If You Want to Be a Good Leader, Understand The Link Between Business Values and Leadership3/20/2023 Let's look at two different lessons about leadership and corporate values: In 1982, Johnson and Johnson (J&J) discovered that someone had contaminated their Tylenol Extra Strength capsules in at least half a dozen Chicago pharmacies and grocery stores. Because of their corporate values committed to public safety, J&J leadership responded immediately: warned customers to stop consuming it, halted advertising and removed all Tylenol from store shelves until they could determine the extent of the tampering. In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig platform exploded, and its owner, British Petroleum (BP), realized it had a leak. Company officials first reported the leak volume was low, but when the rig sunk days later and eleven workers died, investigations into BP's practices found they took shortcuts, cut corners and ignored early warning signs. Its leadership was dishonest from the get-go, and to recover, the company had to revisit and update its corporate values. Business values are the guiding principles that shape an organization's culture and inform its decisions and actions. Good leadership, in turn, is essential for aligning an organization's actions with its values and creating a positive and productive culture. Clear values need good leadership Since the 1994 book "Built to Last" identified adherence to core values as a best practice of top companies, most leaders have looked to establish organizational values to ensure their success. But it takes more than words to create an influential company culture built around values. According to Patrick Lencioni for the Harvard Business Review, hollow or dishonest value statements "create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility." A company's values can be critical to its success, but only with good leadership to model and embody them. For an organization to be effective, leaders should be personally aligned with the company values and be their biggest cheerleaders. Values are a foundation for the organization to build and provide guiding principles for more strategic decision-making. When leaders make ethical decisions and take actions aligned with organizational values, it builds trust and credibility. Good leaders act as role models, living out the company's values in their everyday work, so their team members can understand how to embrace them in theirs. Develop company values While someone can still be a good leader without explicitly setting and communicating values, it makes the task much more difficult. Values provide a framework for guiding decisions and actions, and good leaders help spread that clear direction and sense of purpose through their teams. Values also help leaders more effectively guide and motivate team members through challenges, building trust and alignment within the organization. If you haven't already established a set of organizational values, here are five approaches to get you started:
Values should stand the test of time and, ideally, shouldn't change, but you may find better or more appropriate values along the way. Clearly communicate the reasons for the change to team members, stakeholders, and other relevant parties, and engage and involve them in the change process to build understanding and buy-in. Solicit feedback and ideas from team members or consult with external experts to develop a detailed plan. Elaborate on the steps and resources needed to achieve specific goals and mechanisms to support team members navigating the change to ensure its smooth and effective implementation. Then, monitor and review the plan's progress, course correcting as needed to ensure the change is successful. Get your team aligned Values inform a company's culture, fostering a sense of shared purpose and creating a supportive and inclusive environment, but only when employees are sufficiently educated and enthusiastic about them. Leaders need to communicate their organizational values clearly to everyone — employees, customers, vendors, and other stakeholders — at every interaction. To create a positive and productive culture aligned around values, good leaders repeat and reinforce them among their teams, integrating them into every company process. As Lencioni put it, from their first interview to their last day of work, employees should have constant reminders of the company values – in hiring, performance management, promotions, rewards, dismissal policies, and more. Encourage open communication and a culture of transparency by creating inclusive opportunities for team members to share their ideas and embrace business values in practice. Provide support and resources — training and development opportunities, guidelines, or toolkits — that can help team members incorporate values into their everyday work. Motivate others by recognizing and rewarding team members whose behavior aligns with company values, either through simple recognition or praise or more tangible rewards like bonuses or promotions based on the degree of performance or contribution to the company. Employees today want to contribute more and feel a sense of personal purpose and impact where they work, and alignment around company values helps them build this connection with the organization. With values providing organizational alignment and leaders embodying and modeling them, team members better understand how to use them to guide and shape their own decisions and actions. Values allow them to connect the work they do to the company's larger goals, making them feel more capable of having a positive and meaningful impact, and less likely to leave the organization. Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/ Image Credit: Getty Images
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As an entrepreneur and success coach to multimillion-dollar companies and rising stars in business, I am the first to admit that I could not possibly do what I do without my fantastic team. I know the amount of effort it takes to find and train employees and to inspire them to work together like a well-oiled machine, and it's no easy task. In my career, I have seen how some companies can unlock the potential of each employee over and over again. They attract, engage and retain top talent who are enthusiastic and highly functional in their jobs. In turn, these employees boost productivity, engagement and profitability. When you've seen that magic at work, it's incredible. When you're experiencing the opposite, figuring out how to fix it is overwhelming. No matter how big or small your business, everything about it comes down to the satisfaction and happiness of the people who are working in it and on it. Happy employees equal happy clients and customers, which equals happy owners and stockholders. Employee hiring, retention and productivity are some of the top issues companies face today, and solving these problems can be one of the biggest challenges for companies of every size. My clients always ask me: How can I ensure that our employees: 1) enjoy their jobs enough to stay with the company and 2) care enough to work at their highest and best levels? I learned a lot about what I know about building strong teams from Bryan Howard of Mercury Performance Group, and I use his principles with my own clients. After decades of working with some of the biggest names in business, including Chase, Wells Fargo, TIAA and more, he knows it's possible to build a company culture that rewards employees, provides a purpose for people, and cares about its employees and their families. I recently talked with Howard about his experiences fixing internal workforce issues for companies with more than 500 employees. He claimed the secret was found in harnessing the power of people. When looking at a company that needs help with employee productivity, you look at the Inchworm Effect or Pareto Principle. Study the 20% of employees on the right side of the bell curve — the top performers — and teach their approach to success to the average and lower performers on the left side. And as those workers are upping their game, the top performers keep innovating and improving, and again their innovations are passed along. Momentum is created, the bell curve gets ever steeper, and the entire team functions at a higher level. Howard shared his program for improving companies, which always starts with people:
Along with this, eight key areas must be looked at: employee performance and productivity, employee retention, employee engagement, customer engagement, the brand's reputation, interpersonal communication and conflict and regulatory compliance. Howard calls this the M-Factor. If you're always looking to build and maintain a strong and empowered team, Howard's main advice is to engage the employees in how to do that. "The trainings happen with them, not to them," Howard reminded me. "This empowered the employees to create a great organization." Applying universal principles and decades of experience can lead to easy-to-implement, measurable results that change customer engagement dramatically. It's possible to help your company thrive through your employees and improve profitability while boosting motivation and personal satisfaction. Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/ Image Credit: Shutterstock
From seeing a decrease in customer engagement to overall brand confusion, here are nine small business leaders share their best advice to the question, “What is the clearest sign that it's time to rebrand your business." Reasons why you should rebrand your business 1. Your brand is not aligned with your values "One sign that it's time to rebrand your business is if your current brand doesn't align with your core values. This can be the case if you've grown and developed as a business but haven't updated your branding to reflect the changes. "If your current branding doesn't reflect who you are as a company, it's difficult to attract new customers and clients. We recently rebranded our company after realizing that our old branding didn't reflect our core values. We wanted to be sure that our branding reflected the type of company we are, so we could attract the type of clients we wanted to work with. By rebranding, we could communicate our values and attract the clients we wanted to work with." —Matthew Ramirez, Rephrasely 2. Seeing a decrease in both engagement and sales "If you are seeing a decrease in customer engagement and sales, it is likely time to rebrand your business. If customers are not buying, it means that your current branding is not resonating with them. Rebranding can help you better target your desired customer audience, better communicate your message and values, and ultimately increase customer engagement and sales." —Lilian Chen, Bar None Games 3. You are launching a new product or service "Rebranding can be a good idea when you are launching a new product or service that doesn't fit with your current branding. This can help to ensure that your new offering is positioned correctly in the market and that it resonates with your target audience. "For example, if customers primarily know your business for selling a specific product, but you are now launching a new service that is unrelated to your existing product line, it might make sense to rebrand to better align with your new offering. This could involve updating your logo, changing your brand messaging, and revising your marketing materials to better reflect the nature of your new service. Rebranding in this situation can help to clarify to customers and stakeholders that your business is expanding and growing, and can also help to prevent confusion about your offerings." —Mike Stuzzi, MikeStuzzi.com 4. Customer confusion "If your business's brand is inconsistent, it's time for a makeover. In order to succeed as a business, it's important for companies to have a strong through line connecting all elements of their branding. "Customers should be able to tell what you sell, your price point, and the quality they can expect just from your branding. If you're finding that your business is stagnating or inconsistent, take a hard look at how you're marketing the company. If customers don't have a coherent understanding of your brand, it's time to make some changes." —Brian Munce, Gestalt Brand Lab 5. Expansion into unfamiliar markets "When your business expands into new product lines, consumers, or geographical markets, it can cause a major shift in your core. When values or operations no longer align with your brand, it's time to rethink and relaunch. Since you may be reaching new consumers unfamiliar with your brand, you can start fresh and rebrand with a blank slate. It's much easier to build a brand image than erase a customer's impressions of your brand and build it up again." —Maximilian Wühr, Finn 6. Visual elements not portraying your message "When I first started my online business, I noticed something was missing. My logo didn't reflect the values that I was trying to represent in my brand. It felt dull and uninspired, making it difficult to connect with potential customers emotionally. I knew it was time to rebrand my business. Seeing how my logo wasn't portraying authentic messages, I realized it was crucial to reevaluate how I wanted customers to feel when interacting with my brand. "That experience taught me that any disconnect between your message and brand story and your existing visuals and design elements means it's time for a change. With a complete rebranding, I could ensure that everything from the colors in my logo to the words we used in social media aligned with my goals." —Mina Elias, Trivium 7. Allowing your ego and surname to get in the way "I'm a small business owner, and I let my surname be the front-runner of my company. My name is Irwin, so naturally I named my business 'IrwinOrganic.' While this was great for a while, after some time, it became increasingly difficult for customers to understand what services we provided. After all, our specialty wasn't actually anything organic! "As an SEO specialist, I understood rebranding was necessary in order for us to better communicate our services. Customers have had an easier time understanding our offerings, and this has resulted in increased revenue because of greater customer satisfaction with their experience working with us." — Jamie Irwin, Straight Up Search 8. Having trouble raising prices "One of the many certainties in business is that your costs to operate it will eventually go up. But if you are struggling to raise the prices for your products, it is a good sign that it is time to rebrand. "Much of the price points that are placed on a business's offerings are based on the public's perceived value of those products and what they believe is fair value. You can justify price increases by creating a greater sense of value in your business's products through a rebranding that emphasizes quality, showcases efficiency in solving pain points, and fills the gaps missed by competitors. Therefore, if you are having difficulty raising prices without losing customers, you should view this as a red flag and a telltale sign it is time to rebrand." —Alexandre Bocquet, Betterly 9. Current branding is not unique "If you're finding it hard to differentiate your business from your competition, it's time to rebrand. Your company name and branding shouldn't follow the status quo because customers will struggle to remember who you are and why they should choose you over similar brands. Instead, your branding should showcase what makes you different and better; i.e., your competitive advantage." —Tory Gray, The Gray Dot Company Source: https://www.allbusiness.com/ Image Credit: Depositphotos
If you are an early-stage startup founder, it’s fairly likely that you’d have to reach your first customers without a real marketing budget. This makes online communities related to your offering an obvious choice for your marketing efforts. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be the only startup in the world that’s trying to growth-hack its way to success by plugging its offering and content in relevant Facebook groups or subreddits. This has led to online communities developing a very strong immune response to self-promotion. In most groups, explicit self-promotion is forbidden, and the moderators would be happy to remove your posts or even ban you to protect the community from being flooded with promotional content and outright spam. Moreover, even if you get past the first line of defense, explicitly promotional content will likely get pushed away by the members of the community - people are not going to interact, or they are going to use negative interaction mechanisms whenever possible (report, downvote, etc.), which would result in fewer people seeing your proposition. The uncomfortable truth is that there is no easy solution to this problem. Whatever your approach, you need to provide real value to the community in order to get the desired effect - interested eyes on your offering. There are generally speaking two approaches to the problem. 1. Become A Valuable Member Of The Community The straightforward approach is to become a member of the community and to provide non-commercial value regularly. If you engage, provide information and opinions, reach out to people, and try to be useful, then it’s fairly likely that the more active people in the community would remember you. Once they do, they would be much more likely to react positively to your efforts to share your offering - you would be viewed as an insider, which makes a big difference. Of course, this is a very costly approach, and you need to carefully consider if it makes sense. Wasting your time engaging with a community for months just so that you can post about your project once is a waste. This approach makes sense only if the community is very close to your target market. If it is, engaging would bring other benefits - you’d be closer to your customers, which would help you understand them better. Moreover, you’d be up to date on the latest trends, which would help you refine not only your offering but your marketing strategy. 2. Make Self-Promotion a Second-Order Effect If becoming a member of the community is a bad idea based on a cost-benefit analysis, this means that you’d have to be creative in the way you promote yourself. Since blatant self-promotion is what triggers all of the defenses, whatever your creative approach, your general strategy would be to create publications in which getting people interested in your project is the secondary effect of your message, rather than the prime reason for your post. A typical example is sharing informational content from your blog. The topic of the content should be one that provides value to your target audience (and the communities, in which you want to post it). You can include references to your own project and professional experience in the content, but it shouldn’t be the main focus of your post. This way even if the community doesn’t allow you to post a link to your blog, but instead requires you to paste the text, readers would become aware of yourself and your offering. In conclusion, if you want to use online communities to jumpstart your startup product, don’t spam. Instead - engage in a way that creates value for the community, and think of your self-promotion as a second-order effect. Source: https://www.forbes.com/ Image Credit: Getty Images
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