Leadership, values and principles.

In every discussion and blog I read online about company culture and leadership people still talk about only vision, mission and values. And there it usually stops. Values are an emotional foundation to a company, something you would like to accomplish eventually. They should be the reflection of the combination of your vision (dream, if you will) and your mission, your assignment as a company. Like the family values are a guideline to what you would like to have accomplished in your upbringing when your children have become grown ups.  Yet since values are an emotion and not measurable, they are at the same time subject to perception and multi interpretable. This is why we need to focus on principles. Principles are a translation of values into day to day behaviour. If honesty is a value, it could be measured by the principle: ‘In this company we don’t talk about each other, we talk with each other.’ This principle gives a leader the opportunity to explain why it is expected, thus underligning the value. Not only are principles a means of showing by your own exemplary behaviour what you expect from others, they are also a way of explaining to people what you expect and why. If the value is client focus, the principle might be to visit a client every three months and ask what they are happy with in your performance and what they think you need to improve. With this example, people learn by doing and in the end you reach desired behaviour by all as well as their ‘upbringing’ to the value client focus. When they execute this principle you can compliment on it, stressing the importance. When they don’t you can confront them and equally stress the importance with that.  Once the principle has been implemented as a behaviour, the art is to get a new principle to the same value, a more refined and sophisticated one. Like the difference in upbringing with your children. The principle to the value empathy for a 4 year old might be: when we are having dinner, the television is off. For a 16 year old, it might be: would you also want to know how my day has been? If yes, you might want to try asking me a question…