The Challenge

Cultures are severely weakened when leaders tolerate toxic achievers (those who produce well but demonstrate deficient character). These team members are often talented and hardworking but are known for being selfish, divisive, dramatic, or disrespectful. Without clear and meaningful core values at the bedrock of culture, holding these folks accountable for executing within the parameters of expected behaviors rarely happens fast or often enough. To exacerbate matters, some organizations have core values, but no one even knows what they are! Other organizations have completely failed in this cultural responsibility and have never created core values at all. To master the art of execution, an organization must be staffed with people who demonstrate both competence and character. These people can produce desirable outcomes as well as exhibit desirable behaviors.

Values Are Every Leader's Responsibility

Creating core values is not an intellectual exercise; rather, it is a vital leadership responsibility that reinforces the strength of your culture. However, until the values are lived, reinforced, and brought to life in your workplace, they are relegated to little more than management talk without the walk. Following are baseline thoughts and strategies that explain why these values are important. I'm also including five core values with examples of how my company, LearnToLead, uses them as a filter for hiring, firing, and decision making.

1. Core values are nonnegotiable behaviors that broadcast what you expect from your employees as well as what you are unwilling to compromise on. These behavioral expectations are just as essential as performance expectations.
2. Core values establish an accountability benchmark that is essential to building and maintaining a high-performance culture. Along with vision, mission, and performance standards, core values are an essential component of corporate clarity.
3. Core values are validated and brought to life when the leaders live them personally, thereby making certain their behaviors embody the values rather than mock them.
4. The importance of core values is also highlighted when leaders tie both positive and unproductive behaviors into the values:

   The leader, speaking publicly at a team meeting: “John really lived our teamwork value yesterday. Sue had fallen behind on her reports, and John stayed after work to help her catch up and had a great attitude about it. No one even had to ask him to do it, and he didn't ask for anything in return. If everyone in this room consistently demonstrates this kind of behavior, we'll blow our TUFs [ultimate few objectives] out of the water this quarter.”

   The leader, speaking in private to a values violator: “Alex, the way you just spoke to that customer violates our integrity value. Frankly, if everyone spoke to customers in that manner, we wouldn't stay in business very long. Let me show you again the proper way to handle that situation. In addition I will expect you to do it that way from now on.”

5. Core values should be both memorable and few. Quality is more important than quantity. Remember, many of your values will cover a lot of other ground. For instance, if a core value is integrity, you don't also need values for meeting deadlines, keeping commitments, or being to work on time. Integrity covers all of this and much more.
6. If your core values don't influence the daily behaviors of your people, they are impotent. When values are brought to life by a leadership team that champions them and personally lives them out, employees will have more confidence making decisions and handling certain situations without checking with supervisors. This accelerates their own growth, morale, and results.
7. A core value should be further explained by demonstrating what the value looks like when it is being lived. A brief and descriptive sentence is effective in this regard. So you may see what I mean, I'm including LearnToLead's five core values and their subsequent descriptive sentences.
   1. Teamwork: The good of the team comes before the personal pride, comfort level, or agenda of any one individual.
   2. Integrity: We will always do what is right; not what is easy, cheap, popular, or convenient. And we will do so without excuse and regardless of the cost.
   3. Urgency: We will honor and serve one another and customers with urgency, because there is power in now. Later is too late!
   4. Personal growth: We will work as hard on ourselves as we do on our job, because our business will get better when we get better. Not getting better is not an option!
   5. Attention to detail: We will become brilliant in the basics and commit to doing the ordinary things extraordinarily well. We are committed to becoming faithful in the “little” things, because in pursuit of perfection, we can expect to catch excellence.

Your Corporate DNA

Core values comprise your corporate DNA; they reveal volumes about who you are, what you stand for, and what you are unwilling to settle for. Reassess your values and, if necessary, reintroduce them to the team. Admit that you haven't done a good enough job in the past of communicating the key behaviors your organization expects and celebrates and commit to do better moving forward. Consider discussing a value of the week during team meetings. Go over the definition, discuss what the value looks like in practice, point out individuals who have lived it recently, and discuss how the team can do more to bring it to life in the future.

I also recommend that you place your values and definitions in writing and review them at the appropriate time when interviewing people. Let them know up front what you are about and how you will expect them to conduct themselves. It's foolish to hire someone, spring the values on him or her later, and basically say, “Surprise! I hope you can live up to these because they are important here!”

Once your values are established credibly as one of your five pillars of culture, you will also have an easier time spotting who needs to change his or her behaviors and who may no longer fit on the team at all. In fact, one reason why leaders tend to keep the wrong people too long is because not enough clear and credible criteria make it obvious sooner that the person is a poor fit—a cultural infection of sorts that needs to go away. In the case of our company, we don't have trouble with employees coming in late to work for long. Why? They'd be violating four of our five values: teamwork, integrity, urgency, and attention to detail. Likewise, because our values are credible, there is no way I could justify keeping an employee with tardiness issues and at the same time expect the values or my own leadership to have any credibility. Thus, core values strengthen and protect our cultural foundation, influencing productive behaviors daily and steadily moving us toward TUFs' attainment.

Parting Thought

Just as all organizations have cultures (the only question being “What is it?”) all organizations have core values. They're official and powerful, existent but impotent, or undefined and unspoken but well understood (more bluntly put, “Cover your own behind and watch your own back because nobody else will”). To master the art of execution, not only must you inculcate core values into your culture, but also your people must live them out in their interactions with both colleagues and customers. If you are the leader and your values aren't what they should be, it is your own fault. The good news is that you can fix it. The guidelines given here are simple, and they offer a great place for you to start. See? It's not rocket science!