Great Teams Are Built On Great Values

For the casual observer, it could appear as though the results each of the businesses Craig and Kim have acquired are the primary reasons so many solid candidates have applied to join their team. After all, who doesn’t want to be part of a winning team? Where I’d challenge that casual observer, though, lies in determining what had to be in place first. This is most definitely not a chicken or egg scenario! Had they not solidified a foundation based on their five core values from the start, I’m convinced the results would have been vastly different. I believe turnover would have been much closer to the national average, if not even higher since management changes nearly always result in a spike in personnel changes, and I’m also convinced that simply maintaining the existing client base would have proven to be a challenge with a lot of different faces in place.

Great results certainly do come from great teams, especially great results that are sustained over long periods of time. A company with many talented individuals can also produce strong results in any given year when there are enough incentives in place, but there’s a tremendous difference between several people achieving individual results and an entire team performing exceptionally well on a consistent basis. If teamwork is held up as a value and defined with the idea of building on trust, the most effective individual performers will produce on their own but have little reason to look for ways to collaborate with the team around them if they’re seeing an executive making decisions out of fear that undermine the community they’re professing to serve. When each of the folks watching Criag and Kim saw them routinely making decisions that benefited everyone involved, even when doing so cost them personally in the moment, it didn’t take long for the most talented folks on the team to look for ways they could support not just the new owners, but everyone around them.

Had those values been just words printed in a handbook or painted on the wall, the existing team members wouldn’t have had a reason to rally around a couple who had little industry knowledge and that would have had a direct impact on the caliber of candidates who were willing to accept positions in the company. The name of business had been in place for more than seven decades but basing each decision on those values created a foundation for the new to build on moving forward.

If this was the only example of this that I’ve seen, I probably wouldn’t be as adamant about how much those values contributed to building their (now extremely) strong team. In complete transparency, there are at least a half dozen other clients we’ve seen experience results like this. I’ve been referencing Craig & Kim here because I’ve had the opportunity to be on the journey with them every step of the way. Another friend’s business has grown exponentially in the decade he’s owned it, going from ten employees to over fifty. He’s held a similar set of core company values as a foundation through it all. I’ve seen him pass on highly skilled candidates at times where he had a pressing need for their credentials because those candidates had reputations that contradicted his organization’s values. Another friend holds a leadership role in public safety. While nearly all the other localities are constantly recruiting, he has a wait list of top notch candidates before he ever posts an open position. Interestingly enough, the locality he presides over also has far less public drama and a substantially better working relationship with local businesses than any other in our area. How he’s established and built his team around a core set of values has played a critical role in that.

When we’re willing to do the work up front to ensure our core values are what we’re building our team around, the great results aren’t limited to the company’s bottom line. Those values will show through in everything our team does for the communities and clients we serve. Before we begin looking at how our values impact anyone outside our organizations though, we’ll close the loop here with why those values give our team members a reason to look beyond the results they achieve for themselves.