Look forward to hearing if the Saudis are friendly, familiar or… ? Cheers

As ever, we come back to that key word “authenticity”, don’t we?

Your point about scripts reminds me of a really eye-opening experience when working on an employer brand project with a major UK supermarket a couple of years back (along with my fellow CommScrummer, Kevin Keohane).

Granted, they’d been through a bit of a tough time, necessitating a much tighter control and management than was probably their wont, but you couldn’t help but laugh when you saw…

6 core values, 6 leadership behaviours, and at least 5 or 6 bullet-points under each of those! (Straightjacket, anyone?)

Now, I’m no great fan of Tesco but, when you compared their approach to articulating its mission and values, its brevity was refreshing and, actually, quite profound.

At the heart of their ‘Steering Wheel’ (their own version of the Balanced Scorecard) are three simple statements…

No-one tries hard for customers
Treat people how we want to be treated
Every little helps

The point? Everyone’s smart enough to know what those values look like, without needing to be spoon-fed with scripts and detailed task lists.

By providing a loose framework, rather than a “normative” prescription, they simultaneously allow the expression of company culture to remain relatively consistent, whilst allowing every employee a degree of freedom to interpret them in their own way and behave in a manner that’s authentic to *them* as individuals.

And that’s a pretty neat trick that precious few organisations seem capable of pulling off.

I was irritated. It put me off immediately and I took on a decidedly cold tone with her. I doubt I made her day in the way a warm and fuzzy customer would. UPS = #fail.

Is this a new trend? At the risk of sounding like an old, frustrated woman, I have to say I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit.