Ann Rhoades - Built on Values: Creating an Enviable Culture That Outperforms the Competition

Copyright 2011 by Ann Rhoades and Nancy Shepherdson. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Rhoades, Ann, 1944

Built on values : creating an enviable culture that outperforms the competition / Ann Rhoades with Nancy Shepherdson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-470-90192-2 (hardback), 978-0-470-94990-0 (ebk), 978-0-470-94989-4 (ebk), 978-0-470-94988-7 (ebk)

1. Corporate cultureCase studies. 2. Success in businessCase studies. 3. ValuesCase studies. I. Shepherdson, Nancy, 1955- II. Title.

HD58.7.R524 2011

658.4'063dc22

2010043039

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

By Stephen R. Covey

author of The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness

I have believed in what Ann Rhoades is doing since we met at a conference where we were both speaking years ago. We both heard echoes of our beliefs in the others words, a belief that people matter and can be inspired to do great things. What Ann Rhoades has done with this book, producing a blueprint for values-based cultural transformation, meshes completely with those ideas. In order to be successful in a volatile world, you must unleash the goodwill and creativity of your people. You must organize your culture in a way that will help your people achieve great things without constant supervision from above. Set this up right, and people will astonish you regularly with their great ideas and ability to take your organization to a higher level.

Built on Values shows exactly how to organize your culture to make that happen. It is a practical guidebook for transforming an entire organization or just your little corner of the world into a place of caring and passion. Anns Values Blueprint process shows a clear pathway to harness the best impulses of your people to accomplish a wholesale transformation of the way you do business. By aligning all of your processeshiring, rewarding, leadership, metrics, communicationwith values that are meaningful and profound for your people, you can reinforce the idea that your people matter and their actions matter. The productivity that will be unleashed is likely to be nothing short of astonishing.

We have rarely witnessed more corporate leadership failures than we have over the past few years. Debacles in the financial industry, an oil spill in the Gulf, auto industry bankruptcies, and more have put corporate leaders on public display in an almost unprecedented way. And, for the most part, the ones who have failed so publicly have demonstrated, perhaps without intending to, that they have very little moral authority at all and few real values beyond making boatloads of money. Once trouble hits, these organizations are revealed to be among the most fragile and least able to respond nimbly. Their employees and customers simply dont care enough about the continued success of the company to do anything to help as it circles the drainthey may even be actively rooting for its demise. For every one of these failed or critically ill companies, when you look for any correlation between their stated values and their behaviors you will, almost always, find that there is none.

Companies that have significant misalignments between their values and their behavior are all too common, even when the consequences do not make headlines. A company may, for instance, claim to honor the value of cooperation and then set up compensation systems that encourage competition. By their actions and decisions, leaders create a culture, and culture always trumps any strategy you try to implement. To inspire top performance, your organizations strategy needs to be aligned with values that are meaningful for your customers and employees. Values need to be incorporated into the operating instructions of organizationsthat is, into the day-to-day behaviors of its employees and its leaders. You cant just declare your values and hope that people will understand what to do with them. It is absolutely essential that you make values come alive for employees if you want them to change their behavior in ways that reflect those values. In other words, if you want to inspire employees to care about the companys performance, you must tie values and behavior to a few compelling metrics in the company and in their own teams. Simple scorecards showing how these metrics can be moved in response to individual effort are some of the most powerful tools in a leaders arsenal.

Unfortunately, most companies handle metrics by allowing only the leaders to see the important numbers. Concentrating everything in the hands of leaders gives them both too much control and too little ability to execute their strategies through the efforts of enthusiastic employees. Your employees need to see what the score is every week. They need to know how the company is doing, so that they can celebrate wins or help change things if they arent working. The team and the individual need to know that they , not the boss, are responsible for beating the metrics. This is exactly what Ann Rhoades has been promoting for years.

I hope that Anns book convinces leaders that the possibility of success lies in creating a shared vision in their people, based on values and reinforced by hiring, training, and rewards. As the economy recovers, it is time to get this message out so that companies can rebuild their businesses on a stronger foundation. In Built on Values, Ann Rhoades presents a systematic method for integrating values and values-based behavior into the daily life of everyone in the organization. Trust is the new leadership competency for the global economy, but trust cannot be forced. It must be earned.