Building Consistent Team Behavior, Based on Our Values

Society has countless “influencers” with significant followings. Having a high number of folks watch their foolishness online is wildly different from the responsibility leaders hold when they’ve earned genuine influence with the people on their teams, or for that matter, anyone their behavior impacts. Whether we like it or not, walking the talk to provide a consistent example of what our core company values looks like in application is imperative when we have this kind of influence with the people around us. Even when our behavior sets the proper tone for our teams, each team member will need routine reinforcement as they work to build those values into each of their own tasks. And that will require feedback from us and everyone who’s part of our leadership team. While this is anything but easy, it’s far simpler than what we’ll deal with indefinitely when those values aren’t a consistent part of our entire team’s behavior.

My first direct reference to Chick-fil-A through our look at the significance of values in the foundation of any organization was from an article comparing their performance with customers to that of McDonald’s, with Chick-fil-A being in the number one spot for ten consecutive years. With that ranking in mind, what do we all expect any time we visit one of their stores - anywhere? We expect to be waited on quickly and courteously, we expect to get exactly what we ordered (which isn’t likely to happen at any location with golden arches), we expect our food to be really good, and we can count on hearing “My Pleasure” several times. I won’t go so far as to suggest any of these will be done perfectly every time, we can absolutely bank on each of them being executive well above average - consistently!

Before tying this to what you and I need to do to achieve this type of consistency with our team members modeling our core values, I’ll remind once more that it took Truett Cathy ten full years to thoroughly embed “My Pleasure” into the Chick-fil-A experience we count on today. I’d love to think we can learn from his success and build the behaviors that consistently model our company values into our team’s routine in less time. To do that, we’ll need to reference those values constantly and we’ll need to live the example we need our teams to follow, but we’ll also need to set abundantly clear expectations for how their behavior should also be based on our values. Even when we’ve provided meticulous explanations, detailing exactly what we expect to see from that point forward and holding a high standard of accountability must be in place. We’ll pick up there next time.