“When the gap between what you say and what you do gets big enough, people stop listening”. Sobering words from Seth Godin.
As a business owner or manager you may have a set of company values somewhere in your working environment. Perhaps they are mounted in a frame on the wall for all to see, or perhaps they are hidden away in a filing cabinet, only to be whipped out and dusted off at the next yearly strategy session. Irrespective of where your values are, if you don’t practise them everyday, they are meaningless.
Values can be seen as your companies culture building blocks or foundation. Everything that makes up your companies culture is built on your values, or lack of them.
When everything is going according to plan, we are all very quick to stand on our soap boxes and preach on how things need to be done or handled. However, when push comes to shove if what you instinctively say and do are not aligned to the reality of the situation, you will over time lose your team and your customers.
To get a true and realistic understanding of what happens in your organisation when the paw-paw hits the fan, try and recall the three most challenging situations your organisation and team have had to face in the last few years. How did you and your team response to these situations? What was your behaviour like when you are feeling the heat?
Does your initial reaction and behaviour within those situations align themselves to the framed values you have mounted on the wall or are you completely off?
If you are able to answer with honesty that your response was spot on, then you are on the right track. However, if you were off, what do you believe is the action plan within your business to get yourselves back on track? What changes need to be made in your business to close the gap between what you say and what you do and to increase employee and customer retention?
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