27 Jun The Right Values Drive Scale and Growth

“I have no idea what they’re doing!” the CEO confided to me as we walked through the company, passing glass-walled conference rooms busy with employee meetings. This CEO had been with the company from its smaller days. He’s a highly intelligent, hands-on leader who had directly guided nearly all the company’s decisions. And under his direction, the company grew—to a point where he was now alarmed that he was not being directly involved in everything.

As an organization grows, it’s inevitable that its leaders can no longer personally attend to everything. So they have to provide a way for their employees to make consistently correct decisions in their absence, decisions that are aligned with the strategy of the company. Some decision points are routine—the same situation and context repeats itself. Others are exceptional—the variables are new or unique or only come up rarely or may never even have been anticipated. Poor leaders fail to let go. Good leaders give their employees a way to align both the routine and exceptional decisions. The most productive leaders, however, do this in a way that automates, scales, and even multiplies their influence.

I’ve coached several CEOs in creating core values that drive their influence forward and scale their business and growth. These values must anchor around verbs, action, howwork is done, and how decisions are made. Otherwise, using the typical business nouns (e.g., “innovation,” “respect,” “customer satisfaction,” blah, blah, blah, …), they sit sterile and dormant. Here’s an example of a powerful set of core values I created at one company:

• In every decision, we PRIORITIZE DELIVERING LONG-TERM CUSTOMER VALUE over gaining short-term business advantage.
• We RESPECT PEOPLE—employees, suppliers, and partners—by continuously improving the meaningfulness of their work and the conditions under which they carry it out, by enabling them to directly contribute to improvements, and by challenging them and holding them accountable.
• We LEARN AND IMPROVE CONTINUOUSLY by being curious not judgmental, by relentlessly questioning the status quo, and by consistently investing the time and resources to lock in gains.

Employees of this company rallied around and relied on these core values to guide all their actions and decisions—both routine and exceptional—as in just six months they quadrupled their revenues and their number of employees. And I was able to smile through it all as I saw hundreds of new employees working and making the right decisions without me!