How to identify and establish your team's core values for making choices guided by who you are. Plus Paul shares how to make Caribbean Chicken on the grill!
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How to identify and establish your team's core values for making choices guided by who you are. Plus Paul shares how to make Caribbean Chicken on the grill!
You can join our Podcast Facebook group here.
You can learn more about Paul Simkins at his website.
We happily work with Buzzsprout for our podcast. See how they can help you and get a $20 Amazon Gift Card after you pay your second invoice!
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This podcast is brought to you by Paul Simpkins and the boldly lead program focusing on helping tech leaders like you in the frustration of low performing teams and losing high quality employees so they can increase productivity by 50%. Go home on time and sleep better at nights. Hello and welcome to the tech leaders Toolbox on Paul Simkins. And we're here today because how you lied today determines how your team succeeds tomorrow. And I want you to know right now that you are definitely a leader, no matter what your role is, whether you have a title or not, you are a leader. Remember that leaders are made not born, and they're made by a commitment to become better each and every day In this episode, we're going to talk about something that will make your hiring you're firing and your decision making easier. It establishes the guidelines for everything you and your team does. Does that sound worthwhile? Great. Let's go. Well, you know, when I first started going to the gym decided years ago, I needed to get in better shape. And so I signed up for a gym and I made an appointment with a fitness coach there. Quick little shameless plug, By the way, I go to Planet Fitness. I've been going to planet fitness for the past few years, and I have a black card membership there, and I absolutely love it because I get to with the black card membership I get. Tau have unlimited guest passes. Aiken basically bring a friend with me every single time I go to the gym as many times as I want. I also have then access to planet fitness is all over the country. So of one, I go on travel to do workshops or key notes in different cities. I can go to the nearest planet fitness and work out. That's a little shameless plug for planet fitness again. I don't get paid by them. They don't sponsor me, but I love what they do. Their planet fitness. It's one of those places where they're very big on. There is no shaming. There's no they don't allow the the people who come in and just want to show off how powerful they are and grunt and groan and clash the weights and all that. It's all about just people getting together, getting in shape. So anyway, so this coach, I go to see this fitness coach to come up with a workout for me, and I go, you know, I want to strengthen my arms. I want to strengthen my legs and I want to work on that stuff and it goes great. But, you know, you also have to work on your core. What's a core? Well, basically, the core is your torso down through your hips, you know, So that includes your abdomen, your back muscles and all of that, he says. You gotta work on that stuff, too, because all of that your core supports your arms into your legs and your spine. And so no matter how powerful you make your legs, no matter how powerful you make your arms without a strong core. Without that strong support in the middle, it's not gonna help you. Any teams and organizations work in much the same way individuals as well. How your organization or your team or even you function and get things done is entirely driven by the core values you hold. They are the non negotiables about who you are, and what do I mean by that non negotiables. That means that no matter what, you will never betray these basic characteristics of the organization that when it comes to, do we do this or do we? They do that. You go back to those core values and those core values tell you how you should behave. And any time you betray those core values, you're eating away at what your organization is really all about. What differentiates you from anyone else, what makes you special and what's allows you to function. And once you do that, well, it makes it hard for anybody to really believe about anything about you anymore. So again, the core values are, in essence, of who you are. They determine the culture of your organization, the attitudes, how you communicate, also, how managers treat employees, how employees treat each other and how everyone treats your clients. Every detail of your operation is determined by those core values. They make decision making better both in the long and the short term view for your organization. In fact, Roy Disney, the brother of Walt Disney, once said making decisions is easier when you know what your values are, and here's a great example of this has happened many years back. Back in 1982. As a matter of fact, uh, there was a big scandal with Tylenol. Some of you may have been around may remember what happened, but what happened was that several containers of Tylenol had been tainted with a poison, and actually, several people lost their lives as a result. Now, within hours of the discovery of this, the president of the Tylenol division of Johnson and Johnson ordered the immediate removal of all containers of Tylenol across the country. Despite the fact that this would cost the company over $100 million Tylenol was Johnson and Johnson's best selling product. In a later interview, when these president of the Tylenol division was asked about how he could make such a decision so quickly in the face of the consequences involved, including the financial loss, he responded by saying he was simply acting in accordance with the values that they had all agreed upon from the very beginning. The result. Today, Tylenol is still one of the most trusted brands out there. Your core values make a difference. Now let's look at a contrast in view of that Here's a quick contrast. It's it's another company's declared core values. This was posted up in everything about who they were. Four keys, respect, integrity, communication and excellent. Do these core values sound good? Yeah, very, very nice. Very good core values. They're naturally, That makes perfect sense. Well, these were the core values of Enron. You remember what happened with that? It's not enough just to have core values. You have to commit to them. You have to be willing toe live by those core values. They have to be the non negotiables of who you are, because any time you're willing to compromise any of them, it is no longer a core value of your organization and is no longer one of your personal core values. Give you another real life example, eh? Organization I've worked with, they're called Inside Out Jail Ministries. They do great work in local jails. What they do is they helped take inmates who were ready to get out, and they help prepare them for the outside world, both in terms of getting productive work and in choosing good habits and in getting away from the environment that got them there to begin with. It's been a great tool for reducing recidivism in the jails and all, uh, terrific program, but it is a ministry, and one of the things that is important to them is a sharing of their faith. Well, they're program was doing so well that the jail where they launched the program came with them and said, Man, this is fantastic. We want you to doom or of this. We wanted to do more of this program and expand it. But do you think you could tone down that religion stuff a bit? Well, they wanted to expand the program, but they weren't quite sure what to do. So I was coaching with their CEO and with her board and one of things we talked about. They talk about this decision, haven't having to make this decision. And I said, Well, tell me, what are the core values of your organization? They couldn't really tell me. Despite being a ministry, they couldn't really tell me what their core values were. They didn't have them written down certainly anywhere, so they weren't really sure. So we went through a series of exercises to help help them identify and establish those core values got them written down on paper. And one of the core values that they established was their faithfulness that above all their ability to share their faith was an integral part of who they are. So with that, when we revisited that decision, they had to make where the jail was telling them, Hey, that's great. Can you tone down the religion stuff once they compare, looked at that and evaluated that based on their core values, they were able to turn around to them and say, No, this is who we are. Take it or leave it You know what the jail did? They took it. They've expanded the program. They're doing warm or every day, and they did not have to compromise the essence of who they are. When you stick by those core values, there is almost always a payoff to it. So what makes a good set of core values have heard a different kinds of core values shared by different organizations, and most of them, well, they're not very good, because, really, what a core value is supposed to be for you is some simple adjectives that describe who you are, and I wanted to give you some examples of some core values both some bad ones and some good ones, so that you can good a good idea of what they should be like. So, first of all I wanted to share with you. This is hub spot, and if you're not familiar with Hub Spot, they're in online, Um, what they call inbound marketing organization and their company values include things like integrity, boldness, honesty, trust, accountability, commitment to customers, passion, fun, humility, continuous learning, ownership, constant improvement, leadership, diversity, innovation, quality, teamwork and simplicity. And, again, good example. Most of those are adjectives describing the organization, and in fact, the only real issue I would have with hub spots. Core values is there's way too many of them. In fact, some of them are even really kind of redundant. But there's way too many of these core values. You generally wanted to be somewhere in the area of Reed of five having this many, which again, this is something like 13 way too many core values, and they need to reduce that list down a bit. Now here's an organization that used to have a great set of core values they have modified them over the years, and that's Google. And here's Google's current set of core values. Focus on the user and all else will follow. It's best to do one thing really, really well. Fast is better than slow. Democracy on the Web works. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer. You can make money without doing evil. There's always more information out there. The need for information crosses all borders. You can't be serious without a suit. And finally, great just isn't good enough. Now again on several levels. These are not really excellent core values. Most of these they're not really values as much as they are standards for behavior in general. Or they could be a mission statement. They could be a lot of things, but they're not really core values, and there's too many of them. And it's more like a manifesto than it is a set of core values. Again, they used to have some some pretty good core values, and then they've adjusted him over the years, and it's not as good as it once. Waas. Now here's an organization has good set of core values and just to give you a comparison sake. It's a company called Bee's Wax, and they have just four core values. Transparency, control, actually three. Transparency, control, flexibility. That's the core values right there, just three items so long that lines that have been touting core values. And I thought it be good. I should probably share mine with you. These are the core values for my organization and again, Like I said, you generally want somewhere in the area of 3 to 7. Five is the ideal number, but anywhere in 327 and I actually have six. And here they are trustworthy, faithful, humble, bold, innovative, smart. Just those six adjectives describe the organization, and again, I do have them written out. And with them. Each of those is an explanation of what we mean. What that describes when we're being bold. What does that mean when we're being innovative? What does that mean? But these are again our non negotiables above all else. We will always be faithful. We will always be trustworthy. We'll always be humble about who we are will be smart about what we do, and we will be bold and innovative in everything we do, because that's the essence of again changing the leadership landscape in corporate America today is all about that. How do you come up with, well, your own build your own set of core values, And again, you want to be ableto have these written down because you're going to share them a lot. So first of all the things I'm gonna talk about here, I've provided some little templates to help you with this. So if you're interested in those templates, you can go to our Facebook group, the tech Leaders Toolbox Facebook Group, and you'll be able to download them from there. Or you can simply send me an email to T l toolbox at boldly lead dot com. Send me an email to T l Toolbox at boldly lead dot com, and I will send you those templates so that you could use them for building your own set of core values. So it's a simple five step process here. The first step is you want to identify a list of adjectives that you feel describe who you are or want to be. Now what I recommend is if you have a team work with the team on this, all of you all get together in a room and brainstorm about it. And by brainstorming is you just set a time limit, usually 10 to 15 minutes. Everybody just throws adjectives out and you write them down on a piece of paper or on a white board or on an easel or something. And the rule on brainstorming is, there's no evaluation of the ideas. Everybody just throws him out. You don't talk about him, you write them down. Once the brainstorming is done and you come up with your list than your next step is, you're going to go buy through them one by one and discuss each and eliminate the ones that don't get a majority Buy in from the group. So in other words, if you're the only one who likes it, that's probably not a good description, and you want to pare this down. You'll keep going through this until you pare down your list to about 10 to 15 items at the most. Once you've got these 10 to 15 items, you're going to use the decision grid to rate each one of the adjectives against each other. Voting for each In other words, let's say again, if I compose, compare bold and innovative, which one's more important to me being bold or being innovative and ranking them that way? And then once you completed the decision grid, you count up how many times each one is voted for. That determines your list. Count the votes, the highest votes win, and you're gonna take anywhere from the top three to just top seven vote getters. Again. Five is the ideal number that is now your set of core values. Write them down right up in explanation for each one. Print that out, post it everywhere. Put it on your website. Put it up around the office space where everybody is going to see it because you want to constantly remind everybody this is who we are. This is what we stand for. Now watch again. If you want the template for that for how to go through building your own set of core values, go to the our Facebook Group, the tech leaders Toolbox, Facebook Group, or send me an email at TL Toolbox at boldly lead dot com. Work on those core values. That's the essence of who you are. you want to do that before you write a mission statement before you write anything else about your organization, start with the core. Start with those core values because they support everything else. We'll be back in just a moment while you're here. Take a moment right now to go ahead and subscribe to the tech leaders Toolbox podcast. You'll find the button to subscribe right here on the page. Do that and you'll always be up to date on The bold and innovative leadership principles were sharing here. Oh, and come join the tech leaders. Toolbox. Facebook Group is well, we will all discuss these concepts in more detail and answer your questions. So subscribe today and share this with your friends. All right, so this is the portion of the show now where we're going to share with you. Like I said, I love outdoor cooking. I do a lot of it and just about everything I do grilling, do smoke cooking. I have my own smoker and with a side firebox, and I use real wood. I do smoke cooking a lot. I also camp a lot, so I use open fire cooking and I do a lot of stuff with Dutch ovens. I mean, one of the most versatile tools you can ever have is a cast iron Dutch oven. There's so much you can do with it anyway. I love outdoor cooking, and so I've shared every episode. I share a recipe with you that you can. If you love outdoor cooking as well, you can use it outdoors, but a lot of him you can do indoors as well, and I try to share that with you. The recipe I got this time I actually got this off of a wet website called Taste of Home, and it is delicious. It's a grilling recipe, but you're really gonna love it. And it's called Caribbean Chicken. And again, you're gonna do this on the grill. And the biggest thing is, is what you're making is you're making a Caribbean marinade that you're gonna marinate the chicken in. That's going to give it a real nice flavor. And so what you need for this recipe is you need 1/2 cup of lemon juice and about 1/3 of a cup of honey. You need some canola oil, three tablespoons canola oil you need to slice up six green onions. Slice up some jalapeno peppers. Make sure that you see them and then chop them up about three teaspoons of dried thyme and then a little bit of salt, some ground allspice and some ground nutmeg. You're gonna mix all that together, and then you want to use that to marinate six boneless, skinless chicken breast halves. What I usually do with this, I get like a gallon sized Ziploc bag to get six of them in there, you probably need to, and you'll mix together your ingredients and you'll pour about half of the marinade each bag. Throw your chicken in there, squeeze some air out, seal them up, put them in the refrigerator, and you generally want to let this marinade just take a little prep time. So you wanna let this marinade foot marinate for at least about four hours, preferably 6 to 8 hours. So this is something you can do the night before. Prep your marinade. Put the chicken breast in the zip locks at the marinade, zip him up, put him in the refrigerator. Let him sit overnight in the refrigerator so it's ready for the next day. Once you bring them out, then you're going to brick. Remove the chicken and throw the marinade away, and then on your grill rack, you're gonna grill the chicken over medium heat or again. If you want to do in the oven, broil it about four inches from the heat of the broiler and your broil each side for about 4 to 6 minutes, or until the internal temperature of each breast reaches about 165 degrees. Now, if you reserve some of the marinade beforehand, which is a good idea, then what you can do is you can actually occasionally base the chicken while it's cooking. And again you'll have a real nice, ah, sweet flavor to it. Nice little Caribbean flavor again, that's Caribbean chicken. If you like that recipe and you want it, all you have to do is go to our Facebook group. I have a Facebook group called Smoke and Ash, where were all about outdoor cooking, and you can go out there and you can get this recipe. Or again just send me an email to TL Toolbox at boldly lead dot com, and I'll gladly sent to the recipe along the same lines if you have a favorite recipe you would like to share with everyone, send it to me a TL toolbox at boldly lead dot com or share it on my Facebook group, the Smoke and Ash Facebook group. And if you share it there and I share it on the podcast, I will actually give you credit for having shared that recipe with us. And I mentioned your name on the air and give you credit for having shared it with us. All right, so today we talked about the importance of our core values and establishing those core values. You want to get to work on that that is so important. I would strongly recommend you set aside a couple of hours very soon, get your team together and work on establishing this core values. And if you're interested in the collateral material, the templates and all that that will help you do that, just contact me and we'll get that out to you. One last thing. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast because that way you'll get notified every time a new episode comes out. And, of course, don't forget to come out to the tech leaders toolbox, Facebook group, where if you have any questions about what we talked about today, you can post them up on there, and I also will occasionally post up follow up questions on the topic of the episode. And we can interact with other people who are listeners on other people who are into leadership development on that Facebook group. That's it for this episode. Go out and be the leader you were meant to be.