Many a company has gone out of business because management failed to safeguard corporate values. Institutional identity can eventually morph into something undesirable, once a destructive ethos takes hold within a corporation.
Consider how many once successful CEOs have lost respect and power when they lost their moral compass.
Do you have an active, ongoing strategic plan to ensure your company’s ethos doesn’t drift from the founder’s vision? It’s true that a fast-paced business environment may not leave a lot of opportunities for conducting a strategic analysis of your firm’s operations. Even so, if entrepreneurs really understood the benefits, they’d be running to that conference room.
Here’s an overview of what you can do to ensure your firm’s core values don’t drift, regardless of how much your business operations may adapt and change to emerging opportunities. Of course, sometimes a purposed shift in a company’s ethos is a good thing, such as when a company decides to revamp its commitment to protecting natural resources.
Succession planning should include discussion of core competencies and core beliefs. Business managers rarely measure the drift in ethical behavior that happens when a strong personality in the group may be driving the process solely for self-aggrandizement or other even more disturbing reasons.
Some individuals in the business world possess a much weaker inner compass. In a large company, that may not have much of an impact over the long term. But in a small company, one member of the group can hold a lot of sway over those day-to-day moral decisions.
One solution is to convene an internal meeting to revisit core values and core competencies at least once per year. That way no single individual will feel as if the meeting was solely for the unspoken purpose of going after a particular employee or manager.
And here’s another idea: Bring a group of CEOs together to glean sage wisdom from other business leaders in non-competing sectors – men and woman who have also wrestled with how to keep core values centric to a businesses enterprise.