Authentic brand values are one of the most critical parts of your brand strategy. Most companies have some version of them posterized on a wall in their often – often labeled as ‘Core Values’.

So many companies find it necessary to have these values but very few of them actually have ones that are distinctive – truly authentic to the brand they’re building.

Think about it: how many times have you seen companies with values like ‘customer service’ and ‘quality’ and ‘professionalism’?

It’s like all these organizations use the same 10-word handbook of ‘core values’ and then just pick their favorite 5 to 7. And while these values aren’t usually bad, in and of themselves, they leave everyone (leadership, employees, customers, and even vendors) wanting something more.

True, authentic brand values help inform everyone about the core beliefs and ethics of the organization. They flow from the purpose of the company. And when they’re expressed deeply and creatively, they become something much more powerful than a list of words that everyone learns on Day 1 of employment and then never thinks about again.

Let’s take the example of Southwest Airlines for a moment. Here are their values:

What can we notice about these values? They start with ‘why’ and are highly internalized. They’re specific. And they are unique.

Look at the first one: ‘Warrior Spirit’ brings to mind resoluteness, tenacity, and action. It helps us identify that this is not just about behavior (outward actions) but a mental state. It shows us how the value can be internalized and then expressed outwardly.

Southwest could have just said: “action” or “tenacity”. But these would have only guided us to an outward behavior. Instead, they depict the frame of mind representatives of the organization need to be in – and if they’re not, no outward action will be quite right.

And when we think about the experiences Southwest has built, they reflect that their brand values start from within. They’re not just surface level, superficial beliefs that everyone in the organization talks about but doesn’t really believe or internalize.  No, it’s clear that most staff and leadership, in most situations, really believe in these values. And that leads to truly authentic, resonant experiences that keep customers coming back again and again.

So maybe you’ve got some brand values already. How deep do they go? Are they truly unique and different? Do they help everyone in your company really understand the mindset of the brand? Do they inspire people to create experiences that ring true to the brand?

If the answers are not a resounding ‘yes’ it might be worth revisiting your brand values. And as you do, here are two common missteps in discovering your true brand values. This will help you discover and communicate your values with authenticity and clarity.

I often find this misstep with companies with strong, visionary, action-oriented leaders. These leaders mean well – and they are great at getting everyone on the same page about where they want to go as an organization. They see the world in outcomes and goals – what are we trying to achieve? And then point everything back to these future achievements.

The problem is that values are intrinsically not goals. If they were they would constantly need to change. Instead, we should think of values as beliefs or ethics or viewpoints on the world. They are lasting guideposts for how a brand should behave.

Here’s a common goal that is confused for a value: ‘Success’.

You might be asking, “That actually sounds like a decent brand value. I mean success isn’t bad, right? Shouldn’t our organization be aiming for success?”

Sure, success is great to aim for. But success is not what you value. It’s the end goal. It’s the outcome. ‘We are striving toward X and if we get there, we’ve achieved success.’

But if we remind ourselves that values are beliefs or viewpoints on how things should be done, we realize that ‘success’ isn’t really a belief or viewpoint on the world. It doesn’t tell us how to think about our work. It doesn’t guide our mindset as we execute for the brand. Nor does it tell us how we should go about getting to that successful end. It simply states where the endpoint is.

And let’s be brutally honest for a moment, everyone defines success differently. So maybe it’s not even a great way to communicate your goals, let alone a ‘value’.

Even if you get more specific with your success: profits, revenues, strategic goals, expansion, employee development, acquisitions…these aren’t brand values.

They’re all endpoints. They merely tell you, ‘hey, we did it!’ Values stand the test of time. They outlast your temporary goals and they don’t change with each year’s new strategic plan. They are the pillars that support your brand. They’re the rules by which you play your game.

This is probably the most common misstep. It’s far too easy to mistake the operational necessities of your organization for values. If you’re in the business of making tires, you might be very tempted to make sure “Tires” is your #1 brand value. And if you have customers, it sure helps to keep them around if you create a good experience for them…so let’s get ‘customer service’ up on that wall poster!

But just like goals, these are not true brand values. They’re operational imperatives. The actual needs of marketing, selling, producing, delivering, and collecting payment for products and services are simply the table stakes for a business. If you don’t care about your products or your customers or your operations…good luck keeping the lights on, let alone creating a brand that connects deeply with people.

How do you know if your brand values are edging into a statement of operational necessity? Check your competitors. What are their stated core values? If you find any that run across organizations (including your own) it’s highly likely these aren’t brand values. These are simply statements of what it takes to do business in your industry.

And beyond that, stating operational needs as values can harm you in the long run. How would Nike have thrived as one of the most sought-after brands of all time if they had made one of their core brand values ‘running shoes for pro athletes’? For many years that is all they did (and their designers and engineers prided themselves in their niche focus). But if they’d formalized that as a value, plastered it everywhere, and if Phil Knight had made it his daily mantra, they’d never have grown into the incredible brand they are today. Instead, they made ‘achievement’ and ‘victory’ their core values. These spoke to the deeper, more foundational beliefs that drove both their entry as a pro-shoe producer and their eventual growth into hundreds of other products.

I guess I can caveat this one a bit: if there’s something particularly interesting, distinctive, or unique to your operations it MIGHT be worth calling out as a brand value. Or if there are some things that just have to be top of mind all the time, forever, then, by all means, call them out. BUT be careful, if you stick with only these, you’ll find yourself lacking in brand values that truly reflect the deeper attitudes and beliefs that really make your organization interesting.

If we look at the example of Southwest’s values again, they do highlight three more operational values: Safety and Reliability, Friendly Customer Service, Low Cost. But they do so only after outlining three deeper, more attitudinal values (Warrior Spirit, Servant’s Heart, and Fun-LUVing Attitude) that foundationally inform the latter three. If it weren’t for those initial three values, I don’t think Southwest would be as iconic, distinctive, and interesting of a brand as they are.

As you work to discover your authentic brand values, keep these common missteps in mind and start asking yourself, “What do we really believe? What set of values drive the way we do things? How can we make them memorable and compelling?”

It’s one thing to find your brand values. Do the hard work of digging deep, confronting your wishful thinking, and being brutally honest about what your organization really values. But you can’t stop there. Turn those values into a digestible, understandable, memorable framework for creating all your brand experiences. Break them down – explain what they mean. Get into real-world examples. You should show people how to use them in their everyday execution of the brand – whether in marketing, HR, customer service, sales, or even operations. And then give people memorable and ‘sticky’ ways to communicate them. I’m a big fan of slogans and mantras…but it’s your brand so you do you.

And as always, if you need a helping hand, we’re here. We’ve got some great free tools (like our Brand Values Class or Brand Values Worksheets) to help you out in your discovery process. Or go deeper and contact us about our brand strategy workshops and consulting services. We love helping brands find their authentic selves and show them to the world.

And remember, you are remarkable.

Differentiating yourself in the market is a process, much like a high school grad going to college to find himself. Luckily, you’re a business, not an Adventure Education major (yeah, that’s a thing), and we don’t need a year, months or even weeks to get to the bottom of this. Let’s talk about how we can get to 5 brand personality traits in as little as 5 days.

Most brands already have a personality, but without a formal process of realizing it, you don’t know how to live it out. Likely, you already have places where it comes out. And people like it. But because you don’t want to alienate yourself or embarrass anyone, you hide your brand personality.

So let’s get to it. The goal of this article is to give you an example process, so it’ll be easy to do it on your own or manage the process effectively if you hire it out.

More formally, the goal: create and develop a list of 3-5 brand personality traits that can be translated into your communication, making you super-interesting to your ideal target audience.

Why should you care? Because when you’re considering working with someone, you want to work with people who think for themselves, who fulfill their promises and have some kind of sense of humor. People who get things and just seem to understand what’s going on around them.

Don’t you?

I might be a little Archie-Bunkerish when it comes to John Lennon, but let’s take a page out of his book anyway. Let’s imagine.

In other words, for those who identify with your business and your way of doing things, what if you could be considered the best?

Because when you’re that brand, you have a point of view.

But you’ll never do it if you’re too shy, if you haven’t developed your personality and built your business on it and clients who expect it.

This process yields 3-5 personality traits that you can then formalize into a list of traits that guide how you communicate and even the kinds of products or services you make.

Go through the section “Which most closely represents your brand and why?” and make sure to talk about why you chose what you chose. For instance, you have a choice of sodas that represent your brand. But if you choose Fanta, that doesn’t mean your brand is Fanta. Remember: WHAT you chose is less important than WHY you chose it. And it’s your job now to talk about why you chose Fanta and why it represents you.

Choosing the words in the next step can feel like a lot of work. But you can make it go fast. Set a timer and make everybody move through them quickly. Don’t think, just circle. As you pare things down to your final words, you’ll be looking for between three and five of your top traits.

You’ll take these traits and you’ll say which ones are your current traits and which ones are your desired traits. Take your current traits and then turn them into sentences. Those sentences represent your brand personality traits and why.

Optionally, if you have traits that you desire to possess, but don’t think you quite have them yet, then write sentences for those as well. You may find those helpful in understanding how far away you are and potentially what kinds of things you’d have to do to change and adopt those traits. You might also find that some of those traits will never be consistent with your other traits or with your business.

Now spend the next 5 days refining them in order to have them ready to finalize on day 5. Assign a person who will write them and who you think can capture the deeper meaning. It doesn’t even have to be a senior person. And that person should be asking for feedback almost immediately.

Make it your goal to have them fully expressed and vetted in 5 days.

None of this matters if you’re not able to live out your brand boldly and clearly in the world. Shy brands don’t inspire others. Your ability to directly and consistently live out your brand personality depends on getting a good start with a process like this one.

And remember, this process is not a long, drawn-out, vague kind of process. It can be done in one day. With refinement coming in the next day or week. But it needs focus for that one day.

If you do that and you sequester yourselves and fully complete the process, you will find that you’ll come out with a very good understanding of the personality traits that your company possesses, but has never maybe talked about. And you will understand the difference between aspirational, “want to,” traits, and ones that are actually true. And you will also gain the objectivity to understand the difference between what you want to think your personality traits are based on the fact that you’re the owner, and what they actually are based on the company you’ve created.

And then, over the next week, refine those and have fun with them. Think of examples and play with them. Talk them over and find out if there are things that you do that don’t exhibit that personality trait. Also, talk about the ones that do and how you actually do live those things out. Then double down.

This is how you make your writing fresh, your design unique and come across as genuine. Because before you can come across as genuine, you have to know yourself.

Great branding impacts your entire brand presence, including everything you say and do. Your brand’s personality is an important — and very visible — part of your that presence that builds favor and trust with your customers. These 4 principles for discovering your brand personality will help you as you nail down your own unique, authentic brand personality.

Shortcuts can be good. As a kid, I was always looking for a shortcut to the store, so I wouldn’t have to walk around the block. But branding is a process. And when you don’t understand the process, the shortcuts you choose could actually waste your time and money, at best. And at worst, they could sabotage the whole process, stealing punch and conviction from your results and from the buy-in you’d otherwise get from your stakeholders.

The good news is that most of us have a head start. We see our brand personality traits peeking out every once in a while. But just as soon as that happens, we worry we’ll be criticized for being quirky. “Stakeholders want to see responsibility,” we say. And then part of our unique personality dies.

But not permanently. It turns out that when this happens, your personality is only mostly dead (thanks, Miracle Max). And a solid process for discovering your brand personality can bring that personality back to life and organize your traits in such a way as to make them usable. Even powerful.

In fact, it’s more than that. Because these are just some basic, but high-leverage, rules to make you smarter about branding.

We almost forgot the most important question. For some of you, this is just a refresher. But have you ever worked with someone who consistently communicated confusingly and it made you not trust them? You could tell they didn’t have the character to really follow through on what they were promising. You don’t want to be that brand.

Then there are those people who seem solid and trustworthy, but they don’t seem to really be that savvy with their communication. They might even have a ton of experience in their field, but they just don’t seem to quite understand you. They struggle to sort out what you know and don’t know and how you think. Although it is a much better situation than dealing with people who lack morals, it’s not ideal. It’s especially not ideal for a consultative relationship where you’ll need to communicate and develop a sense of understanding so that you’re not constantly clarifying things for them. Because that’s tedious and takes forever.

You don’t just want competent people; you want people who get you and who you get in return. Your personality is what tells potential customers that you are competent and understand them.

Brand personality pays dividends.

We might think brand personality matters more for Business-to-Consumer brands. And it definitely has its own character – B2C brands can get away with more because of sheer numbers in their advertising. Their niches can be smaller in proportion to the total world population, while still being large enough to sustain a business. You can see how a B2C company can hyper-specialize with a sense of humor that can gain a cult following. This is a little harder to do in B2B. But it is possible.

In fact, there are some brands that have built a following not because they just happen to be in the right place at the right time, but because they really know who they’re talking to and they’re not afraid to talk in their language.

For instance, in the defense industry, they might talk about things like “lethality.” But you might not talk in such frank and blunt terms if you’re talking to a general audience of business people who are more concerned with developing cultures of empathy. But whatever industry you find yourself in you know how your particular audience talks and whether or not you fit in with them.

So let’s look at the pitfalls in the process to see if we can glean a few insights to help us make sense of the process and what it’s for. So the question is: what do people do to mess up their brand when it comes to personality?

Let’s look at each one.

You are not consistent. This means that you are not consistently showing these personality traits. When Resound creates personality traits for a client, we cover a few bases, so you can speak consistently and with boldness by defining how you act during different situations.

We write guides for our clients that cover areas like tone, voice, and mood. This shows people (employees and contractors, both present-day and future) how to create on behalf of your brand in a way that’s consistent, but appropriate for the situation.

The takeaway: Consistency comes from defining your values to a sufficient level of detail, making your brand decisions followable and scalable.

You haven’t shown people what to expect; you haven’t let them get to know you. We’ve all been in those situations where we first meet someone and they become a really good friend and someone we can joke with in a way that we can’t with other people. But that didn’t happen on the first day. At first, they had to get to know you and you had to get to know them. You don’t want to offend them by being too forward right off the bat. You want them to get to know you, laugh at their jokes, they laugh at your jokes, and pretty soon you have a connection. And then you can say whatever you want. But not at first. This is a process. You have to let people get to know you, so they properly interpret it when you do something daring.

The takeaway: Roll things out with clarity, but with an increasing level of boldness, so both your employees and other stakeholders, can keep up with your style.

You have not gone through a formal process. A formal process gives you quick results while at the same time allowing you to vet all your ideas and all your thoughts about your personality. At Resound, we guide you through the process with your team. But what if you’re someone who wants to do it themselves? Make sure to download our brand personality worksheet and follow the process. Because a process will give you the proper amount of circumspection and will help you avoid backtracking when you start creating things.

The takeaway: Give yourself the necessary time to execute your discovery process. It doesn’t have to take forever, but stay present and engaged when you’re in the process.

You choose personality traits that don’t fit you. This is like the last one, where are you start to choose personality traits based on things that you like rather than things that fit you. This is why it’s important to have a team around you of people who are not exactly of the same personality as you. If you’ve surrounded yourself with people who think just like you, you’re less likely to notice when you choose a personality trait you like rather than one that you actually exhibit and can embody.

The takeaway: Get the right people involved, so you don’t create a brand around yourself, rather than your company, because there’s a difference.

Branding is essentially everything people know and believe about your company. And it’s in your power to make sense of it all for them. But it’s a process. One which, if you understand it, can be a powerful tool in your hand as you discover and define your brand for a world out there that’s hungry for your point of view. They want (and need) to see your services and products delivered in a way that only you can.

If you can just bring your personality traits out to play.

If you want help discovering your unique, authentic, and compelling personality traits, our free Brand Personality video class may be a great place to start. Or jump ahead of the class and grab our Personality Traits Worksheet and start digging deep with your team.

It’s hard to measure brand. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important. As practical people, we know better. At Resound, we’ve worked with some pretty tough, focused brands who don’t like to waste money. So it made sense to us when we saw branding elder statesman Marty Neumeier describe his brand ladder. He insists — and we agree — that branding not only increases your value in the minds of your customers, but it’s measurable. Let’s talk about how.

Neumeier’s ability to create concrete philosophy around the value of branding helps everyone in business, especially B2B businesses whose rate of repeat customers and unpaid advertising by customers (free, word-of-mouth advertising), depend on their brand.

But even as you’re thinking about measurement, remember that no gimmick or measurement should be your primary focus. All these methods of measurement should lead you to actually deserve return customers and the word-of-mouth the experience generates.

First off, let’s remember that just because something’s hard to measure doesn’t mean it’s not important. And if there is a way to come close to measuring it or approximate measurement, that might be better than measuring nothing.

Let’s look at each one, using Neumeier’s terminology, for consistency.

Neumeier calls it “satisfaction.” You call it “returning customers.”

The truth is there are a few ways to measure branding. But what are the signs? Because if we know the signs, then we can measure.

Simply put, do customers come back? Do they show signs that they’re interested in continuing to build that relationship at least in the short term until something better comes along? This is your first sign that your brand is solid.

A strong brand works from the inside out, putting your team on the same page, singing from the same sheet of music, making success less accidental, and giving ownership to everyone at your company. This, combined with a great external message, both makes a promise and keeps it.

But maybe you think it’s a good sales team and a good customer service team. You might say “We don’t do branding. We just preach a set of values consistently inside and outside the company that’s more than talk, but turns to action, showing integrity in everything we do.” Dude, you just defined the most important part of branding.

But sometimes people just want confidence. Think about a big consultancy, like McKinsey. If you want to know whether your business strategy is sound, you ask for their mark of approval. Once you have that, it’s almost impossible for anyone to blame you for a bad business decision. There’s value in a brand name.

Neumeier calls it “delight.” You call it “referrals.”

What the heck is “delight” you say? It’s creating a pleasant surprise that the customer wasn’t expecting that’s in-line with your values and makes sense and extends the experience.

Why do you care? Because it means referrals. Delighted people tell others about you. They defend you in conversations because they feel they know you. And they like you.

Here’s where business-to-business is a little different. Although you can delight your customers by making them look smart and furthering their careers because of the great decisions they make, it’s not always such a personal experience as if you were an end-customer. In B2B, you’re more likely to get referrals because people want you to know they use you. It might be a status thing that reflects on the company.

These are examples. The chances that this list is perfect for your business are pretty small. The real magic is when you discover how to build your measuring tools from your strategy, creating bookends that both plan and then find out if it worked, allowing you to adjust and troubleshoot until you have the perfect system for your brand.

So decide the following, this is your strategy:

How will we measure satisfaction?

How will we measure delight?

There are many ways to apply these measurements, but the best way will come not from an off-the-shelf measurement funnel or referral program, but from your brand itself. So let it originate honestly, through conversations that ask the questions above.

In the end, this comes back to this question:

Because if it comes from your values, it matches your personality and connects with your customers in a way that shows you “get” them, you’ll have the best chance to win their loyalty, because you’ll have earned it.

If you’re looking for more practical tips like these, consider signing up for our newsletter, registering for our next webinar, or subscribing to our book launch mailing list which will have tons of exclusive insights from our upcoming book.

It’s tough for some companies to invest resources in building a great brand when they can instead spend money on making the next sale. And yet, if you ignore why you stand apart, you can be easily replaced. The question is not whether to brand, but rather how much, where and how? So let’s talk about the two stages of branding, so we can learn how to focus our efforts.

Note: As we learn what it means to deal with COVID-19, and as we watch to see what the economy will do, this is a great opportunity to talk about tightening things up. That doesn’t mean we stop operating. In fact, it can mean quite the opposite, but with more discipline. And to exercise discipline first means developing an understanding of what you’re dealing with. At no time are organization and optimistic sobriety more important than times like these. So this conversation lays a foundation to help us understand where branding leads. It’s the first step in understanding how to allocate your resources, spending precisely what you need on branding and marketing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0rC22ONF4c&feature=youtu.be

Resound serves some of the toughest-minded, growth-oriented, business-to-business companies in the greater Phoenix area. They don’t suffer fools or indulge themselves in foolish spending. The difference is that these businesses also know what they’re about as people — that flows into their business, causing them to grow in sophistication. Because sophistication comes in the trenches, where you have to make real decisions about whether you’ll do what’s right or what’s expedient.

Businesses that don’t choose to do what’s right never develop the sophistication that comes from that experience. When you fail to avail yourself of each opportunity to do what’s right, you forfeit depth and strength of character. And it’s the same for companies as it is for individual people.

Here’s what we’ve learned from our experience. I hope it helps you make sense of your situation. Branding comes under fire for being something that only the big companies can afford to do. Yet we can say from experience that our success has not made our clients undisciplined. They make bigger deals and work with better companies because they’re worth working with.

They care about money, and they care about operations. But they also care about doing it the right way. And they know how to talk about it in a way that makes them desirable to do business with. Because aside from the ethical problems, companies that don’t care about anything bigger than money or efficiency create for themselves a glass ceiling. They don’t know why they can’t get bigger deals or keep relationships.

It’s the companies with bigger values that see unlimited growth. They’re the ones who seem so generous and joyful, even in tough times. They’re the ones who come out of hard times stronger and usually with a larger market share.

So how do you measure it? If you’re still with me, you agree that branding becomes an outflow of your values and gives you something much bigger to offer the market. The next question is, how do you measure the effectiveness of your brand? After all, it’s one thing to define your values, and it’s another thing to see them inform, coordinate and align your entire culture to the point that everyone, even outside the company, feels the energy of the brand.

Marty Neumeier talks about it as a ladder that starts with satisfaction, goes to delight, moves to engagement, and then leads to empowerment. Most B2B companies will be interested in the first two: satisfaction and delight.

Satisfaction begins with fairness and trust. They’ve purchased from you and want to do it again.

When clients look for opportunities to endorse you. When customers are delighted, they don’t just return. They identify with you and actively tell people about you. They can’t wait to tell other people about you. They’re proud to have your sticker on their car or proud that they use tools from your company because it means they have legitimacy. This happens in B2B all the time because it shows you’re at a certain status.

Great brands create a sense of direction within an organization that creates a sense of direction outside of the organization. If everyone in the organization understands what the company is all about, measuring success and serving customers in a consistent way, you now have what is the starting place for a brand.

It teaches people that you stand for something great. Companies that only talk about money with their employees, in terms of overtime, cost savings, efficiency and things like that, teach their employees that the important things are financial and directly measurable. And if it’s measurable then it matters and if it’s not measurable then it doesn’t matter.

Branding, on the other hand, lives out those good values in relationships out there in the world, getting everyone focused on a cause that’s bigger…something you share with your audience.

When you care about money, but believe you get money NOT by thinking about money, but by helping others, it shows. Companies that care about money and care about making a lot of it, but also care about offering value and doing things that benefit other people, are able to align all those things. They align that desire to make a lot of money with an investment in their values.

But the opposite is true, too. To focus on your values creates distrust. You can tell when someone is just all about the transaction and the money, and you feel used.

All this reminds me of a quote I heard a while back.

You can have anything you want if you can help enough people get what they want.

-Zig Ziglar

The truth in this is that you, by being someone who cares about people and also cares about making a lot of money, can make those two things work together in your brand.

This is why it’s so important to define your company beyond just the money and those things that are easy to measure. Because if you can define your company by how it serves people, and if you can really make that your driving force — to where it feels tell your employees like it’s the driving force — then you’re on your way to a great brand that stands out from your competition.

As real as a brand is, not everybody is willing to control it. It’s harder to measure than advertising because it’s the long-term result of a set of values and activities that are hard to measure together. And yet, you don’t want to be a commodity that’s easy to be replaced by your customers (or your employees, who might opt for greener pastures, for that matter).

Start with your values and personality — your brand — and build from your strengths. Aim for what advertising, by itself, can never give you: repeat customers who tell other people about you. No amount of Groupon-like, transactional offers that buy temporary sales can build very much momentum without the ability to execute your values consistently. But for those companies that want a higher ceiling and a firmer foundation, decide what you believe and how you work. And you’ll build the kind of momentum that will work with your sales and marketing efforts to build your business in the long term.

If you’re looking for more practical tips like these, consider signing up for our newsletter, registering for our next free video class, or subscribing to our book launch mailing list which will have tons of exclusive insights from our upcoming book.

You buy values with action, not words. You don’t own values just because you put them on your wall or think they’re a nice idea. You own them when they work. So let’s learn how to put your values to work every day and build your brand.

Your brand’s values work in your company before you talk about them. If they don’t, they’re not your values, and this is not your brand. It’s a slap-on decoration.

So we’ve talked about values and how they form the core of what you do.

We’ve talked about why it’s necessary that those values turn into actions that benefit your values.

We’ve also talked about the importance of talking about what you believe in order to share the “why” that drives your brand forward. And so that people can spread the philosophy.

Now let’s talk about how to document these things and how to set up a regular session that allows people to understand what’s going on, synthesize them, and then live them out in their jobs.

How do you help your values grow deep roots in your company? You adopt a process that invites everyone to think about the values and then turn them into actions that change the process.

So you do the following:

But you might want a more-specific process. I can help.

First, we work from the top down. Leadership, then front-line employees.

Note: the next month, add a task at the beginning to go over the assigned tasks and make sure they got done.

Rules for the meeting:

Say what you believe and then go do it.

If you’re willing to put yourself on trial before your values, you’re doing what very few companies do and putting yourself on the next level. But don’t do it because it makes you “better.” Do it because it makes the work you do matter in the lives of people.

Most people aren’t willing to do the small things. They want to do the big, exciting things. But if you follow this process, or build your own, your brand can start delivering dividends before you even make a great logo. This is the essence of your brand in its raw form. This is where grand ideas meet operations and employee’s everyday lives. This is where it becomes real. And if it can’t become real here, then you have to question whether you really own those values.

If you’re looking for more practical tips like these, consider signing up for our newsletter, registering for our next webinar, or subscribing to our book launch mailing list which will have tons of exclusive insights from our upcoming book.