Use your values to make decisions. You have to walk the talk. In other words, if you do communicate what your value system is, then you need to absolutely follow it. I’ve been in those situations where a decision [is] a little bit questionable. You just have to go back to your value systems and say, ‘If I don’t follow these, then I’m giving up the ship.’
Ask employees to share their values. It built trust between myself and the associates within the company. And I encouraged each one of them to share their value systems, as well. It gives them a better understanding of what makes you tick.
Years ago, we did an exercise like Myers-Briggs [personality test]. It’s called brain dominance. You really find out as a team what all your strengths and your weaknesses are.
That type of thing, if you do it as a group or a team, you can really understand each other and understand where everybody’s coming from. For example, it will identify who’s more of a creative type, and usually if you’re creative, you’re not structured. And then you’ll find individuals within your team that are very structured but not very creative.
What happens, a structured person looks at a creative person and says, ‘Jeesh, you’re just ineffective,’ because they don’t follow the same brain situations that you do.
But once you understand where the other one’s coming from, then you can deal with it.
It’s on the table, ‘I understand that you’re not going to dot every I and cross every T, and therefore, I can deal with that.’ And then on the other hand, when the creative person just wants to fly and not put together a plan and is not very structured, then that person can also understand [that] these other individuals, they’ve got to have a plan or they just are not comfortable moving forward. It’s really just understanding each other.
Keep each other accountable. I’ve seen it added into performance discussions to where you actually can have that as one of the elements of the performance review or performance evaluation.
[But if someone violates their values,] you need to address it right away. I’d say, ‘Honor my commitments,’ and let’s say somebody comes up and says, ‘You said you were going to do that, and you didn’t,’ you have to apologize and tell them you’ll work your hardest not to make that happen again.
You have to deal with it on the spot. Everybody has a hiccup every now and then, and that’s understandable. You deal with them as they come up, but then over a period of time when you sit down on the performance review, you say, ‘Well, jeez. This has happened too many times.’
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