Newsletter: May 2010

The Value of Values Alignment Within an Organization

What benefits does an organization gain by having values alignment? And what outcomes can be expected if accomplished?

Values, and alignment of those values across the organization, drive organizational performance and promote growth.

Organizational values reveal themselves in two ways:

from/in organizational strategy development (the planning process to set goals and vision-- the ideal future state you are working towards) and,
through organizational norms that reveal themselves based on behavior (good or bad) in lieu of, or in addition to established and known values, as set in #1.

Values, (also referenced as guiding principles) are one of the three key strategic visionary elements that establish a business philosophy and set the framework for accomplishing work. (The other two are: Vision – “Where are we going? Our ideal scene?”; and, Mission or Purpose—“What we do, why we exist.”) Generally Executives (the leadership team), set the framework, and staff execute it. If the values are not known, poorly understood or not supported (i.e. given lip service), the benefits of the values run amuck. And, as in the case of #2, if values are not identified and shared, they will be made up and driven by the strongest personalities (both positive and negative), often creating dissonance or worse, a negative culture. As long as this is either tolerated or supported (through inattention), organizational progress will be limited.

The benefits of value alignment are both tangible and intangible. For example, we see 3 common and potent areas of benefits:

Increased quality, productivity, efficiency, and/or effectiveness – tangible items like product quality, timing, satisfaction; which are surfaced through values like “excellence”, the “gold standard” or “market leaders” in services and products
Greater morale and cooperation, which are intangibles are derivative from the values like “respect”, “teamwork”, “trust”, “care”, etc., that all work to ultimately promote better performance
Increased employee engagement is tangible and observed in a person’s direct work output and activities, and reflective of values like “accountability”, “growth”, “individual contribution”, “ownership”, etc. This also crosses into the intangible of positive employee experience at work and is an enabler for morale.

Conversely, a lack of awareness and alignment of the organizational values will result in employee dis-engagement, competition verses cooperation, more insular work and territoriality verses resource sharing, a decrease in morale and ultimately a decrease in productivity—all costly and things that can be avoided. Simply stated, lack of values and organizational alignment can diminish performance and impedes growth. And often the executive team has no idea why the organization isn’t more successful, and argues – it can’t possibly be this values fluff.

Organizational values are a foundational element of high performing organizations. They establish what is most important to get work done in an organization. It also serves as a guide to decision making by enabling staff to assess fit and priority of business activities and opportunities, which in turn results in the performance organizational leaders are seeking.

Building Your Brand Identity & Determining Your Competitive Advantage

Building a brand identity is important for any business and it is especially important for small businesses as a differentiator. Too many small businesses do not invest the time and money to establish a brand. But before you invest in actual marketing (branding) items, you need to determine your competitive advantage, as this should be the fundamental message in your brand identity and will serve as the anchor in your marketing items and branding activities.

There are 4 key questions to help you determine your competitive advantage:

What is your value statement-- that is, how do you improve your client/customer’s condition? If you don’t know, your clients won’t either.
How are you unique, different or better than your key competition? And how do you prove it?
What is your company best at doing? Consider products, services or both. And would your employees say the same thing? Front line employees (customer facing) can support or sabotage your message
What makes you different and better than your competitors at building and maintaining relationships with your clients/customers? And how do you know. Saying it doesn’t make it so.

When you answer these questions honestly and factually and when you have the evidence to support your answers, you have just made a major step forward in differentiating yourself from you competition. Why? Because in our experience most companies do not bother to truthfully answer these questions.

After you’ve answered these questions, the next step is to determine how these messages are condensed and translated for easy and appealing public awareness and understanding: AKA branding.

Building a brand identity is important for any business and it is especially important for small businesses as a differentiator. Everything you send out, should present a consistent look and feel about your company. We are not suggesting it has to be an expensive branding campaign; we are recommending that your business cards, stationary, website, etc... be consistent and visually appealing – i.e. same font, same colors, same design concept.

Perhaps the most powerful tool for branding small businesses these days is using the internet. This includes:

website that’s interesting and informative
1. with the website address on your business card, stationary, advertisement
emails containing your “signature” that also informs about you and your business
using the social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter
presenting tips or ideas on how people and benefit from your products and services

Lastly, remember that a powerful yet often overlooked contribution to brand building, and a competitive differentiator, is how effectively you avoid self-sabotage (i.e. the time it takes to return calls and emails, how effectively you build relationships, whether you do what you said you would do when you said you would do it.) You can have the best intentions, the best business cards, the snappiest logo, the highest quality stationary and an award winning website, but if you don’t address the intangibles of doing business, then the other things just mentioned won’t matter, at least for long.

And, how do you maintain your competitive edge over time? Eliminate complacency. Success can be the greatest contributor to your failure. Why? Complacency. At least yearly, ask the four questions, examine your brand and based on customer/client feedback, check how you are doing on the intangibles.

Consistency is critical – in appearance, in service, in doing the intangibles better than your competition.

Announcements:

We have added a MEDIA Page to our website which highlights new and internationally published articles, press releases, interviews and quotations of our work. Check it out!

http://tinyurl.com/klcmedia