Technology
Rules of the road
How Jim Kavanaugh integrated values into World Wide Technology to align employees for growth
By Mark Scott
Smart Business St. Louis | November 2008
Page 1 of 4
Jim Kavanaugh has heard and spoken
about many of the common values that
leaders use to describe what their company stands for. Honesty, integrity, transparency, accountability and so on and so
on.
But as he sat down to compose a list of
the core values that would guide World
Wide Technology Inc. after the dot-com
bubble burst, he knew he needed to be
more selective.
“The easy thing to do was to list every
strong value that you could ever think of,”
says the company’s co-founder and CEO.
“You would end up with 50 different values or 50 different things that you think
are critical to the organization.”
You would also end up with a laundry
list of principles that, while important,
would be very difficult for most employees to get their minds around. Kavanaugh
needed an exclusive list that his people
could easily remember and live by.
“If it was something that just drove a specific action because of the time period we’re
in or it’s the Internet craze or a market melt-down, if it was anything time-related, I wasn’t
interested in it,” Kavanaugh says. “I wanted it
to be structured and be a value system that
would stand the test of time.”
He wanted a list that would guide World
Wide Technology today, tomorrow and
long into the future when Kavanaugh is no
longer with the company.
“A lot of organizations create their own
problem, and that is they change their core
values,” Kavanaugh says. “If I leave, these
core values should still be able to live and
breathe within the organization because it’s
not dependent on me or the specific time
period we are in relative to the economy.”
The IT solutions provider needed these
core values to provide alignment for employees on how they were expected to act.
“As a smaller company, you can do that
just through communicating in person or
through some type of correspondence,”
Kavanaugh says. “However, as you get larger, you need to build a more systematic
way of getting that message out.”
Here’s how Kavanaugh conveyed a list
of foundational core values throughout his company and got employees to commit to them.
