With all the stories I have heard in the past few years from employees in
companies around the world, I’m convinced you cannot be too specific about
values and their related behaviors.
And It’s in the Backup
Clarity around values and behaviors is not much good unless it is backed up.
To make values really mean something, companies have to reward the people who
exhibit them and “punish” those who don’t. Believe me, it will make winning
easier.
I say that because every time we asked one of our high-performing managers to
leave because he didn’t demonstrate the values—and we said as much publicly—the
organization responded incredibly well. In annual surveys over a decade,
employees would tell us that we were a company that increasingly lived its
values. That made people even more committed to living them too. And as our
employee satisfaction results improved, so did our financial results.
And Finally, It’s in the Connection
A concrete mission is great. And values
that describe specific behaviors are too. But for a company’s mission and values
to truly work together as a winning proposition, they have to be mutually
reinforcing.
It seems obvious, doesn’t it, that a company’s values should support its
mission, but it’s amazingly easy for that not to be the case. A disconnect
between the parts of a company’s framework probably is more a sin of omission
than of commission, but it often happens.
In the most common scenario, a company’s mission and its values rupture due
to the little crises of daily life in business: A competitor moves into town and
lowers prices, and so do you, undermining your mission of competing on extreme
customer service. Or a downturn hits, so you cut your advertising budget,
forgetting your mission is to enhance and extend your brand.
The foregoing is excerpted from Winning by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch. All
rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written
permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Two Lives is a memoir written by international best-selling author, Vikram Seth. In this interesting and engaging book, Seth writes about his great...
read more
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Judge rules unused Borders gift cards to be worthless(May 23 2013) Borders owes nothing to holders of roughly $210.5 million of gift cards that had not been used by the time the bookstore chain shut down, a Manhattan federal...
Full Story
