Who Else Cares About Your Values? Your Clients & Community Do!
A great team will definitely care about the core values we exemplify as we build the foundation for our organization, but that’s not where the importance of those values stops. How leaders, as well as each team member in an organization, live out those values will impact business relationships with individual clients and the communities that business operates in. And when it comes to what clients and the surrounding community sees, the owners and executives won’t be the only ones providing the example. Realistically, every member of our team is part of our marketing department when it comes to displaying our core values.
In sharing how we can rally our team around a strong set of values, I mentioned a friend in public safety who typically has a list of candidates asking to join his team each time he posts an open position. Since he’s in law enforcement, let’s consider how much negative publicity that entire community receives when any police officer - anywhere in the country - is so much as portrayed as having used poor judgement, let alone actually breaking one of the laws they’ve sworn to uphold. Each time this happens, it casts a shadow on everyone wearing a uniform - regardless of where it occurs or the facts behind the headline.
Whether we like it or not, the same thing holds true with how each member of our organizations represents our brand. While price is certainly a factor, and one that’s made plenty of headlines with the crazy inflation we’ve all dealt with over the last few years, it’s not always the factor in winning and keeping business. The organizational values we live by, and how each of our team members display those values in and out of work, play a critical role in earning and maintaining trust from our clients and the communities we’re a part of - even when we’re not attempting to compete on price alone!
I frequently make this case with the companies we support that have technicians servicing clients’ equipment. Many of those clients rarely, if ever, interact with the organization's executive team. Sometimes, they have occasional conversations with the person responsible for sales or business development. However, the majority of the clients’ opinion of these companies is formed through what they see and hear from the individual performing the work at their location. Those technicians generally have excellent technical skills but how they display their core values (through their speech and behavior) provides the client all they often need to form an opinion.
Another way our company values show through to our clients and community lies in who and what we support. Not so long ago, a friend who manages a great local company shared a social media post about who sponsors little league teams; we don’t see Amazon or Walmart on those jerseys but we do see the names of local businesses where we know people personally. That same friend has been very intentional in how his company contributes to community initiatives, especially the ones closely aligned with their business model. While they do indeed provide products and services that are priced very competitively with their competition, the organization has developed an extremely loyal client base by backing their values with action. The leadership team and each public facing team member routinely provides reasons for the folks they serve to like them and to trust them. And when all things are equal, we’d all prefer to do business with someone we know, like, and trust.
How Values Impact “Know, Like, & Trust” Relationships
Let’s set any leadership responsibility we hold to the side briefly and think about how much an organization’s values - specifically, how each team member does or does not uphold those values - impacts our desire to do business with them. As regular Joe’s, clients or even just members of the community where a particular company operates, does the example each of those team members set effect how well we know them, how much we like them, and how much we trust them?
For me, the answer is a resounding yes. In wrapping up part one of Leading With A Clear Purpose, I shared the stated purpose behind those (in)famous golden arches - and how much variance there when I last attempted to order what vaguely resembled fast food from one of their restaurants about two hours away from home. It’s been several years since and I still have a very clear picture in my mind of how the behaviors we saw contradicted the organization’s stated purpose and values. Interestingly enough, society often overlooks missteps from employees in a large company like that while dropping a small business like a bad habit for anything remotely similar. I believe that difference is almost always driven by the sheer convenience provided by the bigger ones, or maybe just a lack of willingness to take a stand on principle. Either way, employees (at any level) who fail to live up to their company’s values send their customers and the community they’re a part of a distinct message.
 We’ve all heard the saying that “we do business with people we know, like, and trust.” I believe I was introduced to this idea more than two decades ago and I’ve always viewed it as a fundamental truth in business relationships. As we’ve worked with and studied the DISC Model of Human Behavior over the last decade, though, I’ve learned that this is only one variation of the truth behind building great business relationships. Two out of every three people we interact with on any given day will indeed need to like someone - at some level - before they’ll begin to trust them. Those people-oriented folks place a high priority on enjoyable interaction. If there’s no personal connection, they may never get to a point where they build trust. That said, the remaining one-third of us who are more task-oriented will generally need to trust someone before they’ll ever begin to like them. When I first learned this simple but profound difference, it was like the heavens had opened! I had previously seen the folks who appeared to automatically like everyone, whether or not they had any reason to believe they could trust them, as naive. And I’m sure those same folks saw my lack of interest in being friends with anyone I didn’t trust as just plain cold. While this is a subtle variation, it still plays a key part in how displaying company values impacts relationships.
As a task-oriented client or customer, we wouldn’t likely move forward with a transaction if we see the person we’re dealing with as not aligning with their company’s values - or our own values for that matter. Even in a longstanding business relationship, a mismatch between values and behavior can destroy trust right away. The people-oriented customers and clients may maintain some trust a bit longer, but seeing the disconnect between actions and values have a negative impact on their relationship with the person they deal with directly will eventually burn the bridge. (Remember the thousand bridges from before?)
While the timing may vary slightly, failing to uphold a business’s core values will impact the relationships with its customers. But it won’t stop there. Although everyone in the surrounding community may not be existing customers, how members of an organization exemplify the stated core values will certainly be something that they all pay attention to. And regardless of their people or task focus in the equation, few of them will ever line up to be new clients without being able to like and trust the organization - or the people it’s made up of!
However, standing firm on our core values and consistently working to serve the people who depend on us for that can earn passionate support that exceeds even the best marketing initiatives.
Strong Values Earn Passionate Support
Someone at any level of an organization can deteriorate our relationships with long term clients as well the community around them through behavior that isn’t congruent with their core values. And regardless of their primary focus being on the people involved or the task at hand, those clients and community members will like us less and lose trust if our behaviors aren’t lining up with what we profess as our core values! The inverse holds equally true though.
I once heard Marcus Buckingham explain how differently we approach the companies we like compared to the companies we love. Buckingham said that while we do business with companies we like, we go out of our way to tell the world about a company (or product) we love. And telling the world about a company certainly isn’t exclusive to the ones we love. If anything, being alienated by a company - or even someone representing that company - incites every bit as much word of mouth. Think about it: how often have you taken the time to give anyone a three-star review on Amazon or Google? The one-star reviews nearly always share why the customer was dissatisfied. For the four or five-star reviews to include that same level of detail, there was something about the experience the customer truly loved.
Before we dig into some specific steps for building our values into the experience we provide our clients, as well as communities we serve, or even any measurable ways doing so will benefit our company, let’s consider it from the highest and most general sense. Just like our team members will rally around strong values they’ve seen us model, the same thing happens with the clients and community members who see us stand for things they believe matter. Unfortunately, most folks don’t get to see anything like that very frequently; think back to John Maxwell’s comment I referenced before about only five percent of anyone we interact with working to exceed what’s expected of them. Since I’m convinced his estimate is a bit high, being willing to uphold a core set of company values will undoubtedly go a long way toward ensuring we exceed what our clients and the communities we’re a part of expect from us. When we’re willing to do that routinely, they may find a reason to love us rather than just like us. And that’s where our strong values can build passionate support from those who know us best.
Earning this type of support doesn’t come easy and it won’t happen quickly. In many cases, it may not seem worth it. Moving forward, we’ll work through why it’s worth pushing forward even when it’s tough.