High performing businesses share a set of core values for every employee. It is not sufficient to only document the core values for your business. You must actively keep your core values alive in the business every day. In this video, I share practical ways you can apply your core values to hiring, retention, and you the entrepreneur.
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How do you keep core values alive in your business?
Hi Everyone, I’m Coach David J. Greer. Today I want to talk to you about keeping a set of core values alive in your business. To start, a reminder that core values are a set of beliefs or how people behave that is common among every single employee in your business. If everyone has those same beliefs and behaviors then your company will operate quicker, faster, and have higher growth.
It’s not sufficient to just write down and figure out your core values and share them among all of your company. That is necessary. I want to talk about other ways you can keep core values alive in your business every day.
First of all, I think that core values are shared best by telling stories. I encourage people at every weekly team meeting, at least, to share a story about someone who demonstrated a core value in the previous week. Even better, if you have daily huddles is to share a core value story from the previous day. It does not have to be long. It just needs to demonstrate one of your core values.
If you want a set of core values that are common throughout your company, I believe one of the things you need to do is to make hiring for core values one of your principles. I believe this so deeply that I hire for core values first and skills second. During the hiring process you need to ask people open ended questions. Things like “What was the biggest challenge you have ever overcome?” “What did you do about it?” “How did it change you?” These will reveal much more about people’s values and beliefs than asking them about their skills.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t hire for skills. I am saying that you should hire for culture first and skills second.
One example of hiring for core values is my friend Ralph Turfus. When he was running his company Class Software every single person who applied for a job at Class had to first answer a skill tested questionnaire that was part of the application process online. Ralph didn’t make up the questions in this questionnaire. They were done by the employees of the company. I know that it was very difficult to get past this test because I even had a few of my friends that tried to apply for jobs at Class who were unsuccessful at passing the test. Clearly, they didn’t meet the core values of Class Software.
The next recommendation I’m going to make can be difficult for a lot of entrepreneurs. And I’ve seen how impactful it can be. You need to fire people who blatantly violate core values. If you don’t, it sends a strong signal to the rest of the company that you don’t actually believe in those core values. As you get more and more people who are aligned along the same set of core values, when you have one person that doesn’t, they disrupt everyone else. Eventually you will find that disruption is just not worth it.
Then you have to look in the mirror at yourself. We as entrepreneurs often times like to make our own rules. There are times where we might not blatantly violate our own core values, especially if those core values really came from us in the first place. You have to be prepared when your senior leadership team or when any employee calls you out for violating a core value. You have to look at that, own up to it, and you have to be prepared to change your behavior. In my experience, that can be one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur to do. And one of the most worthwhile.
If you would like help in discovering your core values, implementing your core values used in your business, and learning more about how you can gain high performance by having the same set of core values used by every person in your business. Reach out to me. Give me call. Send me an email. Let’s spend time on the phone and we’ll explore more about how core values can help your business.
