Establish your values
You have to make sure that you first identify what is important to your organization. For Third Federal, the four most important values are love, trust, respect and a commitment to excellence.
While some may say that love, trust and respect are soft and don’t belong in a business setting, Stefanski would suggest otherwise.
“The bottom line is, it comes down to relationships,” he says. “How good of father were you? How good of a mother were you? How good of a son or daughter were you? Friend were you? Associate were you working the job?
“That’s the single most important thing. Nobody is going to care how much money you made at the end. Nobody’s going to care what kind of job title you held. Nobody’s going to care how many touch-downs did you make. They’re going to say, ‘What kind of person was he?’”
While the softer values are important in creating a nurturing culture, you then have to balance those to make sure you can still compete.
“Commitment to excellence is actually our balance to all the softer values,” he says. “Without a commitment to excellence, you can’t have No. 1 or No. 2 market share. You can’t be the best you can be or accomplish the goals you want to accomplish.”
Some people may feel that the commitment to excellence is the most important value of the four, but you have to take a look at the bigger picture of your organization.
“I compare making money for a corporation like a human being breathing air,” Stefanski says. “A human being needs to breathe air, but that isn’t your sole existence to breathe air. It’s the same thing for a corporation. A corporation needs to make money, but its purpose isn’t necessarily to make money.”
You also have to realize that while you decide on something, everyone may not fall in line. You just have to be willing to take steps to reaching where you want to go and continuously reinforce it.
“It takes total discipline to those values,” he says. “Values end up being the foundation for the culture.”
