“Our Values: customer focus, responsibility, innovation, performance, teamwork.”

What do you think when you read something like that?

“That’s an important list of drivers that gives me an insight into how they run their business” or, “Yadda, yadda”?

Lists like these might (just) look good from a distance — “oh, they say something about values” — but get close and you realise there’s nothing there.

Painting by Numbers?

It’s the painting-by-numbers of leadership. (And would you put one of those on your wall?)

Values are the guiding principles of how you make trade-offs, and they shout loud the kind of business you are. Tell me you have an unconvincing list of empty concepts at the heart of your business, and I’m likely to believe you.

But what about this from a firm of retail consultants?

“Obsessive. We are obsessed with fashion and shopping. We live it, love it, and just ‘get it’. An obsessive passion which means we’re like a ‘dog with a bone’ to get the best job done.”

‘Obsessive’ means something to this company and any recruit or customer who reads that little story would have at least some idea of what they’re dealing with. Convinced by the story or not, this is a different kind of company to our friends with ‘customer focus’.

The Truth

Every business has values, whether they’re written down and posted to an About Us page or not. If you decide to disclose yours, don’t be tempted by blandery, don’t settle for a wish list of concepts that you’d like to be true, and don’t waste your time with the dictionary.

Values are the truth about who you are as a company and if you want your staff to live them and your customers to trust them, if you want them to make any difference at all, show what they mean by giving some context.

Search for stories that describe who you are on your best days. What is absolutely true about your company, and absolutely you? Write it down. And publish that.

Neatly filed under Purpose
Tags: beliefs, honesty, Purpose, values

A while back I talked about using icons to teach what you stand for. How about just saying it out loud to everyone who’ll listen?

Say it Loud, Say it Proud

That’s what sandwich makers Pret a Manger do. In the very small seating area of their Piccadilly store where I took this picture the other day, every wall had at least one board like these, each telling the story of Pret’s passion for food. You probably can’t read the words under the pictures so here’s the text from the top left board:

Pot Pourri — Made from delicate muslin material, our tea bags are fashioned into little purse-like pyramids, filled with organic whole leaves, hand picked in the Tea Gardens of Sri Lanka.

Ask a Pret team member to show you one — we think the Calming Camomile is particularly beautiful. A lucky coincidence really — what they’re designed to do (and do extremely well) is make a cracking cup of tea.

And it’s labelled Passion Fact No.72. The other two boards in the picture are about in-store baking and looking after basil leaves. I saw more, and I know they’ve been at it for years.

The message? Pret stands for quality, freshness, and care.

Commitment + Transparency = Accountability

Here’s the question … are all those little pictures aimed at the consumer, the staff or the management?

Visible commitments like these play well with customers who like to know what they’re getting, but transparency is even more powerful for the staff and management. With such a public commitment to quality, can anyone inside the company — whether a sandwich maker, food buyer or senior executive — be in any doubt about what’s expected of them every day? About choosing quality over price? About decisions over storage, or packaging, or recruitment or any other operational detail?

This isn’t about top down management. It’s about accountability.

Public declarations make everyone responsible, not only for living up to the commitment itself but to call out inappropriate behaviours too. Seeing this on the wall, what team member wouldn’t argue against reducing quality to save a penny a tea bag?

We don’t all deal in freshness or food, but we can all make our intentions clear, and ask everyone around to help us live up to them.

What boards would you hang on the wall? What else can you do to make your commitments transparent and to hold each other accountable for living up to them?

Neatly filed under Foundations,Making Promises
Tags: motivation, Pret, values

Every manager has to deal with uncomfortable situations from time to time.

From giving constructive feedback to letting people go, difficult conversations are part of life.

If you’re not sitting down with a troublesome member of your team, and dealing with the stuff that’s so troubling, then you’re not managing — you’re ignoring/avoiding/ evading/bailing/hiding/running-away-from and not living up to your responsibilities.

Some of the most difficult conversations involve key players who aren’t living up to their responsibilities or your expectations; worse still if the problem is a fellow founder.

• Deal with problems early — don’t wait for a mythical right time. Give feedback (good and bad) as near to the source as possible. Immediate and direct is better than delayed and fudged.
• Use direct language — “you’re not pulling your weight” isn’t very helpful; “I’m really frustrated that each new feature takes much longer than your original estimate,” is.
• Write it down — the more difficult the conversation or the more likely you are to chew over your words, the better it is to use notes. I make sure I can stay on track by looking at my crib sheet and saying “Let me make sure we’ve dealt with everything. Oh yes, …”

No amount of experience or preparation ever makes these situations easy, but leadership means entering the discomfort and dealing with the issue.

One final point — don’t tell them how difficult it is to say this stuff. You may think it helps to get them on your side. It doesn’t. If it’s hard for you to say, it’s even harder to hear – so stop thinking about yourself and try to empathise; this conversation is not about you.

Neatly filed under Leading,Managing
Tags: meetings, responsibility, values

What are you doing? Lots of stuff, right?

It’s easy to be seduced by action – doing all the whats of what we’re doing.

Image copyright: annnna

It feels good to be busy. It feels good to do stuff without thinking. To feel wanted. To roll along. To do.

So nice in fact that sometimes we get into things just because we can, or always have, or someone says please.

For one day only, see what happens if you ask yourself and your team, why?

1. It brings the what into focus
2. It defines success
3. We’re likely to be more motivated when we know why it matters
4. It releases creativity – for alternatives whats that get to the why better
5. It creates options and helps prioritise
6. A clear common cause aligns resources
7. Decisions are faster and firmer
8. It can save a lot of work – particularly if there is no why and you can stop, or not start

No getting away with “because I have to” or “you told me to” — to get the benefit you have to go deeper than that. Visit the why-stuff-happened world of root cause analysis to work out why stuff should happen.

The 5 Whys Method.

Legend has it that Sakichi Toyada, founder of Toyota Motor Corporation, invented and systematised the 5 whys method for engineers looking for the seat of a given problem, although anyone who’s been a kid knows that asking a bunch of whys is the way we’ve always learned. You can use his method to determine the future, not just analyse the past. Just ask why (about) five times.

I’m about to drive to Cambridge to attend a conference (the possible action)

• Why? – I need to connect with some people in our market (first why)
• Why? – To find some potential pilot sites for our next product (second why)
• Why? – We like to do live testing before we do any marketing (third why)
• Why? – We’re obsessed with quality (fourth why)
• Why? – The golden rule; treat others as you’d like to be treated. We don’t want to sell anything that hasn’t proved its worth in the real world and we know is up to the job (fifth why, root cause)

So going to Cambridge is the tactic that will fulfil some personal goals and further the strategy and values of the company. If the answer to number 2 was, “I always go, they expect me there”, I’d save myself an awfully long drive.

Whenever you need to commit resources, better know why.

Neatly filed under Leading,Managing
Tags: planning, resources, values

This week I got involved in a conversation that had lawyers sitting on the other side of the table. Thankfully not the kind of discussion that happens when things go bad, but the other kind, when things haven’t quite started yet.

This happens a lot in organisational life. Employment contracts, licensing agreements, partnerships, outsourcing, non-disclosures, service level agreements. Internally and externally, we rely on bits of paper to nail the detail. These things are so common that it’s easy to believe that this is the way to do business. That this is how to deal with difficult possibilities. That this will make everything ok. But it won’t.

Lawyering like this is good, but it will only reduce some of the wriggle room for some of the arguments that normally come up. Not eliminate disagreements altogether. Not stop problems happening. Just squeeze some of the juice out of the lemon – it’s still going to hurt, but not as much.

If it’s going to hurt, why do it? Why employ, agree, partner, outsource or do anything else that puts us in the hands of others? The promise of working together is that the business of the organisation will be better than before. An organisation’s success will increasingly be determined by its ability to work across formal boundaries – whether than means inter-department or inter-company.

• Go in with eyes wide open. By all means clock up some billable time with lawyers but don’t kid yourself that this means plain sailing from start to finish. There will be problems. Expect them to happen, however good your relationship and however willingly the parties sign at the start.
• Work through the bad times. When things start going wrong, put your collective heads down and work it out. Nobody wins when you walk away or run to litigation. Remind yourselves the reason you got together – to both be better than before – and find the path through the mountains.

When choosing which person or organisation to share ink with, work out who you’re dealing with (which is more about values than names or capabilities), and ask yourself “can I work with them when things go wrong?”

Ultimately, never allow the desire for a deal to cloud the needs of the business.

Neatly filed under Leading,Managing
Tags: partners, values