A Slight Change In Our Approach

Throughout our professional lives, Cindy and I had seen a wide range of values stated by the organizations we were part of. A few either had no clearly defined values to speak of or they just never referenced them. Others had a couple of values listed in a policy manual or on a bulletin board but did little to call attention to them or explain them in any more detail. A few, though, had thorough lists of values with explicitly written definitions for what each meant, but still did next to nothing to ensure team members exemplified those values. In one case, I remember the organizational values being referred to as their “DNA”. Folks were glorified for public behaviors that were in line with those values but no one was held accountable for actions directly opposed to them. Talk is cheap, especially when that talk is only tied to pomp and circumstance!

We had been delivering a keynote called “Building Buy-In Around a Clear Mission & Vision” for a few years at the time, detailing the importance of helping each team member understand how their daily behaviors tie directly to the organization’s mission and vision statements. Seeing how Craig & Kim provided that same kind of clarity - for everyone in their newly acquired company - for each of their core values prompted us to begin researching how clear values provide a strong foundation for any business and produce measurable increases in overall profitability.

Just like our message about the difference we can make by detailing how any particular task impacts our organization’s mission or vision, providing specificity around the behaviors that are in line with or contradicting our values is critical. Even when we have an amazing group of team members, we can’t assume everyone is on the same page.

Tying Everything to Our Values

As Cindy and I worked to learn and understand what each member of our Executive Leadership Elite Think Tank had as core values for their organizations, we had intense conversations with all of them regarding how they kept those values in front of their teams; how often and in what setting did they cover the values, and in what did applying those values look like? Like most executives, each one we talked with had far more to-do items than time to accomplish them, causing this type of intentional dialogue around core values to take a back seat to more urgent issues.

Through those conversations, though, we were able to gain clarity around the behaviors each of them felt best demonstrated the values for their respective organization. In many cases, we were able to discuss scenarios involving the performance of their various team members, be that exemplary or subpar. We used those opportunities to dig into how that performance tied to or went against any of the stated values. Talking through specific situations that were fresh on their minds allowed us to help them crystalize what they expected from each team member and how they could use each example when talking about their organization’s values with their entire team.

This slight change in our approach helped those clients develop clarity around the behaviors involved in living out their values, but it also provided us with a deeper understanding for how having common values with each of those executives contributed to the stronger working relationship we had built with them. More and more, we realized that the closer our values aligned with the individual we were working with, the better the results were that we achieved through that relationship! Looking back over our entire careers, we could easily see that this same thing had happened all along, whether we recognized it at the time or not.

In August 2003, John Maxwell published a book called There’s No Such Thing as “Business” Ethics. I remember him teaching a lesson on that idea around that time, sharing how he initially turned his publisher down when they asked him to write something on “Business Ethics.” When they pressed him on why he wouldn’t write on the topic, he said “There’s no such thing as ‘business ethics’; there’s just ethics. You either have them or you don’t.” I’ll circle back to ethics soon. For now, I’ll just share that I believe one of the most important things we can do with our values, in our professional or our personal lives, is make sure we have a clear understanding of the exact behavior necessary to uphold them. When we have this in place, and we’re able to keep it top of mind in our own routine, we have a much better chance of providing that same clarity for the team members counting on us for leadership. Then, we’ll only need to make slight changes in what we do daily to keep those values front and center. I’ll share a simple example of how Cindy and I have worked to do this now, and later on we’ll work through some specific steps any leader can take to make this part of what they do daily.

Changes We Had to Make

As we developed more clarity around the values of the clients we enjoyed working with the most, we found more and more opportunities to challenge them on how to tie those values to nearly every conversation they had with their teams. This didn’t require major changes in what they were already doing; just a touch of intentionality in the message they shared. With each of those clients, it was fairly routine to discuss their team members’ performance - specifically, how that performance contributed to the overall productivity and profitability of their organizations. The slight change we were able to make in those conversations was to press each executive on how they could connect the employee’s behavior, which contributed to or pulled away from that productivity and profitability, to any of their stated core values. While this initially took a bit of prodding, mainly because it hadn’t been something they ever really considered in depth before, it quickly became second nature - at least when we asked them about it specifically.

Making the connection when pressed during a one-on-one conversation and communicating those connections with the team member in a real life scenario proved to be two very different things. One of the first things I learned during my initial training on behavior-based safety was the power of habit. Depending on the source, it generally takes 21 to 30 days to develop a new habit or change an existing habit, assuming we’re able to perform the behavior tied to the desired habit routinely without slipping back into whatever we had been doing previously. Whether that’s biting our fingernails, smoking cigarettes, or intentionally connecting a team member’s behavior to our values, making a change once doesn’t equate to sustaining that change. Through our conversations with those clients, we realized that we’d need to be just intentional about finding ways to help them maintain their slight changes as we were in working with them to make the connections to begin with. Since that time, we’ve rarely had a conversation with any clients, existing or perspective, without discussing their values.

While we were developing a clear understanding for how to best support our clients in keeping their values visible throughout their teams, I can’t say that we had the same clarity around our own values. After more than two decades of marriage, being involved in several business projects together through that time even before launching Dove Development & Consulting, Cindy and I had a strong sense of what we valued most. That said, we had only discussed those in generalities for ourselves and in how we related to the words or phrases any particular client listed as their values. Unfortunately, even with what I felt were some deeply held personal values in mind, I hadn’t taken the time to specify them or detail what behaviors would be required to practice them daily. 

We’ll look more at the specifics of this later on. For now, just know that the simple act of putting our values to paper and outlining what someone should see us doing to model them was significant. Doing this also helped us be even more effective in supporting our clients as they worked through the same process. Before we begin working through any of those steps in detail, consider this quick example of how we’ve seen closely held and consistently communicated values have a direct impact on a business’s bottom line.

Living, Breathing Proof

Over the course of my close to fifty years on this ball of mud, I’ve learned that the only people who truly like change are the ones who came up with the idea for the specific change that’s happening in any given moment. I can tolerate change when I have some level of control in how it occurs or when I can see how that change can yield better results immediately. All said, I still believe I adapt to change better than most folks. But I’m still not willing to blindly accept random changes just for the sake of saying we’ve changed something. Having so many experiences point to how values do indeed provide a strong foundation for any business, and specifically the textbook example leading up to the handbook rollout, the changes we made to detail the personal and business values that Cindy had been working from weren’t difficult changes to absorb.

Telling you values are important is easy, though. For years, I worked with a supervisor who coined the phrase, “a mouth will say anything,” which he usually inserted into a conversation after one of his employees made a nonsensical excuse for why they did something they shouldn’t have. Since he’s retired, he seems to reserve that more for political candidates! With that in mind, I’ll share the results that rapidly followed the textbook example I detailed earlier…

By the end of their second year of ownership, the business Craig and Kim led had increased overall revenue by fifty percent! In that process, they may have had five percent voluntary turnover in the entire twenty-four month span. For perspective, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the average annual voluntary turnover rate at just under 25%; they had less than one-fifth of that in twice the time! Additionally, they were able to provide significant wage increases for every role and institute some new incentive plans. Since the two-year mark, they’ve purchased three additional businesses, each complimenting the existing business and providing collaborative opportunities across the entire organization.

I won’t pretend they haven’t experienced bumps along the way. Nothing goes that smoothly. But through every step of the process, I’ve watched Craig and Kim keep their core values front and center. Each decision they make in handling a tough customer ties back to their values. Interactions with every employee, every single day, is based on those values. And at this point, the reputation they’re building in the community shows how much those values really matter.

Make no mistake though, none of the growth they’ve achieved has fallen in their lap. Listing the values in their handbook and printing them on the back of their shirts would have made little impact had they not followed through in their daily routine. The challenge in far too many businesses today is that even the most articulate values rarely get attention after the ink is dry. Before we work through specific steps for ensuring we have a business built on values, we’ll take a look at how even the best values on paper may not help much if they’re not being practiced…