You’ve no doubt heard the old saying, “If you don’t stand up for something, you fall in love with anything.” So how do you make sure you represent something with value, how do you promote values in business?
Having an ethic and belief system that can be turned into action in your personal life can give your life meaning. This is the same in business. If you visit virtually any website or tour most corporate offices, you’ll see the company’s values posted on the wall in the form of a mission statement.
The mission statement does not provide the details of how a company’s products are made or define how services will be provided. However, when a company publicly declares its commitment to “quality”, “customer service”, “honesty” and “preservation of the environment”, the implications are that the company will conduct its business in a way that promotes those goals, and that your employees will move forward. It implies that you will conduct business with integrity and will, for example, unknowingly put sawdust in meat, turn off spontaneously accelerating cars, or rudely ignore customer complaints.
If you, as a leader, want your business to reflect your values, you need to dig much deeper than the typical mission statement fare. As a boomer planning a second career, you’ve been in business for many years and no doubt have plenty of ideas about how to translate your values into concrete typefaces. Part of his career was in the trenches before he became a manager, so he knows it can be difficult to get employees to buy into company values and modify their behavior to align with your values.
When you analyze why this is so, many of these answers come from your own experience:
* Employees do not always see the boss as a leader who supports everything they want to follow.
* Employees can see a big difference between the words on the wall and the way the company operates, as well as the way it treats them.
* Long-term employees may have seen various attempts to increase employee participation in company quality programs and other efforts to increase worker ownership of company values.
As you build your own business, you want to create a workplace with less disconnection. If your hope is that your business will rely less on you for day-to-day operations, you need to feel confident that those who make sure things happen are doing it efficiently, and the way you would. You also want employees to do quality work without micromanagement.
Volumes have been written on how to make it all fit together, but again, your own experience offers the basic guidelines. Many employee attitudes develop as a result of the environment in the company, which often results from how people are treated. Are they treated as valued employees of the company or as robots expected to do what they are told? Are they treated with respect? Are they fairly paid and given reasonable benefits? In your own career, when did you perform best?
You may have attended many management seminars that say that money stops being a motivator at a certain point. In our society, compensation says a lot about how much you value your staff. Money can’t do everything, but remember that reasonable compensation allows people to feel a certain level of comfort that translates into a better job. If you run a nonprofit organization, where salaries are low and much of the work is done by volunteers, you may not have the money to offer, but you need to create an atmosphere where people feel they are appreciated and respected. . contribute towards the larger vision.
By recognizing the value of your workers, you can do much more to promote your own values than by issuing a million management memos or harsh ultimatums. When your employees feel that you have their best interests in mind and value and recognize their contributions, they begin to see you as a leader worth following. They also begin to promote the values of their business.