Recently I attended a few workshops about team culture and read Jack Delosa’s new book Unwritten. It reminded me of the importance of defining values for a company and just how important they are when building a world class team—and company.
Our values I feel are an evolving piece about who we are as a company, and who we (at the Cue) are as people.
I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re not perfect, but by these six “bylaws” we hire, train and guide our people to be self-empowered and confident. When I dug deeper into them, I realised if they’re going to serve our team, I wondered why do they need to start and stop at the team?
1. Hospitality's our mission—quality is our passion.
2. We get it done.
3. We're slick. We're smooth. We're in and we're out.
4. We share our knowledge.
5. We work beside you, and we've got your back.
6. We're accountable—we own it, we rock it.
I’ve always heard about people who say “we only work with clients that we like”, or things like “we are selective about who we work with” (typical of a coffee roaster looking to build a relationship with a wholesale customer). As a customer you can’t just walk off the street and use any roaster’s coffee—does that surprise you? Your money is just as good as the next person's, right? Maybe they’re on to something.
It’s been the same case for our graphic design team (pictured below left) and our photographer/videographer (right). When I hired both companies, we sat down and interviewed one another to see if we could work together. This approach, while fantastic for building rapport, is rather unstructured but interesting nonetheless. I’d previously thought that if we don’t have good banter, then we’ll never be able to work together. I still agree with this sentiment to some extent, however it yields nowhere near as high a result as does determining common ground on beliefs and shared conviction.
I’ve always believed that every business relationship needs to be mutually beneficial for both parties. If you can connect with someone on what you stand for, then you’ll definitely go further together. Sure there are dollars exchanged, but I genuinely believe that both parties should want to do business with one another, otherwise you just become a “thing, a cog, a widget,” which is never the reason you set out to start a business or go to work. So now I make a point of sharing our values with each stakeholder. I tell them what we believe in, what our values are, and what we’re shooting for (our mission). If they don’t share at least 4 of the 6, I flat out won’t work with them—regardless of the commercials. I just don’t have the mental real estate and we won’t get what we want from one another.
To have a cup of our coffee in every delegate’s hands in Australia.
We recently had a proposal fall through with a customer that we’ve worked with for a couple of years now. As a team we’ve worked hard to put together solutions specific to their needs—the details aren’t all that necessary. Last year I was made aware of a corporate policy that they have surrounding suppliers which states that best price equals best supplier, regardless of transaction history or any previous relationship. The ethos there is essentially “go and find the best price in the market for this solution, pit all suppliers against one another and then the one to offer the best price (with the most inclusions for free), go with them”. For me, this isn’t on.
You can shoot me down in flames if you want here, but at the end of the day I’ll say this. Had both parties (ourselves included) stated who they were, what they are about and what they stand for at the beginning of the relationship we’d never have gotten to this stage. Put even more simply, I’m only willing to invest in customers that see things the way that we do, and we see the world as they do with common ground. It’s these relationships, deals, interactions that are fun and that matter.