Values: What Will You Die For?

You’re probably wondering what he is talking about, what would I die for?  And normally when we’re talking about values that we would die for we’re talking about freedom, justice, love, religious or spiritual beliefs, country, ideology or humanitarianism. But what about your company’s values? What about your personal values beyond those? 

Part of creating a strategic plan is making sure you have core values that you can build the culture around in the organization. These core values must be things that you’re willing to hold regardless of the situation. Many times we come across core values that have become platitudes such as honesty, integrity and trust.  But would we do business with anybody that doesn’t have these values by choice or only by necessity?  

Those core values must;

• Actualize and activate our teams
• Must be tangible (we can see them in action)
• Must be delivered, no matter the circumstance
• They set boundaries and rules to live by

Examples

 Let me give you some examples of core values in action;

McDonald’s

 McDonald’s core values are customer obsession, integrity, inclusion and diversity, quality and consistency, innovation, community engagement, teamwork and collaboration. Let’s just look at quality consistency. Even though you may not think McDonald’s is a high quality provider of fast food you have to admit that it’s consistent throughout all their stores what that quality is. They achieve this by having set processes using the same equipment materials and raw foods. To achieve this they have to train all their people to do things the same way. So when you go to McDonald’s you can pretty much count on the quality being the same from store to store. The only variance will come if one store is not managed as well as another. But it won’t be far off. Another example of McDonald’s core values is their customer obsession. During the Covid-19 era, people weren’t dining in and they were simply going through the drive-thru. This increases the volume on the drive-thrus and causes longer lines. Most McDonald’s installed another line to take orders quicker from the drive-thru and thus expedite delivering high quality by their standards and on time delivery as was expected by its customers. 

Apple

 Let’s look at one of Apple’s core values, user experience. Apple thrives on the ability to enhance the experience that each user has of their devices and software. By creating simple shortcuts Apple was a leader in innovative computing and mobile apps. This core value filters out any products that might be in research and development but is not focused on enhancing the user’s experience; those products will be shelved and not be on the market.

 So, you can see from these examples that these companies have used their core values to really drive the outcomes, activities and behaviors of their stakeholders. This has increased their value to the markets they serve. So when I say you should have core values that you would die for I mean those that you can apply in every situation and abide by those.

 so, complete this exercise.

1. What do you want to be known as by people looking at your behaviors?
2.  What core value could really drive the performance of you or your organization?

 What core values will you die for?