Your company culture is the true foundation of your success — which is why it’s vital to create values you connect with. When you do that, you’ll often find that when you have questions, challenges, or don’t know which way to grow, you’ll be able to find the right decision based on one of those core values. Identifying your culture and values will help you to determine how to answer opportunities for growth.
One of the fundamental values, in my opinion, should be based around the ownership that everyone in your business has of the decision-making process. Because when you’re in crisis, when you’re not sure how you’re going to meet your goals, your people will be able to help you. When you’re stuck in a rut, you can explain the desired outcome to your employees, and they’ll share their thoughts and their ideas on how to get there successfully.
When in doubt, ask your frontline employees — they have the answers.
You would never be able to grow if you imposed the limitations of only your own mental agility. But when you have 100 employees and all the thoughts whizzing around their brains, too, the change becomes fluid. Your business continues to grow when you have engaged people on board who fully believe in the company’s mission and vision.
Opportunities for Growth
Leaders have to make a mindset shift. When you keep your morals and ethics at the center of your business and prioritize not only high customer service standards but high standards of respect for your staff, you’ll grow in the right way.
You still strive to be the best. You are just doing it more effectively in a way that serves your employees and takes them to another level. Because working hard, being self-disciplined, and being joyful aren’t mutually exclusive, they all go together and help everyone take ownership of different processes for the good of the team.
Today’s workforce wants to know that they’re valued, they want to know that the work they do is important and has meaning, and they want a leader who’s going to go on a journey with them and coach them. You empower your people to go ahead and try things themselves, but you also maintain enough oversight to coach them through the process.
In a successful team, everybody partakes in the vision planning and participates in the strategy for their area. It can feel uncomfortable to give so much power to your employees, but when you make the switch, you will reap so many rewards, financially and emotionally.
Answering Growth Opportunities Start From Your Culture Statement
The transference of power from the leader to the team allows you to use the core values to change people’s behavior. It makes the business, and the values come alive and incorporates them into your daily conversations, reinforcing their importance.
Positive psychological capital is the hero:
- Hope
- Efficacy
- Resiliency
- Optimism
The hallmark of a resilient and authentic leader is the ability to set a goal of achievement and roll with the changes as they happen. An authentic leader is vulnerable and compassionate in a genuine way, and that vulnerability leads to action by their employees.
Value-Led Leadership
In today’s leadership, we should be following the organization’s values. That’s the integrity that I mentioned above — it’s following the values, always being true to your values, earning respect, and keeping respect.
Being Vulnerable with Your Team When it Comes to Values as a Leader:
- Helps you fill a knowledge and competence gap.
- It helps your people be a part of the solution; they realize that you trust them because you’re opening up to them.
- It shows that you respect their skills, their experiences
When you open up to your people when you make yourself vulnerable to your people, I genuinely feel that they’re going to open up to you even more because they know you’re there for them, they know they can trust you.
And when you get that, you’re going to get information from them that will help you as a leader understand what’s important to them and what’s going on in their life. Which will bring you right back around full circle to how to answer opportunities for growth by leaning into the support of your team.
If you’d like to learn more about how to answer opportunities for growth, you can continue to enjoy our blog posts and head over to the podcast The Athletics of Business where I discuss all aspects of leadership with a variety of insightful guests.
