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 the beef 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 in any given 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 the 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 early on. 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.

As important as it is for my friend to be able to highlight the progress each of his students have made, we all share a similar need; as members of a team and as leaders of that team. The work we’ll need to do to rally a community around our organization’s core values will seem futile at times. As I’ve already suggested a few times, we’ll frequently be faced with the option of moving toward the easier wrong instead of staying the course of the harder right that models our values. When we’re under constant pressure to achieve bottom line results, sticking to our values over the long haul can seem like we’re not gaining any ground at all.

For those of us who have accepted the responsibility of leadership, especially when we’re fast-paced and task-oriented with measurable results serving as a primary driving force, slowing down enough to reflect on how much we’ve actually accomplished rarely happens. Most leaders I’ve known over the years have a tendency to keep their heads down and push through anything and everything that’s thrown at them. That constant focus on getting things done doesn’t typically allow for much of a look back at where they’ve come from. Make no mistake, I’m not throwing stones at anyone who’s guilty of this! Without Cindy building times into our schedule for this type of reflection, I don’t think I’d ever do it on my own. And I doubt I could have kept focused on our clear purpose without her doing this…

In 2012/2013, just as we were finally getting our heads above water financially after a near-foreclosure thanks to a fiasco with Wells Fargo, we found ourselves in a scenario where we had no choice but to address a situation with some business associates that went against our values. We took a stand, but that stand came with substantial financial consequences (to the tune of six figures in lost revenue annually since). As tough as that was at the time, on our bank account and because we quickly learned that some of the folks we had considered as close friends were nothing of the sort, we’ve never regretted that decision. In the ten-plus years since, we’ve had several more occasions that have forced us to make similar decisions. Each time, we’ve chosen to stick with the values we hold most dear. And each time, it’s definitely been harder - financially and physically, and often even emotionally.

At any point along the way, it would have been very easy to look at where we were right then and thrown in the proverbial towel. We’ve always had a busy schedule, but that’s grown exponentially with all that’s involved in starting and running our business. Without Cindy being so intentional about us dedicating time to reflect on our overall progress as well as the successes we’ve had along the way, sustaining those values - and the work we’ve done to build our business - may not have happened. Without that, we wouldn’t have had a solid foundation to rally a community around or to ever have a shot at being viewed as an overnight success!

Momentum Builds Into an “Overnight Success”

If Cindy and I had only been measuring our accomplishments by reviewing our bank statements and retirement account balances, making some of the decisions we’ve been faced with over the last fifteen years would have been substantially harder. Reflecting on even the smallest personal or business victories, though, has been critical in helping us sustain the harder right to live out our values on a daily basis - despite varying levels of nonsense on any given day.

Just as clearly as I remember that feeling as I heard that suggestion to have additional products or services to offer, I remember the manufacturing plant manager I was working for a year prior to that telling me that I was making the biggest mistake of my career by leaving the company I had worked for my entire adult life to that point. Please know, I don’t share any of the things we’ve accomplished to boast. Quite honestly, we’ve worked harder (and longer hours) since starting our business than we ever had previously - and we have always worked pretty damn hard! I share it because none of this would have happened without ferociously standing by our personal core values and routinely reflecting on just the smallest bits of progress along the way. 

Before wrapping this part up, I need to clarify why I just referenced our personal core values rather than the core values of our business. Anything we’ve accomplished to this point as well as any success we achieve moving forward in our business is based on a foundation of the values we hold personally. We don’t have the luxury of separating our personal feelings from how we operate our business. And quite frankly, I’ve never seen anyone lead effectively over the long haul when they try to. One of the reasons for the positive experiences I know you can picture when I mention the service at Chick-fil-A is that the Cathy family modeled strong values, in their personal lives and in the business, and they set a high expectation for the owners of each location to do the same. Having worked closely with my friend, Craig, for several years now, I know he ran a company with close to a billion in annual revenue just like he’s running the four small businesses he and his wife own today: on a foundation of their core personal values.

Whether we’re leading a small team, operating our own business, or running a large organization, modeling our core values - especially when it’s hard - will provide our teams with something they’ll happily rally around. Doing that consistently over time will provide our clients and the community around us with plenty of reasons to do the same. Eventually, living by those core values will build a reputation for our organizations that impacts everything we’re working to achieve and that’s what we’ll work through next!