Shared Values

I had the distinct honor of being part of the team that created Insight Global's shared values.? If I were to ever write a book about my life it would get a whole chapter because it was such an amazing moment in both my personal and professional life.? But let me back up a little bit.

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I had 13 years of my career at Insight Global before we formed the shared values.? And I’ll be honest, they were great.? I learned how to work hard, I made some of my best friends and I got to be part of a company that grew from $60,000,000 in revenue to almost $2,000,000,000 in revenue.? It was everything I was looking for when I was looking to start my career but there was always something that felt like it was missing.? Aside from hard work we didn’t have anything to build upon, we didn’t have anything to anchor us.

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It is extremely rare that a bunch of entry level employees rise into the leadership ranks of a company and then get handed the keys.? This is exactly what happened to us and more specifically what happened to Bert.? Bert Bean is one of my closest friends and not for a moment did I envy the position he was in.? Our founder Glenn Johnson was an extremely autocratic yet charismatic leader, he had a simple vision, but he made us all believe it, and ultimately there was no one I wanted to do better for then him.? His vision was that no one would out work us ever.? He also had an ability to keep things very simple.? The only problem with that is when you become a multibillion-dollar company, things get a little more complicated and the vision must evolve.? We had been stagnant for a few years, and it had thrown our culture into chaos.? This is where Bert came in.? He decided that if we were going to build our company into something that TRULY mattered, that made the hard work worth it, we had to get real, we had to get vulnerable and then we had to decide what was going to be the corner stone of our culture and ultimately our company for us to continue.? He decided we were going to have the first Compass ever.? He brought 20 or so of us together than ran various parts of the company and we were going to lock ourselves in a house for three days and chart the course of the company for the future.? But not before we became known to each other.

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The night before we created the shared values, we all went around the room and shared our darkest moment from our career.? It took at least 6 hours, and it was an exorcism of sorts.? We all had a lot of things to get off our chest, things that haunted us, made us scared and things we didn’t want anyone else to ever go through.? It was the most I ever cried in my life, and it felt great. ?It is one of the moments of my life that I would re live if I could.? I had been struggling in my role as a Regional Manager for the last few years.? While on paper I was growing in revenue and doing the things expected of me.? I was really a task manager.? I cared about the people in my charge, but I came across as inauthentic, and I wanted to be perfect to them and to Glenn.? Ultimately this led me down a path of not being myself and not being someone who was a leader that served his people, I served my management.? And because of that, about 6 months before Glenn retired, he sat me down and told me I was on a growth plan.? The conditions of the plan were vague.? I was told that no one liked me, and if things stayed that way I would be out of my role.? I don’t know if you have ever been told that no one liked you by your CEO, but it is gutting.? Now I was struggling, and that was my fault and I needed to change my behaviors and how I did my job.? Lucky for me I had an amazing team around me and Bert as a leader who helped me be my true self.? And once I was able to do that I thrived.? I loved my job, my people and my life.? Unfornatley Glenn never took me off that growth plan, in fact we never talked about it again and it had been a really rough experience where I didn’t really know where I stood and struggled in silence.? So that night at Compass, I bared my soul to my friends and peers like I had never done before.? I shared my whole experience of not knowing where I stood or that I mattered.? It was cathartic.? And when I got done, Bert with tears in his eyes said, “Matt you will never not know where you stand again, and great news you are officially not on a growth plan.” That line got a ton of laughs, from me included.

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The next day we sat down, and we set out to make a set of shared values.? They were influenced by all our experiences.? All we really wanted to accomplish was to put together a set of values that we wanted to live by.? I’d like to say we had a master plan that this was what would fix the company and fuel our growth for years to come.? And maybe Bert did have that master plan, I was just proud to be part of a team that cared so much about each other and the organization.

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After that, nothing happened.? Bert let the shared values sit in his office.? We would look at them and talk about if we still liked them.? And after a few months we didn’t like them anymore, we LOVED them, and we wanted to share them.? So, at our Conference in January 2019, we shared them with the whole company.? And it was pretty amazing because they caught on like wildfire.? People all across the company were talking about them.? And then something I hadn’t expected happened.? Our shared values became our causation for success.? They became the first five bullets on any job description we had.? They became the thing we went back to when we had hard decisions to make.? They became the cornerstone of anything we did, big or little.? From starting the Insight Global Family foundation, to making sure we had GROW counseling available to all of our employees, to how we help our teammates when they are struggling at work, to giving everyone a week a year to go serve their communities, the list goes on and on.

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If we hadn’t come up with the shared values and if Bert hadn’t been brave enough to share them with everyone, would I still be here today.? Well, I guess I’ll never know the answer to that.? But what I know for sure is we have had some really hard times over the last few years.? From covid, to the contraction in the industry last year.? And I have had some really hard times over the last five years, but what got me through all of those hard times was knowing that Everyone Matters, We Take Care of Each Other, Leadership is Here to Serve, High Character and Hard Work Above All Else, and to Always Know Where You Stand.

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We aren’t the first company to have shared values and we won’t be the last.? But I feel so lucky to be part of Insight Global where we have OUR shared values.? I am so proud that every person that has interviewed and been hired over the last five years spend a good chunk of their interview discussing the shared values.? And the amazing people (thousands of them) that have joined Insight Global over the last five years all embody these 5 simple yet impactful values.? To me they aren’t just words, they are how I want people to feel about me and they are how I want to think about people.? Lucky for me I get to work with thousands of such people every single day.