Consistent Examples Still Require Consistent Reinforcement

Even in cases where we leave absolutely nothing to chance, taking every single opportunity we have to provide examples showing how each of our core values can be acted on in roles our team members perform daily, we’ll still need to provide consistent reinforcement backing our consistent example. As I kicked off this look at how important our values are in creating a strong foundation for any organization, I mentioned the time involved in establishing or replacing a habit. Initially that was specific to what we need to do as leaders, just to model our core values and keep them at the top of our team members’ minds. Since then, I’ve mentioned how much more effort it takes to transform a one-time-behavior into a habit that’s part of our daily routine. Creating habits that involve our values in our own role is no small task but helping our team members do this, even after we’ve worked to show them exactly how they can, requires a very focused effort.

I alluded to our Strategic Leadership Coaching model when sharing how we challenge executives to delegate certain tasks to others in their organization. In transparency, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with “coaching”, even though Cindy and I had both completed the certification process to offer that as a service; I had seen far too many clowns claiming to be a coach of this or that but had never accomplished anything themselves. Cindy, being so much smarter and much more intuitive than me, saw a tremendous need we could fill where I was stuck on the bull shit I had seen from other people. Our goal with assigning “homework” after any lesson we deliver has always been to build collaboration between the participant and their direct manager so that the manager could guide them in implementing their action steps and help them sustain them long enough to form habits. When we realized that many of those managers weren’t engaging their folks, even when they received extremely articulate lists of steps the participate hoped to put in place after time with us, I finally conceded that Cindy had been right all along (again) and we started providing “coaching” as a service - but with the specific goal of reinforcing the action steps they implemented and capturing how those steps increased their productivity and profitability. 

The important part isn’t who’s providing that reinforcement, it’s that the behaviors modeling our core values are being recognized and routinely reinforced. As leaders, it’s our responsibility to make sure that gets done. We are required to provide a clear understanding of what each value looks like in practice as well as an example every time we have the chance, but there’s no way we can do it all on our own indefinitely - and we don’t have to. Moving forward, we’ll work through specific steps we can take to do this whenever and however we can, and we’ll identify ways we can engage the leaders around us to have an active role in the process.