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 this 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.

What ARE You Known For?

An article called “Workplace culture and its impact on corporate reputation” from a UK-based group Igniyte, an organization dedicated to managing corporate reputations, opened with this:

A company’s reputation is all about how other people view the brand. Their perception derives from several factors, including media coverage, the CEO’s social media sites, customer reviews, and whether there is a healthy workplace culture internally. What employees think about the company’s culture and workplace culture is hugely important when it comes to its external reputation.

With that in mind, I’ll stress this once more: our team members, our clients, and the community we operate in directly all care about our values, but so does everyone else who ever hears anything about us!

But hold on, Wes, how did we go from the simple behaviors we use internally to model our values to something as far-reaching as how people view our overall brand? The folks at Igniyte went on to share this, connecting the dots between reputation, culture, and values - and tying all of them to an organization’s results:

Company culture is a catch-all term for its set of behaviors, values, and belief systems that dictate how it operates both externally and internally. A strong culture in the workplace is vital for enhancing employee engagement and overall organizational success.

Workplace culture, then, impacts and influences the following:

1. How customers perceive the organizations culture (its external reputation).
2. How employee engagement manifests.
3. How all stakeholders view and interact with the company/brand.

From this, we can extrapolate that a healthy workplace culture that accurately reflects and lives the company’s core values boosts employee happiness, its reputation, and organizational success.

We’ll dig into how our reputation influences the results we achieve later on. First though, we need to be very honest with ourselves about whether or not our reputation is what we want it to be. It’s one thing for our values to be listed online or to have the boss mention them in a soapbox rant, but that doesn’t mean anyone has connected with or lives by those values… As a reminder for how often this happens, think back to the article I referenced before from MITSloan Management Review called “When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk?” saying that, “we found that more than 80% published an official set of corporate values on their website” and “more than three-quarters of CEOs interviewed in a major business magazine discussed their company’s culture or core values — even when not specifically asked about it.” That same article closed by emphasizing, “Unfortunately, many organizations’ core values are so generic that they could easily serve as fodder for a Dilbert cartoon.”

So what about that honest, clear-eyed look? What should we be asking ourselves? Several years ago, Cindy and I were part of small group on a call with Mark Cole and Jeff Henderson (author of Know What You’re FOR) where Jeff challenged us with these three questions:

• What do you want to be known for?
• What are you known for?
• Do they match?

At first glance, these questions appear to be focused solely on our personal or organizational reputation, our response to the third ties back to our company culture and how we, as leaders in that company, have (or have not) worked to routinely model what we have listed as our core values. Think about it, do they really “put guests and people first” when the milkshake machines are broken company-wide?  Our reputation, the culture it's built on, and the values that drive that culture is based far more on what people see than what we say.

What They See IS What They Get

So who ultimately cares about the core values we model personally or in our organizations? Everyone does! The reputation of our company is indeed built on the values we exemplify day in and day out. For far too many individuals and businesses, the answer to that third question Jeff Henderson challenged us with is an unfortunate NO… Companies nearly always (around 80% of the time based at the stats I just referenced again) say what they want to be known for by posting their values with wonderfully crafted definitions on their websites for the world to see, then the executives pontificate about those values to anyone pointing a camera or microphone in their direction - whether than same message ever gets to the rest of their teams or not…

How often have you heard someone say, “What you see if what you get!”, detailing their aim to be genuine in all that they do? Hearing that statement isn’t uncommon. The validity of it, though, depends on the source. Just like posting meticulous core values on a website or spouting them off in an interview, talking is the easy part. We can definitely detail what we want to be known for but what we’re actually known for - internally with our team members, externally with our clients, and even more broadly through the reputation we build over time - ties right back to “What you see is what you get!”

If what we want to be known for isn’t lining up with what we are known for, it’s critical that we take a hard look at any possible reason we can find that could be driving this. Maybe we haven’t been as clear as we had hoped in messaging what our values really mean; am I the only one who’s ever thought I explained something in detail only to find out later that I completely missed the mark? I know it’s hard to believe, but I’ve done it more than a few times - just ask Cindy! Or maybe, we shared the perfect message once, saw our folks connect the dots as they heard it, then neglected to ever circle back to solidify just how important those values are every single day. Had Truett Cathy said “My Pleasure” just one time, rather than for ten full years, we may have never even learned about the amazingness of God’s chicken sandwich… But maybe, just maybe, what we say in detailing those values isn’t lining up with what people see in our actions.

Whether it’s from a misunderstanding, a difference in perception, a lack of consistency in sharing the message, or we’ve completely dropped the ball in living out the values we want to be known for, what people see is far more important than anything we ever say. We can count on the people closest to us to duplicate the example we provide. What our teams do routinely will have an immediate impact on the clients we serve and the community we operate in. And eventually, even if we’re blessed with a longstanding history where the milkshake machines were once dependable, what people see will overtake what we say and anything we’ve said or done leading up to that point. That will become our reputation - and that reputation will affect our results, so we’ll pick up there soon.