121: No Bad Teams (Part 3)
How To Develop Leaders for Today's Performance and Tomorrow's Growth
In our third and final episode on the topic of No Bad Teams, we’re joined by Cameron Earhart of the Axiom team, where he is going to discuss with us the importance of creating and maintaining values for your business.
The reality is that everyone knows what the purpose of core values are, but they usually and unfortunately get them wrong by how they come up with them and also by how they define them. Because of those initial issues, what we typically see are the core values not being used to actually impact the organization or culture.
So then - how do we actually create 3-4 core values that will impact our organization and help lay the foundation to define our culture?
The first part is choosing no more than 4 values, because once we get past 4, we can’t expect our team members to remember the values, on top of executing and living them out to create the culture you want. The other part is making the values unambiguous - which means that we want the values to be able to shape the attitude and behavior within the company. Therefore, the values need to be achievable in the sense that universally anyone in the company, whether brand new or 15 years tenured, has the opportunity to live them out with any hesitations.
Another important thing to remember is that when choosing and creating values, you don’t have to pick a word from the dictionary and use that definition. You can choose a word, and define it how you want it! For example, one of Axiom’s core values is diligence, and our definition is “we bring the right amount of work to the task”, which is definitely not the Webster Dictionary definition… but for our team, it makes sense, and it helps us create the culture we truly want to have.
The other part of cultivating these values for your team is also being able to use them to have hard conversations with your team, either as a group or individually. When you’re having difficulties with someone, the goal is to then be able to bring them in for a conversation and discuss their behavior or attitude, with the values being at the forefront of that conversation. This way, if in 30 days you have to come back to the same conversation, you can lay out the values again and reiterate the expectations of upholding the company's values. If they cannot uphold those values, it will be time for them to move out of the team.
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