The First Secret Ingredient to an Innovative Company Culture

At the bottom of an email or in a framed statement on a conference room wall, companies often have their mission statement and values. Such statements might read:

• We make and keep commitments
• Together we create a world that works better
• We believe in the power of engaged talent

Without digging into what is a mission statement vs. what are values, let's look at integrity as one the key ingredients to have these statements have meaning beyond a nice phrase or pretty picture.

Integrity is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles, or moral uprightness. It is a personal choice to hold one's self to consistent standards. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity]

I think the second part of this definition is the most critical: It is a personal choice to hold one's self to consistent standards. And taking it a step further -- Do our actions line up with our commitments or what we profess our commitments to be?

Integrity is often related to as a moral principle i.e. you're good if you have integrity and bad if you don't. Or you're right if you do what you say you'll do, and wrong or bad if you don't. But human beings are imperfect by nature. No one has 100% integrity all the time. It's just not possible.

So how do we have our professed mission and values mean anything or how do we have them be a living conversation in the organization?

First of all, it is important that they are in writing.

Once you've written them, this is where you want to look:
How do our actions, practices and behaviors line up with these principles?

This needs to be a daily practice and not an after-thought once you've finished your to-do list.

Some suggestions how to approach this:
Pick one principle a week with your staff and bring examples of where you fulfilled on that and where you fell short. [Remember that doesn't mean you're good if you fulfilled on it and a bad person if you didn't]. You just want examples. You want everyone looking for examples, consistencies and inconsistencies. This has the principle begin to be real and come alive in the organization. It starts to be a principle that shapes action vs. a static, pat phrase.  But that only happens with a dialogue about it, an on-going dialogue. Tell one on yourself as a leader. Give an example of where your actions are inconsistent with your principles. That creates safety and vulnerability for everyone else to do the same. It demonstrates that you're human, too. It validates that we're all learning to be better people and employees together. 

If you'd like to learn how to better have your company mission live across all parts of your organization, please schedule some time here. Your mission, principles and values are critical to your business success, talent hiring and retention, employee satisfaction and customer fulfillment. If you can learn to leverage them and have them live in your organization, the results will surprise you [in a good way!]

To your success and fulfillment,

Kerry