The importance of living your company values

Displaying your company values is one thing, living and delivering on them is paramount.

Not every client all of the time is going to be happy, that is just a fact of business. We are a service industry and with that comes expectations from each cleint we deal with, specifically around the experience they have had with our business.

I think there is always the absolute drive when you own a business to deliver perfection at every opportunity with every client interaction, but, we have to be real about the fact that sometimes things don't go exactly to plan and that sometimes we have a client that feels underwhelmed with their interaction.

Every business has a set of values, whether they are words or a mission statement or whatever you like to call them, they are usually displayed on their website somewhere and maybe placed around the office for staff to see. We all like to think that is enough and by doing that we are then living those values or that statement we have made.

I had a conversation with a client the other day, they were not excited by an event that had occurred, it was not something that we could have controlled or could have done anything different to avoid, it was just something that happened. The interesting thing for me was that as part of the conversation, our company values were the first thing the client drew my attention too - FOCUSED. INTELLIGENT. COMPASSIONATE. VISIONARY which are clearly outlined on our website as part of the Thought Leaders Brand. My comment to them was that whilst I can appreciate the event that has occured which was not ideal for them, I believed we had upheld those values and more importantly, had done everything we could after the fact to continue to uphold those values. Sometimes things go wrong, the critical thing is how you handle when something does go wrong.

So, the thought that came out of it for me and the reminder I would like to share is that we have these values we say we have and it is super important that we do not forget them, they do not get lost and that we are thinking about them at every opportunity in our business, most importantly, we are delivering on them.

If we are not considering our values and delivering on them, delete them from the website, they are empty, hollow and in fact meaningless.

Our values are proudly displayed as no matter what, I believe we uphold the values of those 4 words, every member of the team does, day in and day out.