A Reputation Built on Consistency, Over Time…

To build a reputation that drives results, one that each person who ever hears about us will connect with our core values, being intentional in our approach to providing world-class service and being sure to detail why we’re willing to do it is part of our responsibility as leaders. But doing any of this on occasion won’t get the job done. We’ll have to model our values every single day. We’ll also need to make sure everyone on our team knows exactly why we’re doing that and how they’re expected to do the same. Doing either consistently won’t be nearly as simple as printing those values in a handbook, painting them on a wall, or adding them to our website. That’s where discipline comes into play, and that kind of discipline is often the key difference between effectively leading a team and just managing the actions of the people reporting to us.

All said, this discipline to be consistent, especially when we feel like we’ve beaten the horse to death, can wear out even the most driven executives. Starting off Leading With A Clear Purpose, I emphasized the importance of identifying exactly why we accepted the responsibility for leading an organization or just a small team. Without a clear and definite purpose, living out and detailing our values - over and over and over again - can be a heavy load. And not only will we need our own clear purpose for leading, we’d do well to connect those values directly to the purpose we’re working to achieve as an organization.

Our example starts the process, but bringing the team along with us on the journey is how we’ll build modeling our values into a culture - a culture that yields the reputation our organization is known for far and wide. That’s where the second half of Leading With A Clear Purpose comes into play; helping our team members identify their own clear purpose and connecting that with our organizational purpose. With that connection made, tying our core values to purpose can give meaning to work that may otherwise lead to burnout - especially when the process takes longer than any of us wants and we’re not seeing significant results.

There’s no way around it, building a great reputation takes time and consistent effort. Whatever reputation we’re known for from a distance will be based on the culture we’re built within our teams, and what the clients and community we support directly experience from us. And like it or not, that internal culture falls completely on how we’ve routinely modeled our core values for everyone we lead. Consistency gets the process started and connecting our values to a clear purpose will help create sustainability, something we’ll start working through soon…