Do Values and Principles Matter to Your Company?

by Marcy Marro | 2 March 2020 12:00 am

These anti-team players pull down the entire team and make everyone’s life miserable. To grow a flourishing garden, you have to cut out the irregular branches and regularly trim out deadwood to get the plants to thrive, bloom and reach their potential. And with a company, you have to have everyone working together, following the same rules, with positive attitudes, to achieve the highest results possible. To make this happen takes a clear understanding of what your company rules are, what basic principles you stand for, what kind of people you want working together in your company, and how you expect your team to work with each other and treat your customers, vendors and subcontractors.

What Do You Stand For?

What basic business ethics, intrinsic values and internal principles does your company stand for? A very important component of building a great company is defining, knowing and monitoring your core values. I call these your BIZ Principles.

• Basic core values, beliefs and standards
• What really matters to your company
• Our fundamentals, principles and guidelines
• What you stand for, driving forces and qualities

You must identify and decide what your company stands for and what beliefs are important to you, your company and employees. How do you want to treat customers and other companies you deal with? By defining these basic principles or core values, they will act as guides to keep you on the right track for future decisions, choices, dilemmas, and personnel issues and challenges you face. Your BIZ-Principles will act as a filter when addressing employees who don’t match your values, dealing with customers who don’t have the same beliefs, or deciding which direction you should go on important matters that may fall into tough grey areas.

For example, if one of your basic core values is teamwork and being a team player, keeping people hired who have bad attitudes, won’t follow company standards, or continue to disrupt the flow of progress doesn’t fit within your BIZ-Principles and therefore these bad apples shouldn’t work for your company. If a core value is to be accountable for results, and a field crew foreman continually makes excuses for not meeting his project schedule or production goals, he can’t continue to work at your company without major improvement in his attitude or results.

Having clearly defined BIZ-Principles or core values will help you make good decisions about how to lead, run and manage your company, people, priorities and projects. There are no exceptions to your principles. For example, full value means giving fair prices on change orders to customers. Following company standards means everyone follows the rules, not just a few.

Take ownership and act to find solutions means not calling your supervisor to get approval on every small decision 10 times a day. Honesty and do what you say means telling the truth about the schedule, late or on time, and then doing whatever it takes to achieve the agreed upon deadlines versus telling customers what they want to hear. Achieve winning results means knowing the production budget and working hard to achieve it without excuses.

Draft Your BIZ-Principles

Get your key managers and leadership team together to determine your overall company core values and principles. Give everyone the following list of values to consider and ask them to select their top five:

— Integrity and Honesty
— Excellence and High Standards
— Customer First
— Focused on Profitable Growth
— Quality and Attention To Detail
— Laser-Like Focus To Achieve Results
— Strong Leadership and Planning
— Decisive, Disciplined and Strategic
— Professional, Competent and Experts
— Follow Company Standards and Systems
— Confident, Competitive and Motivated
— Dependable and Loyal
— Pro-Active Decisive Problem Solver
— Goal, Results and Solution Driven
— Full Value
— Full Service
— Winning Can-Do Positive Attitude
— Safety First
— Accountable and Responsible
— Willing To Make Decisions
— Efficient and Effective
— On Time, Fast and Fast Paced
— Pro-Active and Go the Extra Mile
— Plans Ahead
— Always Do The Right Thing
— Do What We Say We’ll Do
— Productive
— Fair and Respectable
— Teamwork and Team Player
— Innovative Creative Flexible
— Systemized and Organized
— Committed and Follows Through on Commitments
— Adaptable and Willing To Change
— Cutting Edge
— Continuous Improvement
— Ability To Develop “A” Players

After your management team selects their top choices, tally them and then discuss which principles work for everyone and represent the real values your company wants to stand for. Try to limit your principles to five or less. If you must, you can combine a few principles into one—Team players with positive attitudes who always follow company systems.

After you have your BIZ-Principles completed, post them proudly in your office for all to see. Use them to make decisions how you do business, treat others, act, operate, hire people, manage and work with others. You can also add them to your employee review process and rate each person on all of the BIZ-Principles to determine if they are acting within your values or need improvement.

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George Hedley, CSP, CPBC, helps contractors grow and profit as a professional business coach, popular speaker and peer group leader. To get your copy of Hedley’s BIZ-Principles and BIZ-Vision Worksheets, email GH@HardhatPresentations.com[1]. Hedley is the author of “Get Your Construction Business to Always Make a Profit!” and “Hardhat BIZSCHOOL Online University” available—on his website. Visit www.hardhatbizschool.com[2] for more information.

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