A Part of Every Conversation

Make no mistake, providing behavioral examples that define our core values doesn’t have to be through some elaborate presentation for the world to see, or even done with a nifty slideshow in small groups. It’s far more important that we exemplify the appropriate behaviors personally and that we recognize our team members for doing so in their roles. While putting either of these practices in place may feel overwhelming initially, being consistent with them matters far more than how flashy we are with the rollout! In The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, John Maxwell says this about the value of being consistent: “The sooner you make the transition to becoming intentional about your personal growth, the better it will be for you, because growth compounds and accelerates if you remain intentional about it.” I’m very willing to make the same argument for being consistent in talking about and modeling our values; it will indeed compound and accelerate when you’re intentional about it!

By using our own example in conversations occasionally and working to applaud our team members for exemplifying values in our routine interaction with them, we’re laying a solid foundation for the role those values play in the organization. Our next step should be weaving our values into every formal conversation we have with our teams.

Earlier, I shared how much value comes from providing specific examples during a performance evaluation - rather than simply pointing to the dot we’ve filled in showing “meets requirements.” As we detail the behaviors we’ve seen them use that led to whatever score we’ve given them, we have a great opportunity to tie those behaviors back to our company’s core values. Whether their work exceeded requirements, met requirements, or needs improvement, we’d do well to connect their action to a specific value and explain how they’re living up to or falling short of that value. If we’ve been talking about our values consistently in general conversations, this may just end up being a natural part of our conversation.

One last but critical place we need to be intentional about discussing our values is during any type of corrective action conversation. I realize these are difficult discussions for every leader, mainly because leaders care about the people they’re responsible for, but speaking to how the behaviors calling for this type of conversation are not aligned with our values while providing detail showing what the expected change needs to look like can go a long way toward actually correcting the action instead of only being a punitive measure that pushes someone out the door. As I detailed in What’s KILLING Your Profitability?, turnover is far too expensive not to do all we can to help someone change when possible.

I’m not suggesting any of this will be easy or will magically fall into place overnight. But as we take small, consistent steps to provide detailed examples so everyone on our teams know and understand what’s involved (and expected) with living out our values, we’ll remove that costly ambiguity and we’ll be closer to having that strong foundation for our organization to grow from. And that will help us avoid issues in nearly every area of our business. We’ll look at some of those next to emphasize how much it matters to be sure our values are more than just words in the handbook…