Zlatan Ibrahimović left Inter Milan to join Barcelona football club in 2009 for a then record fee in the region of €90mn. His manager handed him the keys to the company Audi and told him that he needed to exhibit these three behaviours to fit in:
Humility
Hard Work
Team first
Everything was fine for the first 8 months until Zlatan was dropped from the first team. When he turned up to the next training session in his Lamborgini Gallardo, that was strike 1: Humility. When he broke his wrist that Christmas in a skidoo accident while on vacation in Sweden with his family, that was Strike 2. This was because he was unable to play for at least 6 weeks, thereby violating the Hard Work behaviour. When he was asked to make space in the centre of the field to allow another player to develop but refused to cooperate, that was Strike 3 – putting the Team First.
The board of Barcelona football club decided that in the best interests of the club, Zlatan should move on. The substantial contractual loss on Zlatan was considered money well spent in terms of reinforcing what mattered at the club.
Nobody should consider a football club with multi-millionaire employees who have very short term career prospects to be a good reference example for a small or medium sized business, but it illustrates why values are important.
There are three phases to rolling out meaningful values in your business.
The first phase involves generating the values from within the top leadership of the business. Its takes effort, intelligence and integrity to come up with values that are meaningful. They need to be truly grounded in the discussions, debates and battles that have been fought and won which collectively result in the business attaining its current position and based upon which the owners wish to see the business develop. Like that oft quoted 1964 U.S. supreme court ruling on obscenity – “You’ll know it when you see it”. The Alternative Board (TAB) have a sophisticated approach to trawling through the possible alternatives embedded in the Business Builder Blueprint portal which really does take a lot of the work out of it. The key is to come up with something you can easily remembered – generally not more than three items.
The second phase is the planting phase. This involves cascading the conversations that took place generating the values in the first place through the owners, managers, supervisors and all staff in the business. It is helpful to stick the values on notice boards and prominent places (mouse mats) in the business. Do not use the values with customers until you have observed phase three to have taken place.
Phase three is the critical phase, the phase over which you have no direct control but the phase which is essential to get an RoI from the exercise. Values are like seeds, their worth lies not in the planting of them, their worth is in what they look like with they sprout up and start coming back at you in the coaching discussions and conversations between staff and their managers. This is why you need to put effort initially into putting the values in a prominent position where people are heavily exposed to them on a daily basis. You know this is working when people start quoting your new values and start using them to question, clarify, argue or even push back at you. All those conversations have real meaning and purpose in terms of alignment within the business. Discussion and argument will move to acceptance and commitment over time. Only then should you talk about your values to your customers.
I have seen consultants destroy the opportunity to use values properly in a merger of two businesses. They left with a fat fee and a dog’s dinner of meaningless words nobody could list off in their totality. The people who paid for this were happy because nobody lost face at the table at the time they were devised. That cultural mediation process worked fine for them for that moment in time. However, the outcome was meaningless for the thousands of people in that business. The failure lay in the fact that while people could use some of the listed values, they rarely if ever used all of the listed values in their conversations. That good business never became the great business it could have been.
I live and work with just three values which I picked up from my first employer: Professionalism, Perseverance and Respect. I watched a failed attempt by a misguided CEO to nail a 4th value related to efficiency. The 4th value didn’t catch on, because what was there had the legacy of many different management regimes and had served the business through at least two previous existential challenges. Currently 90% of the people in that company say these values mean something to them. There are probably 200,000 to 300,000 people, past and present employees, around the world who can say the same thing. I have no doubt that those three words did more than any individual CEO or company genius to move that business to its current position. Practically, everyone of those 200,000 to 300,00 people will tell you without hesitation that it is a great business.
But ours is just a small company, we don’t need this? I would challenge that question for three reasons. Firstly, values used correctly help the people in your business achieve what Daniel Pink refers to as Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. The behaviours needed to succeed come with less effort and supervision when everyone gets into alignment on values. Secondly, people with a clear sense of purpose achieve more with less conscious effort. Finally, small and medium sized businesses are far easier to establish meaningful values for than larger businesses. If you want help to establish the navigational aids to move your business from good to great, get in touch.
Values are the Navigational Aids that enable good companies
Zlatan Ibrahimović left Inter Milan to join Barcelona football club in 2009 for a then record fee in the region of €90mn. His manager handed him the keys to the company Audi and told him that he needed to exhibit these three behaviours to fit in:
Humility
Hard Work
Team first
Everything was fine for the first 8 months until Zlatan was dropped from the first team. When he turned up to the next training session in his Lamborgini Gallardo, that was strike 1: Humility. When he broke his wrist that Christmas in a skidoo accident while on vacation in Sweden with his family, that was Strike 2. This was because he was unable to play for at least 6 weeks, thereby violating the Hard Work behaviour. When he was asked to make space in the centre of the field to allow another player to develop but refused to cooperate, that was Strike 3 – putting the Team First.
The board of Barcelona football club decided that in the best interests of the club, Zlatan should move on. The substantial contractual loss on Zlatan was considered money well spent in terms of reinforcing what mattered at the club.
Nobody should consider a football club with multi-millionaire employees who have very short term career prospects to be a good reference example for a small or medium sized business, but it illustrates why values are important.
There are three phases to rolling out meaningful values in your business.
The first phase involves generating the values from within the top leadership of the business. Its takes effort, intelligence and integrity to come up with values that are meaningful. They need to be truly grounded in the discussions, debates and battles that have been fought and won which collectively result in the business attaining its current position and based upon which the owners wish to see the business develop. Like that oft quoted 1964 U.S. supreme court ruling on obscenity – “You’ll know it when you see it”. The Alternative Board (TAB) have a sophisticated approach to trawling through the possible alternatives embedded in the Business Builder Blueprint portal which really does take a lot of the work out of it. The key is to come up with something you can easily remembered – generally not more than three items.
The second phase is the planting phase. This involves cascading the conversations that took place generating the values in the first place through the owners, managers, supervisors and all staff in the business. It is helpful to stick the values on notice boards and prominent places (mouse mats) in the business. Do not use the values with customers until you have observed phase three to have taken place.
Phase three is the critical phase, the phase over which you have no direct control but the phase which is essential to get an RoI from the exercise. Values are like seeds, their worth lies not in the planting of them, their worth is in what they look like with they sprout up and start coming back at you in the coaching discussions and conversations between staff and their managers. This is why you need to put effort initially into putting the values in a prominent position where people are heavily exposed to them on a daily basis. You know this is working when people start quoting your new values and start using them to question, clarify, argue or even push back at you. All those conversations have real meaning and purpose in terms of alignment within the business. Discussion and argument will move to acceptance and commitment over time. Only then should you talk about your values to your customers.
I have seen consultants destroy the opportunity to use values properly in a merger of two businesses. They left with a fat fee and a dog’s dinner of meaningless words nobody could list off in their totality. The people who paid for this were happy because nobody lost face at the table at the time they were devised. That cultural mediation process worked fine for them for that moment in time. However, the outcome was meaningless for the thousands of people in that business. The failure lay in the fact that while people could use some of the listed values, they rarely if ever used all of the listed values in their conversations. That good business never became the great business it could have been.
I live and work with just three values which I picked up from my first employer: Professionalism, Perseverance and Respect. I watched a failed attempt by a misguided CEO to nail a 4th value related to efficiency. The 4th value didn’t catch on, because what was there had the legacy of many different management regimes and had served the business through at least two previous existential challenges. Currently 90% of the people in that company say these values mean something to them. There are probably 200,000 to 300,000 people, past and present employees, around the world who can say the same thing. I have no doubt that those three words did more than any individual CEO or company genius to move that business to its current position. Practically, everyone of those 200,000 to 300,00 people will tell you without hesitation that it is a great business.
But ours is just a small company, we don’t need this? I would challenge that question for three reasons. Firstly, values used correctly help the people in your business achieve what Daniel Pink refers to as Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. The behaviours needed to succeed come with less effort and supervision when everyone gets into alignment on values. Secondly, people with a clear sense of purpose achieve more with less conscious effort. Finally, small and medium sized businesses are far easier to establish meaningful values for than larger businesses. If you want help to establish the navigational aids to move your business from good to great, get in touch.