Core Values are the rules and boundaries that define your company’s culture and personality.
It provides a critiera for everyone’s behaviours and decisions in the organization. Top managers must lead by example, ensuring their behaviours and decisions align with the core values. Your company is a living, breathing organism with a distinct personality. It expresses that personality through its core values. After years of being in business, especially if your business is successful, it’s common for business owners and top managers to ignore or even forget their core values. It may not impact the bottom line in the short term, but it will increase the chances of a business spiralling out of control in the future.
Preserve The Core And Stimulate Progress
A business’s success is rooted in the preservation of its core values and purpose while strategies and operating practices adapt to a changing world. This winning combination of “preserve the core and stimulate progress” will assure that the people in your organization have clarity on approaching decisions while adapting to inevitable market changes. Together, you’ll need to decide on the values your organization upholds as part of its collaboration. These values will help form the foundation for a successful team, making it easier to reach milestones while reducing confusion about the team’s objectives.
Ask yourself this question:
- What are the values the team lives by?
- Do all team members recognize these values?
Core Values As A Guide For Decision Making
When the core values fully permeate your organization, the leadership team can avoid being sucked into many day-to-day operational issues. The rule becomes, “If you think you need to ask permission for something, consult the Core Values!” This gives management the confidence to delegate important tasks, knowing that the employee will do the right things when faced with tough decisions or an ethical dilemma.
Core Values To Preserve & Change
Values That Are Congruent With The Company’s Vision
Instill values that parallel your company’s vision and ideology. Making sure there’s congruency with your company’s core values and vision will solidify clarity on why your company exists and what it stands for.
Values That Withstand Through The Generations
Scale your organization that can endure through multiple generations of leaders and continues to adapt in the marketplace through innovation; avoid building around a single great leader or a single great idea.
Values That Are Compatible With One Another
Align your core values that can embrace both extremes on a number of dimensions. Instead of choosing A OR B, figure out how to have A AND B – purpose AND profit, continuity AND change, freedom AND responsibility.
Values That Stimulate Progress While Preserving Its Core
Craft your values that welcome continual change, improvement, and innovation while preserving the essence of what your core values stand for. As you scale your business you will need to adapt to new systems and innovations that will continually give you the edge from your competitors, but despite these changes, the core of your values should be timeless.
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