Great Values Show Up in Everything We Do

Throughout Leading With A Clear Purpose, I emphasized how important it is for everyone in a leadership role to understand exactly why they do what they do, to share a message with our teams detailing why our organization exists, and to help each team member understand their own purpose while connecting it back to what we’re working toward as a company. As critical as that clear purpose is, making a meaningful impact - individually or as part of a great team - truly does rely on having and living a great set of core values.

As we lead our teams, how we choose to live out what we list as our core business values will eventually show up through everything our team does, with exponential results - positive or negative. In the time I’ve known Craig and Kim, the bulk of my interaction has been with Craig. Through all that, I’ve witnessed numerous examples of how he exemplifies their core value of Integrity, through his interaction with their team as well as in how he responds to customers and clients. When he and I talked through their list of core values initially, he considered adding Profitability as a sixth value. After considering it further, he decided that upholding each of the others, especially Integrity, would yield a level of profitability that may never be achieved through simply including it in the handbook; and it certainly has. But many of his choices to model that Integrity cut into that profitability on the front end. Providing replacement products and services beyond a warranty, offering refunds when the business was in the right, and even when a non-profit took advantage of his good will. Not only were his team members watching closely, they were able to begin replicating this in their own roles. They truly did rally around Craig’s example of Integrity, as well as the other four values he (and Kim) displayed daily. Those values began showing up in what everyone did; the key team members first, then nearly everyone in the organization.

With Integrity being something many organizations list as a core value, though, you and I both know that all executives aren’t willing to back their talk with the same intentional walk. Have you ever worked for someone who expected you to perform in a certain way but consistently missed the mark in doing so themselves, then justified it by how their busyness was an acceptable reason but your busyness was not? If Integrity is as simple as just doing the right thing, what are the odds of that kind of justification being replicated and viewed as “the right thing” at every other level of the organization? Unfortunately, you and I have both seen examples like that far more often than we’ve seen a Craig - who lives the values he holds in front of his team daily and is the first to accept responsibility for an issue regardless of where on the team it originated.

While the examples I’ve shared here, good and bad, have been brief and fairly vague, I’d challenge you to think through the values in your own organization. How have you seen them modeled by leaders? How are you exemplifying them for the team looking to you for leadership? And how are those values showing through in everything your team does? What we have listed won’t mean nearly as much as what people see in our behavior. Over time, that behavior will be what creates a lasting impact on the clients and communities we serve - so that’s what we’ll work through next!