Company of Value Creators

"If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” Jack Welch

I mentioned in my book, Truly Human Company, that all companies that are human-centric should be companies of leaders that are places where leaders are developed. When people join the company, they get transformed into leaders. Leadership development in these companies has nothing to do with positions or titles, but helping people to become all they can be and realize their full potential.

Leadership is influence and leaders make things happen. One of the best ways a company can give back to society is to invest in the transformation of its people into leaders and send them back into society to make an impact. When a company becomes a place for the development of leaders, it becomes a force for good in the world. It impacts the world in the following ways:

1. Leaders in families: A leader will lead his family and together the couple will raise children who know how to care for others.

2. Leaders in communities: These leaders will get involved in solving the problems of their communities.

3. Leaders in companies: These leaders will ensure that their companies do nothing to harm the environment and society where they operate. They will ensure that all stakeholders are well taken care of.

A Truly Human Company focuses on bringing out the best in everyone who works in the company. They see everyone as a human and every human has the potential to be a great leader.

You can say Truly Human Company is the hardware of the company, while Human-Centered Organization is the software: and how it functions. You have to get the software right for the hardware to work. While Truly Human Company is about what a company should be, Human-Centered Organization is how the company functions to become what it should be.

A Human-Centered Organization is constantly creating value for all the humans it associates with. In everything and through everything it is doing, value is being created for all stakeholders. Most companies die when the rate of value creation outside is more than the rate they are creating value for their stakeholders.

Creating Value For Employees (Culture)

When a company stops creating value for its employees, they may not leave but they may quit and still be working. They won’t be as motivated and inspired as they should be. They dread coming to work and are glad when it's the weekend. They only work to pay the bills.

Chad Gono, CEO of Regal Plastic, shared his experience in one of his LinkedIn posts. When he had a leader who was creating value for him, he gave the company 110 percent of his time. He was paid $40k and he worked for 70 hours a week. This means the money wasn’t the issue but how the leader made him feel and the freedom he had to work. He fell in love with his job as a result. You can read the story here:

Chad Gono

Then a leader was recruited from outside the company who didn’t understand how the past leader created value for people under him. He first took away their freedom and started micromanaging. He criticized every step they took and questioned every strategy. He made them feel like kids who did not know what they were doing. The new boss managed them using fear.

As a result, some of the best staff they had hired started leaving. Others who stayed back like Chad, stopped giving the whole and their best. Rather than focus on the maximum value he could create for the company, he focused on the maximum he could get and the minimum contributions he could make. Chad wrote:

“5-7 years later the business no longer existed. This is what happens when you destroy all trust and take the reins from your employees. If we were still there, the company would still exist today guaranteed.”

I had a similar experience to Chad’s only that I got fired along the way and was replaced by someone who would conform to the system; a few months after, the company closed shop.

No company that stops creating value for its employees will exist for long. When a company creates value for its employees, they fall in love with the company and make their contributions more than their compensations.

Creating Value for Customers (Business Model)

When a company stops creating value for its customers, they fire the company and employ the ones that create value for them. Customers are not as patient and unforgiving as employees are. They are not bond y sentiments or contract to stay with you. Once you stop creating value for them, they start shopping for your replacement.

Coca-Cola tried that with its New Coke and its customers fired them and employed Pepsi. When Blackberry stopped creating value for its customers, the customers fired Blackberry and went with Apple. Apple understands that they have to keep their customers happy by constantly creating value for them.

Companies should have a business model that sees complaints from customers as feedback to create new forms of value for them. If you are not meeting your customer needs they may either complain or do the Quiet Quitting (where they fire your company without letting you know)

Every Employee is A Value Creator (Leadership)

It takes a leader who is a value creator to liberate the potential of their entire employee to become value creators. Leaders in a company attract people who have a similar mindset as them. Steve Jobs called it the Bozo effect.

A leader with the Value value-creation mindset will enable his people to think in like manner. The purpose of a Value Creation Mindset is to see opportunities for value creation. Everyone can create value at whatever level in a company.

The goal of leadership in every company is to develop a value-creation mindset in all team members. Every department should be creating value. I get a blank look when I talk about everyone being a value creator in a company. To many it’s impossible. But it’s not. Everyone can create value and add to the overall value a company is creating.

Value can be created in marketing, sales, accounting, production, operations, human resources, maintenance, transportation, distribution, and more. You can create value by increasing customer satisfaction and reducing stress for your employees. That way you get to increase the company’s revenue or reduce the company’s cost.

Through our program, we ensure that organizations develop the DNA of value creation wherever every employee develops the value creation mindset and engages in unique capability collaboration where they collaborate to create game-changing value. An organization that increases its value-creation activities will end up becoming profitable and providing value for all its stakeholders.