The AI Antidote? Give Human Values a Seat at the Boardroom Table.

Lee Iacocca once famously said, “Business, after all, is nothing more than a bunch of human relationships.” He couldn’t have been more right. Business is about relationships—and relationships are about values.

Think about it. Are all of your friends in your socioeconomic group? Do they have the same education level? Are they the same marital status, age, and gender as you are? Probably not. And yet, because of the core values you share, you feel connected to them.

The same holds true with business relationships. Want to connect with your customers? Your employees? Your shareholders? You need to find some overlap in your core values. And so, in this age where C-suite appointments have expanded to include things like Chief Environmental Officers, Chief People Officers, and even Nature, why not add Chief Values Officer to the executive lineup?

Giving values a seat in your boardroom would signal their importance to your organization. It would also ensure that values would inform every decision made at your company. 

The Chief Values Officer could use the core values of all your company’s stakeholders as a North Star metric to guide the organization towards the intersection of purpose and profit. Perhaps most importantly, they could make sure that your organization’s decisions honor humans in a way that is absolutely vital in the age of generative AI, when our humanness is under threat like never before. 

Data Only Gets You So Far

Conventional C-suite appointments are generally data-driven roles that focus on looking out for the organization. While they may consider stakeholder groups, it’s generally not in a holistic, humanistic way.

For example, some companies have Chief Experience Officers and Chief Customer Officers. While important, these roles tend to focus solely on customers. On top of that, they are highly reliant on data. As a result, they don’t tend to focus on relationships and core values—the building blocks of organizational success.

That’s where traditional C-suite roles fall short. Because they have a data-centric, profit-centric perspective, they miss the values that drive the human side of the business. This, in turn, creates a massive disconnect from the real world. 

The Massive Disconnect

This disconnect is ironic, given that organizations impact and change the world. In some cases, they have a larger impact on the planet than countries do! But the metrics traditionally used to run organizations don’t leave room for humans, their relationships, or their values.

We need to invite humanity back into the boardroom. We need humanity present when decisions are made about how to run companies, especially massive, world-changing organizations. 

Does this mean data should be ignored? No. The only way to achieve this goal is to speak the language of organizations, and that language is data.

That, too, is where the Chief Values Officer comes in. They can track and measure relevant and important values data points. For example, they can determine that 84 percent of their stakeholders share two overlapping core values: family and personal growth. Knowing that, they can ensure that those values are reflected in the organizational decisions made by the board.

The Intersection of Purpose and Profit

Can you imagine the benefits an approach like this would have? With solid data about their stakeholders’ core values, organizations could better connect with all their stakeholders—their customers, employees, shareholders, vendors, communities, and even their future employees and customers.

For example, if their employees valued family and personal growth, the organization could offer programs that help their employees grow their skills in a meaningful way. At the same time, they could offer a flexible work schedule so that employees could spend more time with their loved ones. The morale and engagement boost for doing these things would be profound.

That would just be the beginning. Backed by data, the Chief Values Officer could work with marketers and product developers to make sure that marketing campaigns and new products were designed around the shared core values of family and personal growth. This kind of purpose-driven decision making would lead to increased profits.

And when it came time to hire, the Chief Values Officer could ensure that recruitment messages and the selection process itself included nods to family and personal growth. The possibilities are endless, in fact. Every decision could incorporate values, and the company—and more importantly, the humans that company served—would benefit.

Evolve From Demographics to Valuegraphics

Up until now, most companies haven’t considered the core values that drive their stakeholders. Most of their research about people has focused on their customers’ demographics.

Unfortunately, because demographics make it okay to look at people based on their age, race, gender, income, marital status, and so on, they also promote damaging stereotypes. On top of all that, they fall short in helping companies engage with their customers.

After conducting 750,000 surveys (and counting) across 180 countries in 152 languages, we have found that people within any demographic cohort are aligned with each other, on average, 10.5 percent of the time. That means they disagree 89.5 percent of the time. And in case you are wondering, this finding is +/– 3.5 percent accurate with a 95 percent level of confidence. In other words, it’s statistically bulletproof. 

The reason demographic groups don’t align is because demographics don’t define who we are. They only define what we are. Let’s say demographics tell you that someone is a middle-aged woman who earns $100,000/year and graduated from university. All you really know about that person is that she is a middle-aged woman who earns $100,000/year and graduated from university. You don’t know if she holds the core value of family, or if she is ambitious, or if she is driven by the desire for financial security.

However, dig beyond the demographics and stereotypes into who that woman is, and you can quickly discover the core values that drive her—that give birth to her hopes, fears and dreams. You can figure out how to engage, motivate, and influence her to make a decision you want her to make. Being able to do that (and do it well) is crucial for your organization’s success, and a Chief Values Officer can help make it reality.

Change How You Look at People

Ultimately, though, as important as they are to engaging your customers, values are more important than that. They are the key to changing the world.

Chief Values Officers can help get your company’s values and reality aligned. That will bring balance back to the organization, and that balance will ripple out into all your stakeholder groups and beyond. 

So, let’s change how we operate. Let’s stop putting people inside demographic buckets and assuming we know them. Let’s stop leaving humanity out of our decisions. Instead, let’s invite values into the boardroom. Let’s make our organizations purpose-driven by embracing human values. When we do, profit—and a better world for all of us—won’t be far behind.

For more advice on how values impact the success of organizations, you can find The Death of Demographics on Amazon. Or you can download a free report here.