CHAPTER 9

Value-in-Action Stories

Just about every story you tell about a disaster with a cable company, plumber, electrician, or other contractor could be considered a Value-in-Action story. The same goes for air travel stories. These tend to be disaster stories that profile selfish or apathetic values, and we tell them so often that we have a bad habit of playing the “Can you top this?” game.

Consider that Derrick the plumber came to my house on a Saturday morning an hour after I called. He had his young son in tow, and they were on their way to a soccer game. Even so, Derrick took the time to fix a leak in my guest bathroom because my mom was coming to visit on Sunday. He went above and beyond the call of duty. He demonstrated values of respect, love of family, punctuality, generosity, and competence.

Then there was Ted, who, after two no-shows, arrived late, did a lousy job installing a new back door, and sent an invoice for twice his original quote. His is a story of procrastination, disrespect, and dishonesty.

The Ted story sits at the tip of my tongue, while the Derrick story doesn’t have the same resonance. Everything went right. Derrick met and exceeded my expectations. Yet his story ignites fewer strong emotions.

Common sense tells me that sharing the Derrick story is more likely to leave me feeling inspired to go above and beyond myself, because in telling it, I reinforce my feeling that the world is full of generous people. It reflects my own good values.

On the other hand, the second story leaves me feeling cynical. I remember how people can be selfish and unreliable. The story doesn’t leave me feeling eager to reach out and help others. Even so, that Ted story wants to jump in and compete for the “worst contractor ever” award whenever a conversation turns to contractor stories.

That’s partly because telling a disaster story helps us process emotions and move past bad experiences. But it is healthier to move past refueling negative emotions by looping through the same story over and over and to move on or reframe disaster stories with a positive message. Value-in-Action stories build either inspiration, creativity and innovation, or frustration and apathy. I’ll discuss how to do so in a bit, but first, let’s look at the many ways that values can translate to stories that fit into our everyday lives.

Metaphors as Mini Value Stories

The stories and metaphors we use in everyday communication lay the foundation for how we think about the world—our value system. Metaphors are ministories that help us frame complexity into a familiar package. We use the war metaphor a lot: the war on AIDS, for instance. When we channel our desire to find a cure and prevent the spread of AIDS through the metaphor of war, it feels more urgent and, for some people, more “winnable.” Many people like the metaphor of war because it makes them feel stronger and inspired to fight. It triggers their fight-or-flight responses and stimulates adrenaline and cortisol that push people into action. War feels active, while “healing a disease” is gentler and more complex (and in some cases may produce better insights).

Metaphors frame and simplify, but at the same time, they can compartmentalize and oversimplify. We are often suckered into metaphors that stir our emotions and direct our resources in ways we might not choose if we were paying closer attention. For instance, it is commonly accepted that factories, products, or information systems function best as “lean, mean, fighting machines.” This metaphor helps you “trim the fat” (metaphor) and “get rid of deadwood” (metaphor). But consider how these metaphors translate when applied to people. Yes, people can be “lean, mean, fighting machines” too. Perhaps you’ve dealt with a few of those machine-like people. You might have felt like a machine yourself. You are left with a dead feeling, because the “lean, mean, fighting machine” metaphor can dull our humanity and disconnect us from the empathy one flawed human has for another—it kills the values that preserve human and humane systems.

When a company uses the metaphor “flawless execution” to describe its accounting services, that’s good. That is exactly what I want when someone files my taxes: flawless execution. But that company also needs complementary metaphors to accommodate the people side—the complex individuals who exist outside popular conceptions of perfection. The “customer is always right” is a popular metaphor, but this notion only works when it is tempered with values such as trust, tolerance, reciprocity, and forgiveness that accommodate the ambiguities of real life. The fact is, the customer is not always right.

One evening—hassled, tired, and angry that my hotel key didn’t work—I marched downstairs to the front desk and showed the card key to the desk clerk saying, “This key doesn’t work.” I probably even let out an exasperated sigh.

The desk clerk grinned ear to ear with a twinkle in his eye and said, “That might be because this key isn’t for our hotel.”

I looked and sure enough the key I was holding was for the hotel I’d just left. I was wrong and I had been rude, but his mood lifted mine and I grinned back.

“Well, then, that would be the reason it doesn’t work. Wouldn’t it?”

We shared a joke on me.

Mr. “Flawless Execution” could have embarrassed me for being stupid and rude. Instead, this man chose to forgive, have some fun, and help me save face in spite of my being quite flawed. Together, we created a “the customer is not always right” story.

It’s Not Bragging

Integrity, by definition, is doing the right thing when no one would have ever known if you cheated, acted selfishly, or fudged a number. That is, integrity-in-action usually occurs without any witnesses. If you don’t tell your story, no one will ever know that you did the right thing. It’s not bragging. Besides, integrity means different things to different people. For my father, a retired federal employee and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, integrity meant that if his boss told him to do something, he did it. To me, integrity means if my client asks me to do something that feels wrong, I have to say no. I wouldn’t promote stories of trust for a company that exploits people, despite the reward it might bring me.

Values are never clear-cut. That’s why Value-in-Action stories are vital if you genuinely want to build collective values powerful enough to guide behavior. In a campaign for more civility between employees, Jim Falucci of Veterans Affairs in New York shared a story with his staff about successfully shifting values toward smoking in VA hospitals. Jim talks about a day when people didn’t look twice at smokers in the hospital. No one explicitly said smoking was OK. It was implicitly OK. Change began when people weren’t supposed to smoke in the elevators. Jim described his frustration when he was the only person willing to correct a stranger getting on an elevator with a lit cigarette. “Now,” he says, “woe to anyone who dares light up inside the building, much less the elevator.”

His story draws attention to the correlation between speaking up and changing behavior. He compared incivility with smoking. No one seemed willing to speak out against incivility, so it was tolerated in some pockets of the hospital system. Incivility seemed to be implicitly OK.

It takes courage to be one of the first in your organization to stop tolerating a behavior such as smoking or incivility. Values often cost you something in the short term. I recall a warm conversation that chilled when I asked a relative to refrain from using racist language. It cost me in the short term but has increased awareness in my family over the long term. Values don’t pay off without continuous investment by real people who face real consequences for holding fast to values, and that’s why Value-in-Action stories are so important.

An organization that professes to value respect should be teeming with stories about showing respect when it wasn’t easy. If you can’t find stories about respect, it doesn’t necessarily mean you aren’t a good story gatherer. It may mean, instead, that other values are currently more important than respect. I worked with a global company concerned with “hygiene issues”—their metaphor for low trust levels in their market. At the time, this company was peerless when it came to identifying and exploiting market and product opportunities. They truly were one of the best companies in the world in terms of making the right decisions and exploiting opportunities and partnerships to make money and grow their market share.

That year, they had so many new products to introduce they called it the “season of swagger.” I was asked to help find a story highlighting their trustworthiness. Instead, I called attention to current stories being told by suppliers, customers, and partners. It seems that the values of speed, excellence, and growth meant they regularly abandoned or ignored partners by labeling them as slow or subpar. Exploiting every opportunity to chase growth justified behaviors that looked mighty untrustworthy to these partners and clients—in other words, they were trading rapid growth for trustworthiness.

Taking Cultural Values into Account

Each culture prizes different values. Mix two cultures and you better start sharing Value-in-Action stories. Otherwise you will end up with assumptions that “they aren’t trustworthy” or “they don’t have integrity,” when in truth, they simply have a different definition of those values.

Mixing cultures produces both creativity and misunderstanding. But if you understand each group’s cultural values, these groups tackle very predictable conflicts. You can reduce distrust and engender creativity by investing time for sharing Value-in-Action stories that give everyone an opportunity to express their personal values in a way that makes sense and does not feel judgmental to those with a radically different background. Ask an American whether, when witnessing a hit-and-run accident, he or she would turn the driver in, and he or she won’t think twice about an emphatic “Yes!” Anyone would, right? Not in some cultures. A Venezuelan witnessing a hit-and-run accident might pretend he or she didn’t see a thing, particularly if that person was his or her boss. He or she has a family to feed.

Many heated disagreements can be resolved when people meet a conflict after they have shared Value-in-Action stories that address the values they feel are in question. It is an unfortunate consequence of American ethnocentricity that we tend to treat our national values as common sense or rational thinking. Not everyone believes that the early bird should get the worm or that you have to blow your own horn. Values emerged to simulate clarity in ambiguous circumstances.

Like many values, for instance, trust is not strictly rational. Trust means I can fall and you won’t leave me. Trust means that if I sacrifice for your good, you will return the favor in the future. Trust rates good intentions over current results and allows for second chances. Objective reasoning alone is too constraining to inspire or cultivate loyalty from complex humans. Even a rational and reasonable decision to kill a product line can leave a product manager with hard feelings about how the decision went down or was communicated.

International experience is a good way to decrease blind trust in your own definition of rational thinking. When your experience comes from only one culture, certain conclusions seem obvious. You run the risk of missing the arbitrary nature of cultural definitions of values such as integrity, trust, and success. An American who thinks it is obvious that any good compensation system rewards individual efforts can easily get on the wrong side of a Japanese manager who believes just as emphatically that any good compensation system ensures no individuals seem more important than the group as a whole.

Exercise: Identify Your Values

It is not only good business sense but also critical to your sense of happiness to know your values and feel that you live up to your own standards. Before you look for stories, take some time to think and write down the four most important values that guide your behavior. These change over time, and at any point in your life, some will have higher priority than others. (If you don’t mind paying a fee, there is an online survey at http://www.valuesperspectivesbook.com that will give you a report on your current top values.) Think about a time when you had to decide between several unacceptable options. If your choice left you feeling like you did the right thing, you probably based your decision on a value. If it left you feeling you did the wrong thing, you neglected a value that was part of your internal guidance system.

A Time You Shined

For a long time, I ran a facilitator training course based on my second book, A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths. It is based on a formal approach that temporarily intensifies a large group’s dialogue so individuals feel safe to reveal hidden agendas and “dangerous truths.” This type of dialogue is not for the weak-hearted. The facilitator course is limited to 10 participants because participants need to sort through baggage about how people “should” behave in groups and what facilitation “should” be, and it’s a very personal process.

The course was in January, and by November, I had five people enrolled. I was probably not going to fill the class, but I always run it anyway. The phone rang, and the representative of a large organization asked me how many places I had left. I told him I had five places left.

He said, “We’ll take all five.”

Now, that might seem like good news, but I was thrust into a moral quandary. Each of the five already enrolled participants was self-employed or paying their own way. Each of them worked in different types of industries. If you have ever attended a course where 50 percent of the participants are from the same organization, you know that group discussions are dominated by examples from the organization that makes up the majority of the class. I felt it would be unfair to the original five people who had signed up. Plus, each of them paid out of pocket, and the five prospective participants would be attending on their company’s dime.

In all good conscience, I had to say, “I’m afraid I can’t take five people from the same organization. It wouldn’t be fair to the rest of the group. I can take two now, and we can figure out something in between now and next year or just let them take the course next year.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Are you telling me no? You are refusing enrollment?”

I tried to explain my reasoning, but he would have none of it. “Then we won’t be sending anyone.”

I said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” I was sorry to lose the opportunity, but I still feel like I did the right thing.

You learn your values over time by having those values tested. A core value manifests itself when you chose that value over an easier, cheaper, or faster alternative that feels wrong in some way. The choices you make to go with values you know are the right ones, and the circumstances surrounding those choices, are shining examples that will make excellent Value-in-Action stories.

There have been many occasions when your values were tested. All you have to do is choose one of those instances and tell about a time when it would have been easier to do anything but follow your values. Respect, reliability, precision, trustworthiness, compassion, or winning: in every case, you chose the more difficult path your core values demanded of you. Tell about all the circumstances, and be honest about whether you deliberated over your decision. It makes the story more real to know that you almost didn’t do the “right thing.”

A Time You Blew It

Frankly, I did not expect teaching storytelling at a Navy base would be so enlightening. I was wrong. Our military attracts some of the finest men and women in our country and gives many who would not otherwise begin life with fine qualities the opportunity to develop them. This is a story within a story, but I’m including both because sometimes stories aren’t the same when they’re cut in two. And in this case, it adds a mentor story as a bonus.

Sixty men and women sat in the training room. The course was open enrollment and, departing from normal military protocol, the participants ranged from very high to low rank, sitting side by side. Both great and small sat together in those chair-desks I remember from high school. Storytelling is a great equalizer.

When we broke for lunch, the group swiftly headed to the galley—except one guy. I hadn’t noticed him before. He was small, compact, redheaded, and freckled, one of those people who could be 14 or 40; it was impossible to tell. We were the last two in the otherwise empty room. I couldn’t figure out what he was waiting for. I was waiting for the training manager, Bettye Bruemuller, to come get me. She and I were going off base for lunch.

She glanced at him as we walked out and said, “End of the month, I just hate that.” I looked bewildered and she went on: “He’s broke—no money for lunch until payday at the end of the week. I see it all the time.”

I glanced back. He was looking out the window.

We got into Bettye’s big red Cadillac (she has style) and headed off to get some greens and cornbread. On our way back, she gave no explanation as she pulled into the Chick-fil-A drive-thru. She continued chatting in between ordering a sandwich and drink. I assumed someone had asked her to pick something up.

When we returned, she walked me back to the training room and came inside to set the sandwich and drink on a side table, announcing to the room in general, “Some idiot screwed up our order and gave us an extra sandwich. I didn’t want it to go to waste. I figured one of you boys might want it.” As I said, Bettye has style. I left for a minute, and when I came back, “Red” was slurping down the end of his drink and the bag was wadded up on his desktop.

I smiled, called the class to order, and asked who would be willing to share a story next. His hand went up like a shot. I invited him to come to the front, and he told this story.

“I joined the Navy because this girl I liked joined. Of course, I never saw her again.” He paused for the laughter. “But it didn’t matter because for the next 14 years, I was either drunk or stoned most of the time. Two years ago, I self-referred myself into a treatment program. It was my own decision. I haven’t had any drugs or alcohol for two years.”

“When I sobered up, I learned something really important: I hate the Navy!” He had to wait a long time for the laughter to die down. “As a matter of fact, I hate authority in general. But I only have a few more years until I can retire with full benefits. When I retire, I’m getting as far away from this life as humanly possible. But until that day, as long as I’m here, I want every one of you to know you can count on me. I will go where I’m told, when I’m told, and do what I’m told.”

The entire room broke into spontaneous applause. A few of the guys slapped him on the back as he returned to his chair. Owning up to what might otherwise feel shameful is difficult, but it is a ticket to emotional freedom. When you tell a story like this, people deeply appreciate the depth of humility required to admit that you failed your own value system once upon a time.

I recommend you look for a story from a chapter in your life that is already closed. You need to be long past feeling shamed by this event. Don’t tell it until you have forgiven yourself and have come out the other side. They say tragedy plus time is comedy. Wait until you can laugh about it a little before you tell this kind of Value-in-Action story.

Look for stories from the times when you should’ve done the right thing but, for whatever reason, you didn’t. There is not a human being alive who doesn’t carry these stories. The power of the story lies dormant until you tell it. You will be amazed at how many people will come up to thank you for telling a story about a time when you failed your own standards. It’s obvious you aren’t condoning failure. What you are doing is demonstrating humility. We all stumble.

A Mentor

Everyone should have a Value-in-Action story that illustrates what integrity means to them. Bettye in the previous story mentored me to see that integrity can mean seeking out opportunities to demonstrate your values: in her case, generosity and kindness. Once, teaching a roomful of 2,000 retail-electronics sales staff, I asked them to share a story of integrity with a partner. I was pretty sure they’d come up with stories better suited to their culture than I could. They did. I love this particular story because it is such a “guy” story.

I come to a lot of these conferences. Most of them, like this one in Las Vegas, are surrounded by casinos. I enjoy gambling, but I don’t enjoy losing. So my buddy Jack and I made a deal where we spread the risk. Whenever we go to a casino together, we split our winnings 50/50. It makes it more fun, and we have twice the chance to leave a winner.

So last night, we were playing blackjack and a little roulette, and I was losing. I was tired anyway, so I decided to go to bed early, if you call 1 a.m. early. Anyway, this morning I’m sitting at breakfast, and Jack walks up like a Cheshire cat and slams down $1,500 in cash right next to my coffee cup.

I asked him, “What the hell is this?”

He says, “We won last night! Three thousand smackeroos, and this is your share!”

I told him, “Man, this is your money, not mine. I wimped out on you last night.”

He just screwed up his face like I was nuts and says, “A deal is a deal,” and walks off.

Now, that’s what I call integrity. He didn’t have to share that money with me. I’m not sure that I would’ve. But I can guarantee that I will in the future. A deal is a deal.

What mentor taught you how to do the right thing? Who in your industry, culture, or organization epitomizes the best of the best? If you seek to influence outside your own group, you might seek a mentor figure from the culture, history, or ethnicity of your listeners. Don’t assume that your mentor will be someone else’s mentor when it comes to values. The extra research pays off.

When speaking to your own family, organization, or cultural group, all you have to do is find stories of people most admired by this group, and you will find Value-in-Action stories. Look to those you admire personally to find examples of your own values in action. It is fun to arbitrarily choose one of your favorite stories about someone you admire and then decode it for the value(s) illustrated in that story.

A Book, Movie, or Current Event

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s marvelous book Respect is basically a book of Respect-in-Action stories.⁵ Among those wonderful stories, she tells one about Jennifer Dohrn, who was a nurse-midwife in a clinic in the South Bronx. To me, the most striking detail of Jennifer’s story was that Jennifer dressed up for the birth of every baby. When the time was near, she put on her best jewelry, gorgeous clothes, and full makeup, so that “when the baby arrives, his or her first view of life outside of the womb will be lovely.”

When I first started speaking, I got some negative comments on evaluation forms about my clothing. They said I was too casual, even “unprofessional.” I wasn’t dressing like a hussy but more like a frump. This was before the cable show What Not to Wear, or I might have ended up on it. I was under the impression that what I said was more important than how I looked.

The story I borrowed from the book about Jennifer Dohrn helped me see that my clothing can be viewed as a statement of my respect for others. Over the years, I’ve learned that respect is communicated in a thousand subtle details beyond my extremely reasoned, rational way of thinking. This story in particular communicates how paying attention to symbolic details can communicate to others in a tangible way.

How would a baby know whether Jennifer had applied lipstick or not? She pointed out that the baby’s mother would know. The baby’s father and siblings would notice. Their behavior might begin to match hers. She’s setting an example with lipstick that might result in more gentle handling, more time cooing, or even an internal commitment to improve the family’s standard of living.

Just as important, Jennifer knows. She described dressing up for those babies in a way that clearly demonstrated the respect she has for all human life, rich or poor. Like Jennifer, I now pay attention to my clothing and makeup so that anyone can tell at a glance that I’m honored to be hired to train or speak to a group and that I’m grateful for the opportunity to learn their stories.

Like Vision stories, I think it is important to stay wary of idealized Value-in-Action stories. If a story lacks believability in a movie or in your reading, you probably can’t make it seem believable in a Value-in-Action story.

Sometimes a brief summary of the plot can illustrate a value. Don’t turn your nose up at TV shows. More people might connect to a Value-in-Action story from The Simpsons than to a recap of a Dostoyevsky novel.

5. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Respect: An Exploration (Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 2000).