How do core values drive your business success

Values are like the sunglasses through which we see the world. In this post, I want to share with you 5 sets of values that are driving your business success at different stages of your business.

You will understand why you need to upgrade your values from time to time, especially when you want to hire new people, scale, and design a bigger vision for your business.

I will share with you 5 typical stages everyone goes through including  leaving  the 9 to 5  in your journey of  building a thriving business.

You will learn how your values can keep you stuck on a certain income level and block business growth and how to overcome that roadblock.

How do our values affect our leadership style?

Values form the foundation of our lives and drive our daily leadership behavior. Values are immensely powerful! and motivate us, help us to lead from our hearts, and explain why we do the things we do and feel the way we feel.

Values are defining our sense of self as a leader. If we want to become more confident in leading teams, and building team culture it is helpful that we not only know how we want to behave but as well what is driving us, our team, and our clients. Our leadership values serve as a compass guiding everything we do - our decisions and our actions. Our values are guiding us on our way to success.

Example. If you believe that employees cannot be trusted you will attract employees that cannot be trusted.

Here are some false beliefs, based on certain values  that block entrepreneurs from growth

• if you believe that only you can take great business decisions you will quickly become the bottleneck of your company
• The belief that only you can do the work, only you are the greatest expert of your lifetime. so that you do not let anyone else do the  design work, the calculation, the negotiation with the customer  By applying this belief- and we do that unconsciously we will quickly become exhausted and experience burnout.
• The belief that you need to win by any means and competition means even destroying others ignoring that there is enough and much more if you would collaborate.

The 5 stages of value systems  of becoming an entrepreneur

These 5 value levels can me be measured and companies use today the 9 levels System created by Dr, Rainer Krumm  based on the research  of Prof. Graves ,and others who studied the science of spiral dynamics of peoples consciousness.

Traditional companies are very  purple. Startups are very red and successful corporations blue with thriving for orange and NGO are very green. Companies have very different value levels depending on their leadership and the beliefs of the owners. I found it remarkable  to see in my practice that the companies who have  strong collaboration related values grow faster.

Stage 1 -The Safety

 You are the expert and you are in a 9 to 5 because of the safety  it provides for you. You are in a tribe  and the "family" gives you protection and the freedom to focus on your expertise, your craft, your work.

However you are depending very much on how your skills set and your work is valued by the Head of that tribe, the boss, the CEO, the team leader, the owner. All decisions are made by the leader and some of those leaders  listen  to their  tribe and some not. The value level of this organization is very Boss centric and doesn´t allow very much individual ambition, individuality , maybe you have rules but not really a structure that allows great experts to act and take decisions for the team.

Good leaders provide  support and care about their tribe, but they are the only final decision makers and that creates a lot of limitations for ambitious experts.  If you have a lot of ambition and your red value level is high you may overstep authority and experience  a lot of conflicts.  Just by leaving the tribe you do not become a better team player, so experiencing conflicts should be rather a trigger to learn the skills how to deal with all kind of conflicts before you embark on your entreprenuers journey.

Many entreprenuers who come form a family business and feel the deep connection and responsibilty for their people will just give you this role model and you may just fall back into that role model after you stepped up to the second stage looking for independency and freedom.

Stage 2 -The  Power

You feel the freedom and act like superman. You take risks and have faith and are driven by your big vision, faith, and willingness to win. You are self-driven, ambitious, and feel confident. You focus mainly on achieving the results and you do not look left or right and there is no or very little work-life balance but mostly you are just in the race and focused on getting results.

in this stage, the red value level becomes more dominant than others, and depending on the culture and other beliefs you may become stuck by defending your wins by fighting others.

The growth of your company is limited to the number of decisions you make., as you are the only decisionmaker. The employees are likely to be waiting for your commands and show very little initiative as they expect the direction from you.

Your ego become after a while your biggest enemy.  You may experience the inner conflict between the freedom to do what want, and what you feel like doing at that moment, and knowing that you need the discipline and willingness to build more structure and include others on another level that is inclusive and empowering.

Most of us feel it and know that there is more but we act in congruency with our values and beliefs and subconsciously drive us to hiring the people that agree with our leadership limitations. Mostly they agree to work for us because they need the money to pay for their living but not because they feel they want to support our big vision. mission.

In the 9 levels Value system, this type of leadership shows in our profile but with a higher- longer  red bar. and some specific values that we are showing in our behavior.

Stage 3 The Structure 

Your business runs like a well-oiled machine. You do not only understand that you need structure so that you can grow but you g value rules, guidelines procedures, and you deeply believe that systems and processes are key to success.  You have implemented  SOP ( Standard Operating Procedures) and invested in adapting proven processes for your business. Modern software tools for planning give transparency to clients, suppliers, and employees. You have a sales process for selling your services and solutions, you have a project planning process for defining your profitable services and solutions, you have a  client onboarding process, and you have a stakeholder influence system and processes for meetings and production workflows that save you time and give all experts in your company the feeling of freedom. 

The more discipline = The more freedom

Mostly yet you hire super-class experts and give these high-class experts the freedom to organize their work by themselves. monitor their work and report on results only so that you have time without supervising or micromanaging them.

You have built an organization with clear functions and processes inside these departments.

But when it comes to new projects, that require either setting u a new business unit, or new department, or at least a cross-functional collaboration the people feel challenged as this is destroying the order. However, as long as everone is in his organization silo and doing his work it would be great to add a bit of innovation, new projects, and new projects. But that will require some mindset shift and the ability of a leader to inspire these fixed structures to collaborate creating new innovative services, and products by collaborating  and moving faster than the standard today So here comes the need to add a new layer of Values and mindset to yourself and your teams, your organization

Stage 4 - The Growth 

You are aware of the different values systems people live by and can get let go of your need for control and reporting of every step of some experts who need that freedom to thrive. These could be key account managers, account managers, software developers, and engineers . 

Their ambition to work more, go faster get results needs space to deliver results. Of course only if they have learned to manage themselves. The freedom that you give them can be the accelerator for innovation and sales growth.

This requires a new style of leadership and of you.  You need to be ready to hold those spaces, take the risks, and be open for the surprises and new challenges these best sales managers, best engineers,  software developers, and marketing experts come up with.  

They will challenge the status quo of your process and procedures by suggesting new ideas. Can you balance maintaining the great company structure and being  open with a beginner's mindset to innovation and growth?

 Are you ready to delegate a  higher level of responsibility to the expert?  Can you hold space for the ambition of people who want to go the extra mile and  beyond?  Great sales teams have these people. and culture. Can you lead such people ? 

Change is inevitable

One thing is for sure staying constant:

everything and everybody is constantly changing.

Stage 5 - The A- Team

Each team member is equally responsible for team results. The team members  can participate and they should in setting the business goals. If the team sets the goals together they feel all  way more responsible for the outcome. The beauty is that it is great not just to be the only person responsible. However, our responsibility as the leader or business owners doesn't go away. You are responsible for hiring such great people in your team who are able to step up. Your teammates need to be on their personal development journey ready to step up and take the lead in their area of expertise.  Every team member needs to be assertive enough to communicate what is on their heart for the sake of the team and the joint results.

In this graph of the 9 levels you see that everyone in this team has the GREEN - Collaboration related Values at their highest in the Team Profile.

There is no practical hierarchy and from the outside you do not see the any difference although on paper there will be one person appointed. 

If you are the owner you will experience that nobody looks just to the boss and waits for your command but they will  tell you what needs to be done and by when.  In this culture where literally 2-3-5 experts think independently about how to get the results, how to grow not just for themselves but how can they deliver a product, a software,  a service, as solution for the clients is fun and highly productive.

But ideally, you need to hire all 5 or 6 experts so they can fully enjoy that process and feel safe.  But growing your company we start usually by putting a  bunch of freelancers together. Be aware that they may have all great expertise but they need to cover their own safety needs first.

All Team members act literally  entrepreneurs who have high , professional skills in their area of expertise. can communicate to resolve the resource problems on their own.

 Here are some skills all team member need to possess to make this team culture work:

1.  general business acumen, 
2. planning skills, 
3. risk management skills, 
4. quality management , 
5. project management ,
6. give and take feedback 
7. business communication skills, 
8. negotiation and sales
9. tolerance of other people 
10. a high level of integrity  
11. Active listening  
12. etc.

Here are some final thoughts for today

We need to know our present values and to design values that serve us best to create the future we envisioned.

Ask yourself the following questions

Do your values support you or what type of values are becoming a roadblock in your entrepreneur and leadership journey?

Signs that you may need to look into the mirror and see the truth so that you can change are:

• Great experts are leaving the team ( not just 1)
• Your revenue is down
• People are more and more  complaining (maybe you do not know)
• Experts are more often ill ( cannot even work from home)

A helpful remedy is a team feedback session or leadership feedback session., so that you get the signs in an early stage ad have time to initiate change proactively. Unfortunately, changing behavior takes time and is not so easy. This is where a coach can help you. If you consider working with us book a session here and find out if we are a good fit.

Helpful Resources:

Free Workbook. Discover your Values: Click here