OWL 201: Values-Driven Leadership: Creating a Culture That Outperforms

Hey Ken, tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to start major strategies. Well, my background is kind of a little bit eclectic or maybe not eclectic so much. It's kind of two parts. One is education and the other is in business consulting. I was a college professor for a number of years. I was on the faculty at Indiana University in Bloomington, and then I was at the University of California San Diego. But I always did a lot of consulting and after, you know, many years of doing both, I had to make a choice and went out into the real world to be a full-time consultant, and that's what I've done ever since. But I've always been interested in the teaching and learning aspect of of how you work with businesses.

Everybody has to deal with change and grow their businesses or or they'll just go away. And over the years I've become more and more interested in this idea of corporate values and how values drive behavior. That of course is what culture is all about. The best definition of corporate culture that I know is it's the way we do things around here. And if you think about values as a driver of behavior, then you can see that values very much impact how people react act. In an organization both with their colleagues and peers and of course with their customers and their banks and everybody else. So I just got more and more interested in this over over the years. It's really kind of interesting when I first started talking about values and developing my my procedures over the years 1015 years ago, people would roll their eyes and say, oh, the soft stuff, and the reality is values, it's the hard stuff. It's getting people aligned in that organization. And leading those people based upon common set of values that everybody understands, believes in, and then helps them to pull together to make the company more productive and, and, and more profitable. And the evidence is clear that strong corporate cultures, especially those driven by a set of core values, makes a difference in, in the bottom line.

I, I totally agree and listeners out there, if you think that that's just kind of not important, think about this, you know, we're, we're all, we're all tribal at some at some point in our backgrounds, and you carried, you know, you probably stood behind a flag. Of some kind that flag was an indication of values, and people want to gravitate towards values that they feel and believe in and we're seeing that big time with the millennials coming up these days. They're saying, you know, what's important to me is, is who I'm working for and what they stand for, but I think that's always been important. Wouldn't you agree, Ken? I think it's always been important, but it hasn't been as much in the forefront as it is today and trying to articulate it more, and you're right, the millennials are saying, well, I'm not so sure that I need to have what my parents said. I really believe that other things are more important, the environment and things that are issues of the day, and those issues of the day are cultural. So I think as the culture evolves and is evolving and as the world is shrinking and you see the impact of different cultures as they try to assimilate one than the other, and often that produces conflict. So if you've got a strong set of values that you believe in, my contention is you ought to think about those values in the context of where you work.

And one of the things that I like to point out to people is that they're 168 hours in a week. Sleep a little mathematical for me in there and if you think about the number of hours that you sleep, the number of bars that you commute, eat, take care of other kinds of things, and you see how many hours are left, you'll find that if you spent 40+ hours a week working, it's obviously the biggest part of your life. And if you're gonna spend the biggest part of your life in an environment that fit into or you don't like because the, the culture and the values are not compatible with your own, you have to really think about whether or not that's a good idea. And so this idea of having your values mesh with the values of an organization is what makes people happy, more productive, and, and stick around in an organization rather than leave. How do the values of a company differ from their mission statement or their goals?

Well, I think I when I put together a a paradigm that shows the values of the foundation of the company. And the next thing you develop that you have a set of values, and that those, by the way, define who we are. They say, well, if we know who we are, then how do we do things around here? And that's our culture. And those are driven by the values. A quick example.

If you're, if you're in the grocery store and the grocery clerk gives you $20 too much change, what do you do? When I ask that question, most people say, Well, I can back and then your youngsters standing and says, Dad, why'd you get the money back? And say, well, it's not the way it wouldn't be mine to keep it. It would be like stealing the money belongs to the store and not to me. And you see this little, this little teaching session that's going on and you realize that's an honest person because the person does honest thing. And so when you, when you think about it at all, those actions you take each day are a reflection of your values. Aristotle said, you are what you do, or I am what I repeatedly do. Well, what you do is a function of your value, so it's really important to be in sync with the organization.

So the second step is to go ahead and define the culture of the organization based upon how you want people to behave in the organization. Now you know who you are, the foundation. You know how you do things around here, the culture, then you can ask the questions, where are we going? And the questions where are we going include strategic goals, and mission statements, and vision statements. And that's step number 3. And then now that we know who we are and how we do things, where are we going? And then step 4 is how are we gonna get there and that's your strategic plan.

But you can't start your strategic plan. A lot of companies say, well, we're gonna go off site for for 2 days we're taking our best team and we're gonna come up with a strategic plan. Well, if you haven't answered the question who we are. And how we do things. You can't answer the questions where are we going and how we're gonna get there. So this whole fundamental basis of, of corporate culture based on a set of values that everybody in the organization is brought into is very possible.

Yeah, it makes makes a ton of sense. And let me ask you a question. If, if a company is saying, you know what, I, I buy into that. We ought to, we, we haven't done that right in the past. We need to get started doing that. How can our listeners evaluate whether they have a healthy company culture and determine if they fit into their company's culture?

It's a great question. I've grappled with that question a lot over the years, and I've come up with a new 12 quiz, and the quiz is called, you know, it's about how you determine whether you fit into an organization and how does your company stack up in terms of values. And if anybody wants quiz, I'm happy to send it to them. All they have to do is send me an email and say please send me the the 12 question quiz on corporate, corporate health, and I'd be happy to send it to him.

Can I just give you my email address? Yeah, of course. OK, my email address is Ken K E N. At Kenma.com and that's spelled K E N M A J E R.com and send me an email saying you'd like to have the quiz about how your company stacks up in terms of culture, and I'll be happy to email that question, if I get a whole bunch of these, am I gonna be able to answer them all? I'll do my best. Well, I don't know if you'll get flooded today, but maybe when this hits the, the, the worldwide internet, maybe, maybe you'll get people checking in with you and I hope they will because.

I think it's so important that you define these are, you know, I've been back east to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, and because of the tidal situation they build their houses on these pilings, right? We've all seen those pictures. It seems to me that these values are the pilings, you know, they don't have a true foundation. The foundation is below the ground. They're driving these pilings in to build their house on top of.

And let me ask you a question. You've done this a lot. How many, how many values does a company adopt without it being overwhelming? Should, should this be memorable? And, and the second part of that is how should they adopt that? Should they involve their employees in this discussion to come up with this together so there's a buy-in?

Two good questions. Let me answer the second one first. Yes, you can involve everybody in the company. I've done this with huge companies. I've done this with small mom and pop. If it's a small company, you can do it with all hands meetings or small group meetings. If it's a large company, you might do it with a SurveyMonkey or Monkey Survey, whatever it is, and or email, email service, but you need to have everybody. Involved in the selection of the values and the definition of the values and the articulation of what behaviors people expect of themselves and others in the organization. So one way or the other, everybody's got to be participate in, in this activity if you expect to get the buy in that you need.

The number of values that I use, we generate 100 different types. Then we go through a process where we multi-vote and get the people in the organization to decide what are the most important ones for us in this company. For example, integrity is frequently a value. That people like to include in their values list and the integrity for a high tech company in Silicon Valley might be different than integrity for a doors and windows manufacturer in Canada. I know the two examples in my client list. And so you define the values based upon what your needs are in your organization, and then the number you can generate lots of values, but the number I like to come up with 5.5 is good. If you have 60, OK. 7 like it's too many for people to remember 3 and 4 aren't quite enough. The ideal number is 5. If you can come up with an acronym to help people remember that, that's always a good idea as well.

One of my most recent clients. Came up with the acronym Eric, E R I C C H, and it's spelled out, those are the first letters of each of the values they have to be six values, but they have the Eric Award. They have, they talked about Eric. Well, that's not very Eric like or what would Eric say? So it becomes part of the culture, it becomes part of the fabric of. Organization, if you can in some way get people to articulate and talk about the values, it's not enough to just put the values on the wall. right to define them. You need to transfer those into behaviors in the organization and of course that that becomes an excellent training module for new people coming in. I guess you could have a what would Eric say campaign there maybe something like that but but why not.

Yeah, of course you can use a set of values and you are and you can talk about one of my favorite questions is what do you love to do when you're not working and you can drill down on what to do and you can determine what their values are you can say this person is really nice. So you can use it for recruitment. You can use it for selection. You can use it for reinforcing people with the appropriate performance reviews. I always have my, my clients build the values into the performance reviews. So the performance review once a year, once a quarter, whatever it is. Not only are you doing your job well, but how are you doing it? Are you consistent with our values? And so you can select vendors based upon whether or not the values are the same as yours. So there are multiple uses for a matrix of values and behaviors that we developed to help the organization constantly be aware of how important it is to keep the culture.

Yeah, I, yeah, I get it. It makes a lot of sense and of course I'm thinking also of course in just general employee meetings you could ask for an example of, of the values in action, you know, I mean there's just tons of ways to reinforce that and it's, it is so important. It's, it's like the badge, you know, the badge the sheriff wears is what it's all about. It's the badge of honor for the company.

You know, when, when companies are, are wrestling with this, what's some of the pushback that you get before they realize how important this is? What are some of the reasons they say, well, the reason we haven't done this before is X. Well, the pushback, I, I don't get a lot of pushback these days because it's a real practical approach and people can relate to it and when you involve everybody, they, they kind of get it. But the, the, the pushback you get in any kind of Program where you're gonna change things, that you can change the culture, for example, the pushback you get is because people don't like change. And we go to a number of exercises helping people to understand, not only that they're gonna resist change and everybody resists it one way or the other. But also we go through a part of our program which is how do you deal with people who are resisting and people say, well, you know, we don't, we don't do that, do it that way around here or I've been doing this for 20 years and to try and change it and use some other way of doing it now doesn't make sense to me. And some people have got to be really honest when you go through a change program, whether it's a new technology or a new set. establishing a new culture, there'll be able to retirement because I've been doing this. I didn't come here to do things the way I've been doing. a little bit overwhelmed by change, but the real issue that you're talking about is everybody needs to change, so we have to spend time talking about how you deal with change when people are. And that, by the way, we have exercises that show people how to be empathic. We have exercises that show people how to get in the other person's shoes so they can help them understand why the change is good.

Ken, if you had 4 people in front of you, a 25-year-old, a 35-year-old, a 45-year-old, and a 55 year old, let's say, and and you were to, to guess what value word you think they're going to grab on to, what, what, what, what word would you assign most likely off the top of your head to each of those four people?

I probably assigned the same word, and I would get it from them, but I can, I can answer your question as well because I've done this so many times. I know which kind of words always come out, but before we do that, it's really important to understand that the values come from the people, they don't come from me. I'm a facilitator and so it's about being able to tease the values out of them. So I would ask each of those four people independently, what do you love to do when you're not working? And I would drill down and say, Well, why do you like that? How does it make you feel? And drill down until I can say. Really see home, so you like to play sports basketball, who are your favorites, and I can drill down with more questions to find out that competition's really important to the person or integrity as in the person of Stephen Cur. You know, the Warriors, who is a very famous guy right now in basketball, and part of it is his humility. That's a value is integrity. That's a value. So what you do is you get it from each person.

Now to answer your question about the younger people, you know, you know, it comes across just about everybody in and around the the sense of honesty, integrity and respect, particularly in respect. People want to be chosen people want to choose values that make them. Feels they're respected and also feels that they are respectful. So I would say that across all of them would be and then as the younger people you just identified, I think it's going to be personal, personal values about the environment and about bigger issues with older folks it's gonna be about respect and security. And things of that nature, but that's, that's easy to easy to kind of project because the, you know, old people moving into retirement, for example, they've got a different set of, of, of things they're worried about and younger people just trying to see how they're gonna impact on, but it's all based on value. Excellent, excellent.

Now, Ken, we only have a couple of minutes left, but give us a breakdown of some of the books you've written. You've written several books and you've got a report available for our listeners also on your website. So give us the rundown there.

Sure. Well, the first thing, the major report I write very short, hopefully pithy and relevant. You can go to my website www.kenmajor.com. Again, that's spelled K E N. At Ken K.com and it's got the report you can sign up for once or twice a month just a page and deals with issues and so that's why we get sort of my most current thinking in that but I've also written some books.

I wrote a book for a winemaker called Williamson Wines, and it's, the Williamson wine story. It's about he applied the values in winemaking and selling. I wrote a book with a former jet pilot. His name is Lieutenant Commander Scott Bear, and it's called Simon Yogi. And so he, he became a Blue Angel. And so when I learned about him, I got to know him. And we wrote a book about his personal values. It is up and down life until he became one of the premier fighter pilots in the world. I wrote another book for this stage which is called Values in Action. They actually commissioned me to write that book and it's called Values and Companies. And then, my first book is called Values Based Leadership, and it's all about what we're talking about today, how do you establish values in a corporation to establish a culture.

Excellent. Well, I've been talking with Ken Major of Major Strategies in San Francisco, and Ken is available obviously as a speaker. He's an author. He's got some great information available. Just visit his website at www.kenmajork. AJ.com to find out and remember he has a a great email about the 12 is it 12 steps to find out your value 12 questions. OK. How, how does this how does how does your company? Love it.

Ken, it's been a real pleasure. I'm really happy we connected and you were able to come on today and it's been enlightening and, and I hope our listeners have gotten a lot out of it. I know I have, so I look forward to the next time we speak. Thank you very much for coming on. Thanks Bill. My, my thanks to you for a very great show. Take care.