Communicate the values
Fifteen years ago, Stefanski was shocked into a new initiative. He was leading senior leadership team associates through a year of meetings focusing on the company. Atone point, he reminded everyone that everything they’re talking about or doing is based on the company’s values. Upon saying that, a man who had been with Third Federal for 30 years raised his hand and asked what the values were.
“I was shocked,” Stefanski says. “I learned from that incident about 15 years ago that you can’t emphasize and talk about the value system enough.”
Ever since that revelation, Stefanski has been on a mission to make sure that the values are known and practiced throughout his organization in various ways. He immediately changed his leadership approach.
“We bounced around from different books and philosophies and business approaches,” he says. “We did a lot of things and never really equated it back to our values.”
Stefanski felt like he hit a brick wall, and he realized he needed to emphasize the values more in everything he did.
“Anything and everything we present, we have to go back to our value system and show how it links back to that,” he says.
Stefanski has also made values a centerpiece of conversation with his executives to ensure they keep getting the word out. He holds off-site meetings with his top10 management people about once a quarter, and at these meetings, they talk about how they can improve the company and the communication of the values. He says he realized that it wasn’t anything he could do quickly and that he would have to work on it over time.
“The Japanese have a great way of going about it — a little bit at a time, constant improvement and all of a sudden you’re king of the hill,” Stefanski says.
In doing so, you have to be consistent.“ Once you’ve found the words that you want to use and the values of it, it’s important to keep the message consistent,” he says.
Now whenever he talks, he’s mentioning the values, including in videos that are made for the company.
“It ends up being almost a replay, but you’d be shocked and surprised how many people are saying, ‘Oh, that’s new and different. I’ve never heard that before,’” he says. “The message can’t be said enough by the top person, by the CEO or the chairman of the board.”
This repetition is important though. “Talk about those all day long because people forget,” he says. “People forget. If leaders are focused on shareholders, for example, or building the company’s worth in the stock market, that will show up, and everyone in the organization won’t be able to create that culture of togetherness or teamwork on their own. It just won’t happen.”
