In business and in life, actions speak louder than words. This is especially true at the start of the culture-building process. Our first crack at this did not go as well as I had hoped. But I took my wife’s advice and chose to take the next step in the journey. If you missed my previous post, you can read it here.
After the feeling of defeat at my first all-company meeting, I went to work the next day and honestly felt that my desire to be a company that created emotions and memories and glimmering crystal awards was just a load of smoke. To be totally transparent, I was tapped out. Keeping up with each day and the new building completely depleted my energy reserve.
The rolling eyeballs at the meeting yesterday had shown me, without any question, that my employees did not know what to make of this stuff. At this point in time, these were just words without any real meaning to them.
I had gathered a group of employees together to help me with the work that Smartie-Pants had for us. I chose the group on purpose so that we could implement all this new stuff together. This was a perfect time for the group to get to work on this while I stepped back. After all, I wanted to see what the group would do. How would they implement our core purpose and values into their respective departments? I was interested to see what would happen and personally relieved to take a break from driving forward.
Our company values should be the basis for making decisions according to Smartie-Pants. We should consciously use the values as we make decisions to show employees that we are taking this initiative seriously. Our meetings with Smartie-Pants were on hold for the next few weeks so we could implement what we’d learned.
My purchasing manager, Mike, taped a copy of our values onto the clipboard he carried with him. This surprised me, but it shouldn’t have. Mike was meeting with his staff about identifying rejects before they hit production when I walked through our warehouse. He was pointing to the values sheet and explained how this was a way to live out our Quality Value.
A couple days later, I overheard him talking again about the Respect Value. He had noticed that one of our production staff had treated their teammate very kindly in a tense situation and wanted to comment that this supported our Respect Value.
Mike was taking all this seriously. He was talking and walking this new culture. Apparently, this was not a load of smoke to Mike. He thought this is doable and believed in it.
I decided to watch and see what would happen.
In my next post, I’ll discuss what happened when I combined our Core Purpose with another concept Smartie-Pants was introducing. See how that unfolds next!
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