Rallying Your Community Around Your Values

As I mentioned before, a lot of people being familiar with your company’s name and building a great reach that makes a positive impact on everyone around you are two very different things. Whether you prefer God’s chicken sandwich or two all beef patties (although I’m not so sure about that part anymore) with special sauce, lettuce and cheese on a sesame seed bun, both organizations are very well known. But how they’re thought of by the masses at this point is deeply tied to the steps leaders, corporately and locally, have taken to model each business’s core values - and to hold team members accountable to living out those same values. The reality is that you and I, as clients of an organization or just living in the communities where they operate, do care about how they exemplify their values. And that feeling is not exclusive to large organizations. If anything it matters even more for those of us working in and running small businesses. When we take this to heart, and consistently choose the harder right over the easier wrong, we can begin to rally an entire community around the core values we’re working to model for our teams!

While McDonald’s and Chick-fil-A certainly aren’t small businesses today, they both started out that way - just like any business does. And while I wasn’t there to watch either, I’d bet that Ray Kroc and Truett Cathy were incredibly diligent in how they worked each day to model the values they held most dear. I’d also bet that their personal values were completely aligned with what they founded their respective businesses on. Like many other small businesses starting out, I’d guess that each of them had plenty of opportunities to take shortcuts to capture more profit at the moment. Had they done that routinely though, I doubt we’d know the names of their organizations today.

For me or you, the same thing is necessary. To have any hope of rallying our community around the values we’ve chosen as the foundation for our businesses, we’ll need to walk to talk day-in and day-out. Truth be told, we’ll need to develop that habit long before the community as a whole even notices. When we do that long enough, our teams will eventually follow suit; it took Truett Cathy ten years to get his folks to switch from “You’re Welcome” to “My Pleasure”... As our teams get in lockstep on those values, some of our most loyal customers or clients may begin to notice. But until then, it’s our responsibility as leaders to do whatever we can to recognize the behaviors our team members choose to live out our values and to celebrate even the smallest victories that come as a result.

This won’t be simple to start with. In fact, we can expect times where even we struggle to see the difference that solidifying the foundation of our organization around those values is making. Nearly ten years ago, John Maxwell told me and Cindy that no one can expect to be great the first time they do something. Building our values into what our clients and community sees from us is no different. To push through when we barely see any progress, we’ll need to be intentional about recognizing where we are and reflecting on where we’ve come from - so we’ll look at that more next time.