Every organization has a soul, which is made up of each employee’s character, the behavioral guidelines developed by leadership, and the integration of these two. Hopefully, we hire employees with these character traits in order that they quickly internalize the company mission and mores, and are easily integrated with fellow employees. The reason for putting the Guiding Principles in writing is to assure alignment of everyone in the organization.
Later in the process of developing your company task lists, objectives, and initiatives, the list of Guiding Principles serves as one of the company performance benchmarks. Shortcomings in behavior compared to principals likely will foster a new initiative for correction.
A process for developing your Guiding Principles might include:
- Gather input from employees, managers, and stakeholders; useing brainstorming
- Rank all statements of principle ─ high, medium, low ─ based on importance to your success and cultural goals
- Select fewer than twenty items and publish them
- Hold discussions among all employees to sharpen everyone’s understanding
Here’s a Starter List of 41 Core Values.
Add to it, take things away, rank your values, and communicate to everyone, including your customers and suppliers.
- Be carbon neutral and be an environment steward
- Be entrepreneurial; build the business
- Answer phones and greet visitors cordially - like guests in your home
- Be honest, open and act with integrity
- Be strategic: steer and invest in actions that optimize use and creation of resources
- Be willing to do any job, regardless of what it takes to accomplish the vision
- Believe the whole is greater than the sum of the parts – collaborate, cooperate, share, support
- Budgeting review focuses equally on excess and shortfall
- Communicate--provide relevant information and take time to engage stakeholders; ensure all stakeholders become aware of changes and progress
- Compare ourselves to best in class standards; seek excellence in hiring, training, organizing and developing human resources
- Continuously improve in every aspect of the business
- Create a culture of engagement: recognize the impact each individual makes; listen to and share ideas at all levels
- Customers ─ focus on customer
- Decide once; repeat successful action until conditions change
- Do not repeat failure
- Employee families come first ─ when there are issues at home, they are a priority
- Emulate, duplicate, replicate success
- Fix things ─ no one cares for excuses
- Focus on funding output not input, and measure everything
- Improve the work environment
- Innovate — set guidelines, allow experimentation, manage risk and allow new processes and technology to develop new levels of performance
- Issues and disagreements are resolved and forgotten; there is no room for anything but candor
- Keep your promise
- Lead by behavioral example
- Lead or follow, but don’t get in the way
- Leaders serve subordinates and go to bat for them
- Leaders set goals and boundaries, and encourage subordinates to achieve mutual objectives
- Leaders teach others what they know.
- Listen; never punish the messenger
- Mom Rule – if your mom could easily understand and agree with your action, it’s likely to be appropriate
- No one is mistreated or disrespected
- Our own families first, our customers and community next, fellow employees next, suppliers next, when a hierarchy is needed for deciding
- Prevent and avoid rather than cure; act when things show up, not after they blow up
- Recognition and rewards reinforce and make appropriate behavior visible
- Seek consensus; do not settle for a majority rule
- Acknowledge and learn from mistakes
- Set, communicate, and enforce rules of behavior
- Thrive on innovation and beating competitors to the next level of service
- Treat suppliers like partners
- Understand and adapt to the external environment
- When everyone shares in the vision, this will be a great place to work
