Q. What are some of the keys to communicating core values?
It’s consistency in message, it’s being repetitive, and it’s also the fact that your actions need to speak much louder than your words. One of the things I’ve had to learn as a leader is that everything you do is being observed and is part of your communication. Whether it’s passing someone in the hall and how you greet them, interaction in the coffee room, your body language, people are looking to you for the signals you’re sending and how you are reacting to different situations.
For the culture I’m trying to build and cultivate, I tend to try to listen more than I do talk. I tend to try and show empathy toward our people and listen and learn about the challenges they are facing. By doing that, I find people are very open, and you can learn a tremendous amount just by asking some good questions or asking for their suggestions.
But that effort needs to be sincere. People will recognize if you’re just going through the motions, so sincerity is important.
As the leader, you also need to show confidence and conviction and passion for the vision and mission and what is being accomplished by individuals in the company.
You also need to get people involved in shaping the vision by dialoguing. What I encourage is positive conflict. I want to hear the diversity of ideas.
I encourage people, regardless of their position in the company, to share their ideas. I want to give people license to state ideas that might be contrary to my own or to popular consensus.
Q. Is simplicity of message a part of communicating core values?
It has to be very simple. It has to be intuitive and as black and white as you can get. The more complicated it gets, the more open to interpretation it gets. Our goals are centered on six terms, and the six terms we’ve used to describe our culture are fairly self-explanatory.
We can often talk about what those terms mean to us and to our partners. But if it becomes open to interpretation, it becomes a gray area, and when you’re holding people accountable to live up to those core values, the last thing you want to have is a debate on whether or not they’re living up to those expectations.
Our values have become simply stated through our communication, through part of our nomenclature and the way we talk. One validation of that is that we do an employee survey to understand how our employees view the organization so that we know what is important to them and know how we are communicating the core values.
But in some manner, you have to find out whether you are clearly communicating those core values.
How to reach: Kelley Blue Book Co. Inc., (949) 770-7704 or www.kbb.com
