“Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.” – Gandhi
In all of the time I have spent reading, learning, and being mentored by some of the best values based leaders, and investing time helping others that want to grow to be the best, I’ve noticed a very clear pattern. The best leaders and organizations know what they stand for, and which hill they’d die on for. On the contrary, the organizations that have the most toxic culture, and are struggling for breakthrough, have never taken the time to define what it is that they want to root themselves and their organizations in. Or maybe they have written out and jotted down some values, only to let them be hung up on the side of their building or office wall to die and never be talked about or even worse, ever lived out again!
Core Values unite people and activate a team. They are like the glue that holds teams together. They are a filter that every single decision of our lives both personally and in our organizations should be filtered through. Every one of us experiences problematic situations. During those times values hold us together. This is true in our family, and also our organizations.
Take for instance, a marriage. It’s simple for a husband and wife to remain united when they are first in love and their life is uncomplicated. I refer to this as the “honeymoon phase”. But sooner or later the base that brought them together starts to shake and troubles appear. It’s the couple’s values that keep the couple together during the trying times. Their values are more stable than their changeable feelings. They find that their marriage is so important to them, that they strive for its success. It’s this type of attitude that produces strong marriages!
That’s 100% equally true for our teams. Our team members need to know what the values are – and always act in accordance with them – so that their potential as a team is maximized, even through the adversities they will face. To function together and to flourish, every team needs solidification. Values serve as that solid, foundational base as to which ALL decisions will be filtered through!
As a leader in your organization, you are accountable for maintaining the values. As you are setting the guide, follow these steps:
- Understand what the values are.
- Model the values every single day.
- Constantly convey the values to your people
- Praise the ones who exhibit the values
- Take action on the ones who go against the values
When we first introduced the concept of defining our Core Values at Atlas, even though deep down inside we knew what they were, they didn’t take the front seat as our north star right away. I remember hearing a few mockers even when myself or another team member had done something, a sarcastic voice saying “that’s not our core values”. Even though, yes they were right, it wasn’t something we valued, we had just not built our foundation yet on them. This right here is when most leaders give up on them. Because they think people are not taking them to heart. Understand that the procedure of setting core values takes time. It can be difficult to align all the team members with the organization’s values. However, working to become a better leader and modeling them yourself will make the process easier! For something to become the moral compass of the organization doesn’t just happen overnight!
Each month, we nominate two Team Members who have performed at the highest level that month. Some months, the choice is easy… As there are those that just shined and stood out above and beyond. Other months, we have had 10+ team members in the running! These are the fun months where I love seeing our leadership team compare notes as they painfully remove team members to narrow it down to just two. We’ve done this program for 5+ years now. And before we really knew what our values were, it made the deciding tough sometimes(trust me, sometimes it still is)… But we came up with a system a few years ago where the nominees actions are filtered directly through our seven core values. And the winners have to hands down have fired on all seven of them to be chosen!
Homework for this week — Start jotting down some notes on the things that are the most important to you. If you are a person of value and character(which I’ll go ahead and assume based on you taking the time to read these values based blogs that you are), you already have some sort of Core Values within. They may just not be written out and in plain sight for you to constantly visualize and also for your team members or family to see every day! Or maybe the opposite, you have clear and concise values and are modeling them each and every day. If you do, you know who you are. And I want to say congratulations on leading well done! If you don’t, it’s not too late.
Remember, what gets written and measured gets done! This couldn’t be more true for your foundational values!