The Non-Negotiables: We Can’t Vary on Values

In chapter eight of What’s KILLING Your Profitability? (It ALL Boils Down to Leadership!), I detailed how much confusion costs an organization and emphasized how significant the need is for leaders to set crystal-clear expectations. Chapter nine fell right in line by outlining how much profitability is lost when teams aren’t held accountable for at least meeting expectations. While both were geared at overall performance, both are crucial if we’re going to build consistent team behavior based on our core company values.

Setting abundantly clear expectations  for how our values are modeled is such a critical part ensuring our organization’s foundation leads to a lasting legacy that will dig into that specifically soon. Before we get there, though, I’ll challenge you to consider something that could be preventing your team from latching onto your values as quickly or in the way that you had hoped.

In the nearly thirty years since Cindy and I started dating, we’ve realized there are countless things we don’t agree on. She thinks a ribeye needs to be all but burnt to be edible and I prefer mine much like Sonny and Pepper ordered theirs in A Cowboy Way. Her approach to handling a problem is to think through several possible outcomes to identify the best way to achieve precision and accuracy on her first attempt where I tend to go with the “hold my beer and watch this” approach (even though I don’t drink), then make corrections as needed. I could go on like this for days, but hopefully you’re not the slow guy at the magic show and you already get the point. While there are indeed tons of things we don’t agree on, we realized early on that we didn’t vary on our personal values. Loyalty to one another, our shared Faith, and an intense focus on character always taking priority over whatever was fun or more profitable in the moment have been non-negotiables since the beginning of our relationship.

When we, as leaders in our organizations, talk about and model our core values consistently, it’s not about coercing our team members into being mindless clones who do exactly what we say because they have no other choice. The idea of diversity, equity, and inclusion has been in the headlines continuously for several years - and rarely for the right reasons. Since toe the line by challenging the societal norm for that in the third lesson of our Recruitment, Retention, & Culture course, I’ll only touch on it briefly here: the most powerful thing I’ve seen true diversity provide any organization has been varying thought processes that drive genuine continuous improvement. Make no mistake though, as great as diversity in experience, skill, and thought can be, I’m in no way suggesting there’s room for diversity in values. 

The reason I continue to emphasize the need for every leader to talk about their company’s core values in explicit detail and model those values daily is that the only way we can ever hope to see them consistently displayed by our teams is to show that our values are non-negotiable. In Traction, Gino Wickman shares this in detailing how important organizational values are, “Once they’re defined, you must hire, fire, review, and recognize people based on these core values. This is how to build a thriving culture around them.” When we are willing to consistently model our values in our own role, talk about those values routinely with our teams, and take every chance we can get to show just how each value can be acted on in what our team members do, we should eventually see our teams following suit. And then we need to be sure to recognize them for doing it - so we’ll pick up there next time.