Picture this… Your CEO and leadership team spend months in a conference room debating and perfecting the core values for your business. Six months later, those perfectly word-smithed values are converted to beautiful works of art hanging on the walls of your office and littered all over your company website like Times Square. At this point, most businesses think their work is done. Everyone is living the values, right?
But not so fast.
In fact, only 27% of employees actually believe in their company’s values (according to Gallup).
There is a distinct gap between how most organizations speak about their values and the reality of how these values are embedded into their culture. Have you ever joined an organization that promised rainbows and butterflies only to find out its dungeon and dragons when you join? Most leaders recognize the importance of values, yet few recognize that the real work is infusing them into the daily practices and routines of their business.
Values are more than art on your wall or words on your website. Operationalizing core values is the consistent practice of embedding values into existing systems and processes that your people use every day. But to be successful, it requires everyone in the organization to understand the what, why, and how of operationalizing core values and their impact on the success of your business. It also requires a commitment from leadership to put your values into practice and acknowledge and celebrate when others live your values.
Wallbank Industrial 4 Core Values:
At Wallbank Industrial, our four core values are the foundation of our organization and span across both Wallbank Industrial entities: PJ Wallbank Springs and Edison Manufacturing and Engineering. They guide us when we need to reflect on how to act in particular situations. They are critical when determining the types of people who would best fit our team and when making decisions. They don’t represent how every person acts at every moment, but they do represent how our best act in most moments.
Our core values include:
- Treat Others As You Want To Be Treated
- We demonstrate empathy, respect others, listen, and act with integrity. We treat others as we would want to be treated.
- We maintain expectations at the highest levels for those we work with, out of respect for them and for what great people can and should achieve.
- We put others first. We care about their success. We look for opportunities for them to grow and develop. We are there for our colleagues, especially in challenging times.
- We appreciate our customers. We never forget that we exist because of our customers. They are how we can earn a living and enable us to pay our bills. They have a considerable impact on our lives. We value and respect them and are constantly thinking about increasing our value to them.
- Challenge The Status Quo
- We default to looking for a better way than the accepted industry norm. We look for creative solutions that are simpler and more effective. It’s not just about solving the problem; it’s how the problem is solved.
- We look for ways to be different. Not for the sake of just being different, but believing that where we are different, is how we create value for our stakeholders and enables us to create sustainable competitive advantage.
- Take Ownership
- We all treat the company like it’s our own. We think beyond ourselves and even our close team. We spend each dollar like it’s our own. We do the right thing when others aren’t watching. If we see trash, we pick it up instead of spending time figuring out whose job it is. Every person “owns” our collective future.
- We do what it takes to accomplish the goal, no matter how significant the obstacles are in front of us. This entails a bias for action and hard work, to which there is often not a substitute.
- We do what we say we will do. Talk is cheap, and so are excuses. We are accountable to ourselves and to our team.
- Details matter. Big ideas are nice, but it’s often the details that distinguish oneself from others and the customer. We have pride in our workmanship.
- Either Win or Learn
- We know that there’s success and there’s learning—no experience is a failure if we learn from it. The failure to learn and improve is the only real failure.
- We have a strong appetite to learn. We strive to be better tomorrow than today by learning from our mistakes. We learn and then adapt. If we’re not learning enough, we seek out more challenges to grow – creating the learning opportunities for ourselves.
- We are willing to constructively challenge others or be challenged to get the best results. We know that there can be a better way and have an openness to other’s ideas who have different perspectives and different experiences.
- We are unapologetic for striving to and ultimately executing at the highest levels, but we are humble in success, knowing that success tomorrow is not promised. We don’t forget where we came from. We are our own toughest critic.
- When things go well, we first look out the window to acknowledge others’ contributions. When things don’t go as hoped, we look first in the mirror to see what we could have done differently.
4 Ways to Operationalize Your Core Values
Our core values show up in our organization in many ways. However, our four key practices for operationalizing our core values include:
- Recruiting: Our efforts in selecting people to join us
The simplest way of operationalizing our values through this key practice is being intentional about the questions you ask. In an interview, we’re not just looking for positional knowledge. We also want to look for evidence of how they’ve achieved results that align with this value. When we think about it from a behavioral-based interview question, we want to ask more than just what they do, but how they do it to uncover all of the interactions they might have had around the answer they give.
- Performance Management: The process of evaluating, coaching, and developing team members.
Many organizations recognize people for the results they achieve despite how they got it done. That’s not the case A high performer in our organization is someone who can achieve results and goals in a way that doesn’t leave people behind. We’re mindful about defining behaviors that support our core values. When I think about our performance appraisal process for our leaders, one of the ways this value shows up is how you develop your team or challenge your team to grow.
- Decision Making: How people should think about our core decisions.
This might be the least obvious way to operationalize your values, but it’s so powerful. I learned this a long time ago. I had a boss and mentor who told me that when you’re faced with a difficult decision as a leader, think about your core values and use those to help you get unstuck and make that difficult decision. When you do this, making the wrong call is almost impossible.
- Recognition: Ways we celebrate people not only for what they achieve but how they achieve it
Recognition is all about what you choose to celebrate and how. One way to operationalize your core values through recognition is to take time during meetings to tell stories of how your values are being lived. This is a simple way to help your team understand what it means to live this value.
Our values are our DNA. They aren’t just words on the wall or website. It’s how we strive to show up for our teams, in our community, and with our customers. It’s beyond what most organizations do, but it makes us stronger and better.
If this resonates with you, let’s chat!
