Struggling with Corporate Culture? The Power of Core Behaviors in Building a High-Trust Workplace
Hi. Max Clark. We were going through and updating normally is referred to as mission vision values recently. And if you've ever done mission vision values, it makes you want to just jump out of a window and you end up with these platitudes of meaningless corporate speak very quickly and in the process of doing this came across some discussion around not core values but core behaviors and are you making hiring and firing decisions based on your values you probably are and instead to document detail core behaviors that you expect your workforce to actually adhere to and if they don't adhere to it that is grounds for separation and that becomes this baseline implementation of culture and culture design. Have you documented your actual core behaviors?
Speaker 1:And do you hire and do you fire based on your core behaviors or not? And so like reading and listening to this, it was actually made a lot of sense. We went from there into okay, well, what's your core behaviors that you actually want? And you get into this really crazy conversation quickly around like integrity is a core behavior. It's a core value, we have to operate within high integrity, people should have higher integrity.
Speaker 1:What does integrity do the right thing when other people aren't looking? Right? That's how I define and think about integrity. By the way, I grew up in scouting. I'm an Eagle Scout.
Speaker 1:I have a scout law seared into my brain. A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent. I'm like, hey, let's just take the scout law and just make that our core values. And like, we're good. We're off to the races.
Speaker 1:Right? You know? Okay. So maybe some things shouldn't be in there. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, do you have to have a reverent or, you know, as a core value for, you know, a company? Probably not. Like, that's probably come out of out of the list. But you think about it and talking with, like, HR practitioners and organizational consultants. So, like, what do you actually have to document in detail in your core values and your core behaviors?
Speaker 1:Like, do I actually have to list, like, integrity as a core behavior? And by the way, we ended up incorporating it. It's not, like, listed as, like, a bullet point, like, integrity. But after having some events and, like, looking at it, when you look at it, you think about, okay, if at a baseline, you have core behaviors and if somebody does not adhere or violates those core behaviors, that's like, do not pass go, do not collect $200. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:You could be an excellent, like, at your craft. You know, you could be the best person in your position, but, like, there is just not a space for you here anymore. Integrity is absolutely in that component. And what was interesting for us in this exercise of talking through this and working on this for way more time than I ever would have expected or wanted to work on it was a foundational behavior of trust. And it kinda became this thing where it's like, I think there's this expectation of this that there becomes this, like, thing of, like, trust is earned, you know, as, like, steady state in a lot of situations, like, you have to earn trust.
Speaker 1:And I don't disagree with that. But what we realized is that if we're hiring somebody, you have to trust, like, we have to start from a default to trust. So our baseline of core behavior becomes trusted. The company has to trust you. We have to trust each other.
Speaker 1:And that has to exist. And if you violate that trust by violating one of these core behaviors, that becomes the end of the road. Like, there's just no doesn't matter anything else like you just out. And so very quickly, we got into this conversation, and we came to this point, you know, basically, like, we trust you to do the right thing. We trust you to do your work.
Speaker 1:We trust you to ask for help. You can trust us to give you support. You can trust others to treat you well. This becomes like its concept around like blameless culture. Right?
Speaker 1:We want to exist in a in a environment where people can test and experiment and reach and stretch. And in order to do all those things, there has to be failure. Right? And in order to be safe and failure, you have to have trust that if you do fail, that it's not gonna have a negative for you. Right?
Speaker 1:You're not gonna get yelled at. You're not gonna be abused. You're not going to be demoted. So very quickly, we got to this position, and I would actually and part of this is, like, ask you is, like, you know, what do you think about this? What are your core behaviors?
Speaker 1:Or what is your company like value? And how do you actually make these decisions? But for us, it became very quickly of we wanted to exist as a culture from a place of trust and not just a place of trust, but a place of high trust. And ultimately, trust becomes the hub of this wheel with other things around it that are valuable and and massively important right like integrity we trust that you are going to do the right thing when other people are not looking we trust that you are gonna communicate we trust that you're gonna ask for help we trust that you're gonna try your best we trust that you're going to try to learn to do more and want to do more right like these sorts of things you know all come from a from this core thing of trust and it became so clear of like you know breaking the core behavior or is really about breaking trust and not from a you know existing of a, like, an earned trust position. And, like, you can earn trust and lose trust and earn trust again, but more from a, like, we're gonna baseline at trust.
Speaker 1:And if you break trust or lose trust, that's just the line you can't cross. And if you cross it, you know, it's just it's not the culture that we want. It's not the behaviors that we want and expect. And it becomes a simple decision of, you know, of the future of this, you know, like, you're we don't fit here. So I'm curious.
Speaker 1:Does your company have core values? Have you gone through this exercise? Do they make sense to you? Do you actually do and evaluate hiring and firing based on values or behaviors? What are your core behaviors?
Speaker 1:Let me know. Comment below. I'd love to hear your story. Feel it.
