Who Ultimately Cares About Your Values?

As heavy as the weight can often be in any leadership role, we can’t lose sight of exactly who, ultimately, cares about the core values of our organization: Everyone! How we’re known, up close and from a distance, all boils down to whether or not we’ve been willing to build those values into the foundation of everything we do - and in turn, everything each member of our team does… While the reputation we become known for, like running a smooth drive through or the milkshake machines always being broken, often reaches more people than we ever serve directly, that all starts with the clients and community we do serve, which begins with how we’ve rallied our teams around those values.

As we started looking at what can happen when that foundation isn’t as strong as we need it to be, I shared something I found in a Forbes.com articled called “Rethinking the Value of Core Values” by Curt Steinhorst saying,

“Core values have weight, especially when they’re truthful and focused on what matters to the community within the organization. If they’re hollow, corrupted, misguided, or pretentious, they carry with them a falsehood that can trap and divide an organization. But if they are drawn from and representative of the community they serve, they can have the strength of steel. Like any principle or strategy, core values are difficult to forge and take time to develop and cure; but once they’re well-formed, they sustain you through everything else.”

While the broken milkshake machines certainly don’t have anywhere near the negative impact as the Enron scandal that I detailed after sharing this statement previously, I have no doubt that you can still picture the restaurant chain’s sign each time I joke about it. If your experience is even close to what mine has been over the last ten years, you have come to a similar conclusion: the only way what I actually order will make it into my bag is if I put it there myself… I mean, seriously, does anyone really leave one of their locations thinking “I’m lovin’ it!”?

However wide our reach is - be that global, across the country, or just within a small local area - the reputation that precedes us stems from the culture our organization operates on. And that culture is based on the values we and the leaders on our teams have modeled for everyone within the company looking to us for leadership. Our decisions to consistently exemplify what we’ve defined as our core values, or to justify behavior that doesn’t align with those values, may seem insignificant on any given day but it always has a cascading effect. Over time, for good or for bad, even our smallest decisions to back or contradict our values permeate our culture and build the reputation our entire organization is known for. Make no mistake, our reputation has a direct impact on our overall results. We’ll look at that soon enough. First though, we need to consider what we want to be known for versus what we’re actually known for - and we’ll do that next!