As we started down this path detailing how strong businesses are built on a foundation of values, I shared something I personally experienced while creating a policy manual for the new owners of company - a textbook example of not just designed that handbook around their core values but building tho...

Building a culture around values requires the leader to provide a daily example of exactly how each definition outlined in the handbook and on the wall directly applies to what’s required of them. Providing a detailed explanation, connecting those definitions to their behaviors so nothing is left to...

In the fourth lesson of our Emerging Leader Development course, Cindy and I detail five critical practices for effective communication. In that process, we emphasize just how important it is that we keep our message simple and we share it over and over and over again with absolute consistency. Cindy...

While the foundation for the residential construction projects I was involved with in my teens was on a much smaller scale than the skyscrapers I alluded to earlier, they were no less important to the long term stability of the home. The same holds true for the core values in a business of any size....

As we wrapped up our look at who ultimately cares about our values, and how much our organization’s entire reputation rests on them, I emphasized the importance of modeling our values and explaining why - because we can’t just assume the general public will piece it all together on their own; they’r...

Make no mistake, there’s a huge difference between touting how amazing we are and in explaining how or why our actions tie back to our values. We’ve all been around folks who have a title that carries some level of authority, and seen them pound their chest about how important they are or why everyo...

Even when we’ve done everything in our power to model the core values our business is built on, we can’t just assume that everyone who cares about those values will automatically connect our behaviors to the reputation we’re working to establish (or maintain). It’s up to us to explain why we’ve chos...

I’ll ask you once more: Who ultimately cares about your values? Our immediate team members most certainly do. And so do the clients we serve directly as well as the community we’re a part of. But everyone else who hears about us will too, and all of that will impact the results we achieve in one way...

An article called “Workplace culture and its impact on corporate reputation” from a UK-based group Igniyte, an organization dedicated to managing corporate reputations, opened with this:

A company’s reputation is all about how other people view the brand. Their perception derives from several fac...

As heavy as the weight can often be in any leadership role, we can’t lose sight of exactly who, ultimately, cares about the core values of our organization: Everyone! How we’re known, up close and from a distance, all boils down to whether or not we’ve been willing to build those values into the fou...

We’ve looked at how things can go really wrong without strong organizational values in place and how easy it can be to fall short of providing a picture of those values for everyone on our teams. We’ve also dug into how, even with specific values listed in various places throughout our office, we ca...

If we want to have any chance of removing the ambiguity that too frequently surrounds the values listed on our conference room walls and detailed through the first few pages of our employee handbooks we’d better be sharing specific examples of what those core values look like in the workplace. To en...