By Mark Faust

Many companies have an old set of value statements, written by a founder or previous management teams. These values might hang on the wall or be passed into collateral. Whether these speak of the priorities of customers and service, or of treating others with respect, there are several steps any management team can take to make this essential element of your strategy fuel to accelerating growth.

Do you have conflict within your salesforce and/or is growth not as fast as it could be? What is the cost of conflict on productivity and effectiveness?

Most conflict within teams or a salesforce can be traced back to a lack of understanding or enforcement around company values. To have values work as a tool for improving teamwork and reducing conflict, having your team answer two questions each year in an all hands on deck exercise can help to reinforce the desired attitudes and actions.

These two questions are: 1. How do you and customers want to be treated in the workplace? And 2. How will we deal with it when someone doesn’t live up to these values?

Since people tend to support that which they help to create, everyone should have input into these answers.

To supercharge the values in an organization and transform them into strategic growth oriented values, also ask sales teams:

“How would we need to:

• conduct our work,

• work with each other and customers

and what kind of environment do we need to foster

• in our company,

• in our work

• and in our relationships

in order to absolutely maximize joy in the workplace as well as the growth rate, profitability and stability of this company?”

Use these team oriented strategies to accelerate growth

Have every sales associate openly discuss the top traits, qualities, ways, habits, environments, attitudes…i.e., values, that we need to live and work by, and list this out in a long list that will usually have several dozen potential values.

Then ask each individual to privately list out the top six values that they feel are the highest priority values that will most accelerate growth and improve satisfaction, happiness and profitability in the workplace. Then have sales associates team up in twos and agree on a top six together, then repeat the same process in teams of four, then eight etc. until the entire team has come up with what they have prioritized and agreed to what can then be a list of the top six to ten values that will create the optimum environment.

Conduct a similar facilitation around the question, “How will we deal with it when one of us doesn’t live up to our value statements?” the much tougher, but more important question, and yet key to ensuring that the values become reality.

The team or committee could work on also building out working definitions of each value, and perhaps examples. The final word-smithed document can be printed on a poster and ceremoniously signed by the entire team.

Leadership should regularly and publically recognize employees being good examples of walking out the values.

Most teambuilding exercises like ropes courses and falling backwards into your co-workers arms are a waste of time compared to having the team create growth oriented values and strategic growth objectives that will work to accelerate growth as these exercises help to Create Emotional Ownership, the C.E.O. of your growth oriented culture. I’ve seen this process double the size of companies while making it a much happier workplace. Are you ready to grow?