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Value-driven
How to make corporate values an active part of your business
By Kristy J. O'Hara
Smart Business Atlanta | March 2008
Marcia G. Taylor
CEO, Bennett International Group LLC
Safety has always been a priority at Bennett International Group LLC, but Marcia G. Taylor
thought it needed to be more
than a priority — it needed to be
a company value.
That idea didn’t just hit her and
her leadership team out of the
blue; instead, it was part of the
strategic planning process that
this president and CEO leads
each year at her $270 million
company, which does marketing
for transportation companies.
She says that a company can’t
simply establish its values, then
put them aside and go on with
its work. So every year, her
team reviews the values to
determine whether they truly
embody everything the business stands for and whether
others need to be added. Doing
so keeps the
values an active part of their
planning process so people
can’t forget about them.
Smart Business spoke with
Taylor about how she drives
the company’s values so that
everyone else will come along
for the ride.
Create solid values. Understand
what’s important to you as a
company from a values situation. We took a survey, and
one of the key comments that
came back to us was we
always want to be respected.
If you listen to your employees, they’ll tell you what is
important to them.
Define what is important to
you. You have to come together and agree that this is the
code of values that you want
to live by. We sit down each
year and define what those
values mean. For example,
one is integrity. Define that,
what does that mean, and you
break it down. Each year, we
look at our values and say, ‘Is
there anything that we’re still
not committed to? Is there
anything we want to add?’
Values are the foundation of
your company. Every decision
you make and everything you
do needs to be based on those
values. We have a value of the
month, and we train on that
value and make it clear what
we mean by that value.
The best way is to live that
value every day. If you’re living
it and if the decisions you’re
making are based on your values, that’s the best way for
people to understand what
your values are.
Hire good people. Sometimes
that is difficult. Some of it is a
little bit of instinct. One thing
[to look for] is their leadership
style, their ability to be a good
communicator and their people skills.
You can have the best —
someone who knows everything there is to know about a
position — but if they do not
have good people skills, it’s difficult for them to be successful.
Without good people skills, it’s difficult to get people to buy in
to your mission and what you
want to get accomplished.
If we’re hiring a management
position, we use Myers-Briggs
[personality assessment].
Spend a good bit of time in the
interviewing process, and ask
some pointed questions. If it’s a
senior leadership role, we usually use a small panel through
the interviewing process, so
that helps us to determine how
we feel someone’s leadership
would be perceived and how
someone’s skills would be.
Empower people. First of all, listen to them. Listen to their
ideas and thoughts, and
respect what they have to say.
Then give them the freedom,
as long as it fits in your guidelines, to act on the things that they’re thinking about. People
have really great ideas. A lot of
times, it’s a small thing. It may
not be a large idea, but it will
be a small idea, and all at once,
it makes very good sense.
You have to drive out fear.
People cannot be afraid to
make decisions and to act on
them. That’s very key. Have a
clear vision, a good set of values, and everyone needs to
understand that if they’re operating within that value system,
that they shouldn’t be afraid of
the decisions that they’re making because if you operate off
your value system, you’re not
going to make a bad decision.
Communicate better. Most companies, communication is one
of the areas that companies need to work on so their
employees feel like they
understand their vision and
they know what’s going on.
They want to feel like they’re
part of the process.
I have a different manager
every week walk around our
entire campus and just spend
time talking to the various
departments and getting to
know them and just listening
— whether it’s about their
families or whether it’s about
something going on from a
business standpoint.
You have to be open, and
employees have to know that
you’re open to listening to
what they have to say. Drive
out fear so that people are not
afraid to communicate. Drive
out the politics so people are
not afraid to communicate, and you just have to have an
open environment.
They send an e-mail to everyone and thank them for spending some time, and then they
come back to me and report
on the process. They do not
come back and communicate
everything that they talk about
because I want to make sure
there’s an open line of communication so people feel they
have freedom in everything
they say. That’s always a little
difficult because most people
have a general apprehension,
but if you live your values and
you work at creating an environment that people feel comfortable, that is just so key. It’s
that open environment where
people are comfortable with
the management.
HOW TO REACH: Bennett International Group LLC, (800) 866-5500 or www.bennettig.com
