Core values. Do we need them in our businesses? Are they essential?

No. We don’t need them. It’s a fact.

Plenty of businesses run without them, and if you don’t think they are important, then you can continue to run your businesses without thinking about them.

However, if you want to proactively shape your culture, then you need to have a set of core values which you totally stand for – and which become a living, breathing, part of your company.

If you implement – and live by – core values, then you create a self-managed organisation.

Your employees are engaged in the workplace because they know the “rules” within which they can act.

They are free to make choices at work because, so long as the choices they make are in support of a core value, or they do not violate one, then they know that they aren’t going to get fired.

This autonomy is great for your employees as they won’t feel crushed or undervalued.  Instead, they’ll feel empowered and significant – traits which lead to increased engagement and reduced attrition rates.

Additionally, once you are clear on your core values as a company, it makes the recruitment process much simpler.

And it leads to your people becoming aligned. If employees aren’t in alignment with your core values, then how are they going to perform at the highest levels?

Think about this scenario for some context and hopefully we can all relate to this topic:

Think about a time when you met the love of your life (or if you are still searching, someone you thought might have been the love of your life).

Think about what their core values were.  

Maybe they told you they wanted a family, they loved reading business books, they always attended personal development courses in their free time, and that they religiously went running 3 x a week.

If you start to dissect how they showed up in their everyday life, you would realise that in actual fact their values were family, growth and health. 

Now, if you didn’t value similar things in your own life, then you would have had less of a connection with them, and you probably wouldn’t have pursued a relationship with them.

Even worse, if their values totally violated one of your own, then you might have decided not to pursue the relationship completely.

Too many businesses just do not see the overlap.

They miss the utter importance of shaping their culture through creating and living by core values.

The fact is, every organisation has a culture because it’s co-created, formed by the everyday interactions between people working together.

If, as a leader, you don’t shape your company’s culture then your employees will create their own.

It will be a mismatch of everyone’s personal core values, applied to their work with their own lens of what is or isn’t right.

No one will be clear on boundaries, what is or isn’t acceptable.  And where they are asked to do something that doesn’t align with their core values, they will do so begrudgingly, without passion or commitment.  They will ultimately be unhappy in their work.

So, please don’t leave it to chance, or simply write off as a ‘fluffy’ exercise to tick off your list.

• Create a strong vision for your company.
• Take the time to truly understand what matters to you, as people, both individually and collectively.
• Create a set of core values and then live by them as if your lives depended on it.  All the best companies do.

Claire Perry-Louise, Founder of EthosCx

Claire Perry-Louise is a visionary leader, entrepreneur, author, coach and speaker. She is a pioneer in the area of community building in business. She believes that community building is the future for businesses who need to uncover a sustainable way to engage with their clients at a deeper level. She is dedicated to the message that culture and community are deeply intertwined and by focusing on both these facets, visionary business leaders can create enterprises that provide long term value to their clients while creating a culture that supports their employees.

Since 2013 she has been focused on evolving these concepts. This has taken her on a varied journey, which has involved her leading workshops, giving keynotes around the world and connecting and building relationships with some of the leading visionaries and entrepreneurs in the world. She founded EthosCx to support her vision and more recently The Community Engagement School, to deliver her community training: https://www.communityengagementschool.com/

Claire has a deep understanding and expertise in culture and community building. Recently, she was described as being five years ahead of her time in terms of her message. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg, has in the last few months started sharing his new vision for community building and echoing in many ways what Claire has been saying for years.

Currently, Claire is focussing her attention on her own community, which is supporting the ever increasing number of business leaders who are building Facebook Groups without support and with only limited knowledge about community building. Claire understands that Facebook Groups are one of the easiest ways currently to build a community to support your business objectives, but she is saving her clients time and resources by sharing her strategies to build an engaged group which can see a return on investment.

She is also advising on the pitfalls of relying just on this platform and has a method which can move her clients through a process where at the end of it they have an engaged owned community, which supports their business goals and outstrips traditional marketing overtime.

Please do request to join this free community if you are interested https://www.facebook.com/groups/communitybuildingwithclaire/.