Increasingly, companies around the world have adopted formal statements of corporate values - and even published them on their websites.   Corporate Values generally define the institutional standards of behavior and can be quite telling for any corporation with senior executives routinely identifying ethical behavior, honesty, integrity, and social concerns as top issues on their companies' agendas.  Companies embed their corporate values into their management practices in the hope that the values will reinforce behaviors that ultimately will benefit the company and its shareholders.

The meaning of the emphasis on corporate values tends to be less obvious, not only to the casual observer or investor, but more importantly, to the employees themselves.  To our knowledge, there have been many articles, surveys, and studies examining corporate values, but few examined how deeply corporate values are embedded in organizations to the extent that the adherence to (living) those values affects overall operational performance of the company, especially when it comes to senior executives.

It is the opinion of the authors of the book, Losing Faith: How the Grove Survivors Led the Decline of Intel's Corporate Culture, that when senior executives believe themselves to be above accountability to those corporate values - when their actions don't match their words - employees will become mistrustful of those senior executives.  Trust is one of those attributes that is easy to lose, but even harder to gain back either on a personal or professional level.  When employees lose trust in management, they essentially become disappointed, disengaged and eventually "lose faith" in the corporate values.  When this occurs, then obtaining peak performance from employees becomes futile.  We believe that this is the beginning of a cancer that will eventually kill operational performance in the corporation and depending on the extent, will vary in terms of how long it takes to impact operational performance and ultimately, stock price.

To put it simply, losing faith is when employees no longer believe in the corporate values because senior management doesn't walk the talk of those values.  We encourage you to read our first book: Losing Faith: How the Grove Survivors Led the Decline of Intel's Corporate Culture.   We believe that senior management adherence to corporate values is critical in leadership of any company and that without it, operational performance can deteriorate.