Small/Medium Business

As a leader in your business, if you only care about what you do and not who you are, then you are missing the big picture. The clearest way to care about who you are is by knowing your mission, vision, and values. Anyone can get “lost in the sauce” of the tasks at hand because urgent distractions always seem to show up. But if the tasks are not connected to your values, then your mission and vision lose their significance. You accomplish goals best when your goals are attached to your values. Otherwise, you and your staff may feel productive only in the specific job requirements, because there is no connection between what they do and WHY they do it. So, I propose the idea that your mission, vision, and values ought to be the foundation for why your team does what they do.

Too often, it’s believed that values are merely an academic or branding exercise. They’re buzzwords that sound like a good fit, yet they probably live in a frame on a wall in the office. I’m not satisfied with that, and you should not be either! My approach inspires every employee to know, understand, and apply the values, by highlighting the need for individual engagement of the values. Over time, this personal alignment to the company values produces a collective ownership mentality. Can you imagine everyone in your organization not only knowing what’s required of them, but understanding how every task on their plate is connected back to the mission and vision? If you can, that’s the power of value alignment.

I have witnessed teams and departments build their own goals and KPIs (based on their own definitions and metrics) completely devoid of the company values. Therefore, they unintentionally seek short-term gain at the potential loss of long-term alignment. On the contrary, value alignment provides the surest foundation for growth, because “value success” is not limited to specific departments, or by accomplishing specific financial goals. Rather, every employee on payroll is engaged because everyone can contribute to values-based goals (provided the company has clear values pointing to their mission and vision). If tasks are connected to values, the company moves forward, no matter the demographic, experience, or size. Said another way, this is how companies not only “go together” but actually “grow together.”