VALUES. SAY IT OUT LOUD. Let the word bounce around your head for a moment.
Sounds good, yes?
Try these corporate values out for size:
Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence. They sound very good, don’t they?
The problem is that they belong to Enron, a massive global energy player that, at its peak, employed 20 000 people and filed for bankruptcy in 2001 on the back of a corporate fraud and corruption scandal that came to bear its name: The Enron Scandal.
At the corporate level, Value Statements are often misleading and completely irrelevant to anything other than marketing and promotional activities. That doesn’t make the idea of values irrelevant. In fact, I believe that values are central to entrepreneurial success. Why? Because, if approached correctly, they lay the foundation for everything that follows – the entrepreneur’s approach to business,
and, therefore, to the structure and operating method of the business itself.
So, what are values?
This is a surprisingly important question. I’ll address it by starting with the three things that values are not.
Values are Not:
All too often, entrepreneurs and business leaders fall into the above three traps. They fail to take advantage of the true benefits of the exploration of personal values and fall straight into the Enron trap.
So, what then are values?
At the highest level, values are the defining aspects of the way you understand the world, the way you conduct yourself, and the way you wish to operate within the world. They must, therefore, be personal before they can be brought into the realm of the business. This is why we’re dealing with them in this section. Values are those aspects of your own personality that give shape and meaning to your passion and your purpose, as well as your ethics and morals. They are the force ensuring that passion and purpose take shape to your benefit, rather than running out of control.
Values are:
How do your values relate to your business?
I mentioned in the introduction that “business success, as with life success, has a lot to do with managing emotions successfully”.
Some people make us uncomfortable, ‘rub us the wrong way’ or, on a more positive note, give us ‘good feelings’ (we ‘click’). These feelings are often a sign that our values are in conflict, or that that we have shared values.
Knowing your personal values will not only help to guide you in identifying job roles, projects and work that is fulfilling, but also to a better understanding of the type of business partners, clients and suppliers with whom you can work well, as a result of having aligned core values. This will go a long way towards helping you to ‘successfully manage your emotions’.
Your personal core values are the foundation and the platform from which the culture of your business is instituted. The phrase ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’, which has been attributed to business management guru, Peter Drucker, and is acknowledged by business leaders around the world, further supports this. In short, this means that without the right culture as determined by your values, the chances of your achieving your business strategy and goals are significantly reduced. This is because your values determine the culture that governs how you do business, your work and leadership ethic, and therefore how you will interact and work with your business partners, staff, customers, suppliers as well as your community at large.
Many great things have been said about the new rising stars of the tech and digital business world that have risen to fame and fortune in record time. These include Netflix, HubSpot and Zappos. And one thing that is key among these businesses is their respect for, and reliance on, their values and how these values have helped them to define a coherent, supportive and high-performance culture in their businesses.
It all starts with you. What is important to note in this section is that, whether written down or not, obvious or not yet clear, the values of a group of people within a business will emerge and become apparent. It is therefore vital that you are proactive in determining what your personal values are and how you can infuse them in your business.
As a start, use the list of 100 values below to circle 25 values that resonate with you. Then narrow them to 10 and then a final 5 if you can. This will help you to identify your personal values which can then be made part of your business values and culture.
