not), and the reasons for that. So here are four things we can do to start translating the value of truth into a behaviour of making truth happen.

Audit your disincentives, not your values.

A powerful test of whether honesty is, or ever will be, real in your organisation is whether there are structural disincentives to telling the truth. Does your performance management system reward people for delivering good news and punish them for delivering bad? Are people in your organisation ever penalised for raising concerns? If so, no value statement in the world will make truth happen. Map out the moments in your organisation where truth-telling carries a cost, and start dismantling them, one by one.

Measure behaviours, not aspirations.

Culture surveys that ask whether people “agree with our values” are largely useless, as they measure aspiration rather than behaviour. The question we should ask is: Do you observe our stated values in the decisions you and your manager make? That single question, asked and acted upon seriously, will tell you more about the health of your culture than most climate surveys you have ever run.

Make leaders go first, publicly.

As the great leadership coach Phill Nosworthy once said to me: “What walks first in leaders runs next in the team.” The fastest way to build a truth-telling culture is to have leaders model it. This can take many forms. Ask senior leaders to share publicly one piece of feedback about themselves that they are actively working on or name a decision they got wrong and what they would do differently. A single act of visible, vulnerable truth-telling by a leader can do more to shift culture than months of values-based workshops.

Practice on a pre-mortem.

A “speak-up culture” is one of the most common aspirations, and one of the least reliably achieved. The reason is that we fail to recognise the structural power imbalances and cultural dynamics that make speaking up scary. If we want people to speak up (a form of truth-telling), we need to build that muscle by practising the behaviour in low-stakes environments. Pre-mortems (a process where a team is asked to imagine a project as failed and work backwards to explain why) are a useful tool for this, as you can engineer a psychologically safe environment where the act of “red teaming” or raising concerns is not scary; it’s literally the aim of the game.

While no single action is ever going to transition a culture to being honest all the time, enough of these things implemented over time can move us in that direction. And when it comes to truth, every step towards it is a step worth wanting.

Dominic Thurbon is the director and co-founder of Alchemy Labs Australia.

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