The greatest single challenge entrepreneurs and business owners face is keeping alignment amoung everyone in their company. Create alignment, so that you can operate faster, and achieve higher growth by discovering and operating your business from a set of shared core values.
Want to learn more about using core values to create alignment in your business? Call me at +1 (604) 721-5732 or Contact Me.
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Transcript
Why should you operate your business with a set of core values?
Hi Everyone, I’m Coach David J. Greer. I want to talk today about core values in your business. What do we mean by core values? Jim Collins in his book Good To Great, I’ll paraphrase a little, says get the right people on the bus. I’d say you want to get the right people who share the same values and have the same behaviors as you and the rest of the company. That’s really what we mean by a set of core values, people say cultural values.
It’s a set of behaviors and beliefs that’s shared among every single employee in the company. That part is important. It’s not just for your high performers, although we hope that every single person in your company is a highest performer they can be in their role. We want this to apply to every single person who is part of the company.
We want to have this because when everyone has the same behavior, communication is easier, [and] coordination is easier. As I like to tell entrepreneurs, the single most important thing you need to strive for is alignment. It’s a lot easier to create alignment, if everyone shares the same core values.
How does a company come about its core values? Typically, owner/founders create values that are aligned with their own values. Often this is done subconsciously without any real realization. There is a real benefit to teasing out those core values, understanding them, documenting them, and applying them across the whole company.
Another thing people ask me about is “How do you discover your core values?” First of all, it is a discovery process. While we might all want to be altruistic and have some kind of high altruistic values, first of all we must discover what your real core values are. How you really operate the company.
To do that, ask yourselves “Who would you hire in a heartbeat?” What are the characteristics and attributes that you have of that person? Make a list of those and use that as a starting point. Alternatively, you can turn to your senior leadership team and yourself [to ask] “Who is that one person who you really know shouldn’t be there?” What is it about that person that doesn’t fit in with everyone else? Sometimes knowing what not to look for, helps you to figure out what you should be looking for in your cultural values.
I believe you should only have a handful 5 cultural values. That’s enough for everyone to remember, 5 might even be hard for people to remember. I think you should have a phrase for each one rather than a single word. It conveys more meaning to everyone. Finally, I think you should sit down and write a paragraph for each of your core values, so they can be better understood.
Remember this is something that will have a long life. Hopefully these core values will even outlast you as the entrepreneur and leader of the company. This is something you are setting for the long term. The long-term behavior of the people in the company, how the company behaves, how it behaves with customers, how it behaves with suppliers, how it behaves with its employees, and with each other.
If you put this work into identifying your core values, keeping them alive, making them part of the fabric of the business, my belief is that you will create a lot higher performance in your business, because you will have to share a lot less information, everyone comes from the same place, they have the same belief system, and they operate together much more simply.
If you would like some help in discovering your core values and how you can apply it to your business, how you can use your core values to gain greater performance give me a call or send me an email. I’d love to have that conversation with you.
