Articulate your values
It’s a simple illustration — 10 jigsaw pieces interlocking to a centerpiece and forming a circle. The centerpiece reads “Olympic
Steel,” and each of the other 10 has a different value on it. The illustration represents the ideas that are most important to the company
and Siegal.
“Every corporation has a values structure, and the company has
the opportunity to articulate their own value structure, and if you
don’t do that yourself as a corporation, then the employees will
determine what that value system is,” he says.
To clarify Olympic Steel’s values, Siegal took his management
team off-site, and he told them to think of anything that they
thought the company stood for and put it up on a blackboard. That
resulted in about 70 values, and from those, the team had to cut
them down to 10.
“We said, ‘God came up with 10 commandments, so that’s a
workable number,’” he says.
They started with the easiest cuts.
“It’s more that you’re eliminating the duplicates of words that
maybe had the same meaning or weren’t the accurate expression
that we wanted to make,” he says.
For example, some liked the word “honor,” but others thought that it was difficult to understand what it really meant.
“If you’re in the military, you understand honor,” Siegal says. “If
you’re the everyday person, honor is a difficult construct as
opposed to integrity and respect.”
Then you have to look at values and see which ones embody
what you believe but are also going to reflect well on you to external constituencies like customers.
“Should you tell your customer that, gee, you actually do make a
profit?” Siegal says.
In this case, “financial stability” made the cut as opposed to just
profits.
The process was collaborative, and it promoted debates that
would yield group decision-making and consensus; however,
sometimes you also have to overrule the group. Siegal had to force
in one value that others didn’t agree with because he knew it was
important. He won’t say which one though, because he says that
it’s just as important as the other nine, even if he had to force it in.
“The good news is organizations aren’t necessarily democracies,”
he says. “You basically say, ‘Look, this is one that has to be here. We
don’t all have to agree on it, but it is one that Olympic Steel stands for,
and that’s the end of the debate, and let’s move on.’”
Once you identify the values that your organization embodies,
you then have to get buy-in for them.
“It starts at the top,” he says. “There has to be a buy-in always at
the top. If there is hypocrisy, employees will see it.”
In order for employees to understand the importance of buying
in to the values, they need to see that management buys in to them
and lives them every day.
“You have to be, both in good times and bad times, consistent,”
he says. “Certainly, in good times, it’s easy to be consistent, but in
more difficult times, you have to act with consistency around the
value structure because you’re always going to be challenged on
your integrity in business — profit versus doing the right thing.”
For example, safety is one of the company’s values, and it’s one
of the most evident ones to employees.
“It’s easy to say, ‘Well, maybe we don’t have to buy safety equipment in the periods of time where you’re not doing well financially,’ and the answer is, ‘No, that’s not a sacrifice we can make,’”
Siegal says. “We have to constantly be sure that the things that are
valuable are always reinforced, regardless of the circumstances of
the market.”
Lastly, the way you communicate the values is also important.
“We list them alphabetically, not in order of importance, because
they’re all equal,” he says.
Once you tell them what the values are, you then have to go a
step further so they’ll hop on board.
“You have got to tell them why,” Siegal says. “‘Why are we doing
this?’ is as important as ‘What are you doing?’ but if you’re just saying, ‘Come to work every day, work really hard, and trust me,’
that’s the mouse on the wheel. ‘Why? Why would I trust you? You
can’t tell me why I’m doing this, then I’ll give you my minimal
effort, and I’ll go home and do what’s important to me.’”
