To sustain the effort required by our high expectations, accountability must be built into our culture - at all levels. But detailing what our team members need to do and how that needs to happen is only part of that process. Even the most ingrained habits supporting the simplest behaviors can still...

Creating a legacy through our core values requires us to set clear (and high) expectations for our team members. Maintaining accountability, consistently and across the board, around the behaviors that model those values is an absolute necessity for ever sustaining those expectations. But accountabi...

I remember a time very early in my behavior-based safety career when Terry Ward (who I’ve mentioned several times in this look at values and throughout my first two books), stopped by my office to chat about something. When he stepped in, I had an email pulled up from Cindy. I can’t recall what the ...

Building consistent team behavior that’s based on our core company values will require removing any possible variance around what each value looks like in practice - in each individual role. But having a clear understanding of the necessary behaviors is just part of the process. It will take at leas...

Society has countless “influencers” with significant followings. Having a high number of folks watch their foolishness online is wildly different from the responsibility leaders hold when they’ve earned genuine influence with the people on their teams, or for that matter, anyone their behavior impac...

Even in cases where we leave absolutely nothing to chance, taking every single opportunity we have to provide examples showing how each of our core values can be acted on in roles our team members perform daily, we’ll still need to provide consistent reinforcement backing our consistent example. As ...

As we started down this path detailing how strong businesses are built on a foundation of values, I shared something I personally experienced while creating a policy manual for the new owners of company - a textbook example of not just designed that handbook around their core values but building tho...

Building a culture around values requires the leader to provide a daily example of exactly how each definition outlined in the handbook and on the wall directly applies to what’s required of them. Providing a detailed explanation, connecting those definitions to their behaviors so nothing is left to...

In the fourth lesson of our Emerging Leader Development course, Cindy and I detail five critical practices for effective communication. In that process, we emphasize just how important it is that we keep our message simple and we share it over and over and over again with absolute consistency. Cindy...

While the foundation for the residential construction projects I was involved with in my teens was on a much smaller scale than the skyscrapers I alluded to earlier, they were no less important to the long term stability of the home. The same holds true for the core values in a business of any size....

As we wrapped up our look at who ultimately cares about our values, and how much our organization’s entire reputation rests on them, I emphasized the importance of modeling our values and explaining why - because we can’t just assume the general public will piece it all together on their own; they’r...

Make no mistake, there’s a huge difference between touting how amazing we are and in explaining how or why our actions tie back to our values. We’ve all been around folks who have a title that carries some level of authority, and seen them pound their chest about how important they are or why everyo...