Joshua Frick, President of Kiddie Academy Educational Child Care.
If someone asked you right now, could you name your organization’s corporate values?
Personal values guide the way we live our lives, but corporate values define the culture and ethics of an organization. In each instance—personally and professionally—values are foundational. At work and at home, they influence our decisions and how we invest our resources and time.
Corporate values guide everything a business does. Values provide meaning, help lead the decision-making process and reflect the type of culture you hope to foster.
Understand the importance of meaning and alignment.
According to Gallup, it’s critical to make your values mean something—they should convey the core way you do business and achieve business outcomes. They are not aspirational ideas hung on the wall to give employees hope. Your company’s values should reflect the core tenets that come up again and again in the execution of your business strategy.
A corporation defined by strong values empowers employees to engage and infuses meaning into the company’s culture. When employees feel their personal values are aligned with organizational values (and when they see those values upheld by leadership), I’ve found they’re more likely to remain loyal to the company and feel a sense of accomplishment in their work.
Communicate and act on your values daily.
If your business plans to lead with its values, those values should be highly visible and well communicated to all your stakeholders. Every team member should understand and lead with your company’s values.
But leading with values and ingraining them into your business has to start at the very top. A business cannot successfully integrate values into daily practice without first building alignment with the leadership team about what’s most important to the organization.
Once your leadership team is clear on what you value and how those values guide you every day, it’s time to share them with the rest of your team—and show them in action in real-life situations.
Encourage your team members to consider the values as guiding principles when they are faced with challenges in the workplace. Instill open and honest communication to help build stronger connections between your values and how your team members conduct business from day to day. Ultimately, leading with your values requires you to be committed to holding your entire organization accountable.
Use your values to inspire and inform corporate culture.
For example, at Kiddie Academy, where I serve as president, our values focus on integrity, responsibility, curiosity, passion, relationships and impact. Our values inspire academy-level initiatives, like supporting a teacher in crisis or hosting a fundraiser to raise money for a local nonprofit. On a corporate level, we use our values to drive company-wide business objectives and to inform how we support our mission and vision.
Lean on your values to get through difficult or uncertain times.
Leaning on corporate values can help organizations through some of the challenges facing their industries—and even reframe them as opportunities. I’ve found that when you’re met with uncertainty, the best thing you can do is leverage your values.
For inspiration, dust off your business’s SWOT analysis and look under the weaknesses and threats columns. What challenges have you been dreading or ignoring, unsure of how to tackle? Now, try looking at these challenges through the lens of your values.
For example, if one of the threats facing your industry is difficulty in recruiting and retaining employees, how can you reframe this challenge as a way to put your values into action? Once you decide to put an emphasis on your value of relationships (one of our core values), it becomes easier to see the next steps.
For us, forging relationships starts from the very first touchpoint with prospective employees. Do they feel respected during our interview process? Do we put effort into their onboarding plan? Do they feel supported in their early days when they have questions or concerns? Do we invest in their continued development? By identifying the overlap between our challenges and our values, the tactical steps forward are obvious.
All companies encounter challenges. How they are addressed in accordance with the organization’s values defines the brand. These values should be so well communicated and defined within an organization that employees know what to do in a gray area they may encounter. When there is enterprise-wide buy-in to operational values, decisions across every spectrum will be positively influenced.
Commit to your values every day.
Success relies on a commitment to lead with your corporation’s core values each day, in every scenario, across all business functions. Set your organization’s values and lead by example, and the benefits will flow.
As Alexander Hamilton is often credited with saying, “If you don’t stand for something, you will fall for anything.” Establishing and adhering to a values system is a way to ensure your organization and the people who make it work don’t fall for anything—that they have a clear vision of what needs to be done today and where you’re collectively going tomorrow.
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