Torkel Rhenman saw a lot of promise and opportunity in his new company when he took over as CEO at The Solae Co. in March 2008.
The company studies the benefits of soy protein and helps companies produce and market soy-based products. Rhenman felt like the time was right for the company to make a big move with people looking for healthy food ingredients.
He spent his first month doing a lot more listening than talking.
“I listened to as many employees and leaders as possible to really get a feel for the situation and the circumstances that we’re in,” Rhenman says. “It’s developing your own sort of view of all the things that we’re working on. What kind of personal change and touch do I want to make to the direction we’re going as a company?”
But as he looked deeper into the company’s makeup, Rhenman felt like the foundational core values that any company needs in order to be successful were not clearly identified at Solae.
“I look at core values as being foundational, noncompromising values that we all have to live with and agree to,” Rhenman says. “It’s sort of the guiding light for all the decisions that we make. Are we living by our core values? Some of that was not clearly there. My experience has been that when I look at companies that have been in the media, many of them have gotten into trouble and been on the front page with bad news because they haven’t defined their core values.”
Rhenman believed that a firm set of core values would provide direction for employees and ensure that the $1 billion company and its 3,500 employees would avoid the fate of others who strayed from their foundation and later paid the price for doing so.
“It is helping to define what people view as gray areas,” Rhenman says of the reasoning behind core values. “You ask people to use good judgment, but everybody’s good judgment might be different. What you need to do then is to define and help people work through, ‘OK, here are the things that we view as foundational for us in our company that we will not compromise on. It helps tie everybody together.”
It was through this early dialogue that Rhenman came up with the four values that would serve as Solae’s foundation: safety and health, ethical behavior, respect for people, and environmental stewardship.
“Many of the companies we work with, they share similar core values,” Rhenman says. “It fits both internally as well as externally. It’s something the leadership team has to work through in terms of what makes sense for us as our core values. What’s going to bind us together?”
Recognizing the need for core values was the easy part. Getting people to accept them as part of their everyday work was where the real challenge began.
