Less Rules More Results

We live in a world with regulations, rules, laws, guidelines, and best practices. Business people know, deep down inside, that all these rules, regulations, laws, guidelines, and best practices are simply ways of trying to control people’s behaviors. Specifically it is their employees’ behavior they seek to control. How much time does your company spend creating, training, and validating compliance to rules and is that where the real pay off is?

By selecting team members that share your core values you don’t have to create rules to control behavior because everyone instinctively operates according to these innate rules.

I recently met a CEO who is a giant in his field. He has created a new organization and each person was hand selected based on what he calls “an instinct.” Upon talking with him further, I believe he picked people based on a set of known but undocumented set of core values. The result is fascinating because this team has few to no rules but yet everything gets done, and is done with excellence. This is the power of discovering, living and selecting team members based on a set of core values. By selecting team members that share your core values you don’t have to create rules to control behavior because everyone instinctively operates according to these innate rules. It is amazing how much a team can accomplish when they trust each other and all their time is spent doing value added work and not on validating, checking and fixing.

Even in my world I see how this has played out. In my practice I have only 2 team members. Both of these people were selected not based on their business expertise but because of their core values. As a result, I spend ZERO time on managing them. We brainstorm ideas, we prototype concepts, and as result everything we do is forward motion.

The CEO that I spoke of has built a $600 million company on this same concept. Imagine the forward motion he is involved in.

Success Metrics are purposely selected and then closely measured and monitored to assess if we are winning or losing as a company. Every member of the leadership team is responsible and accountable to achieve all of these metrics, not just the metrics relating to their functional area. The Leadership Team’s variable compensation is tied to the achievement of the company’s success metrics so they win or lose as a team.

We cannot legislate morality. We cannot legislate performance. We cannot legislate decision making that benefits the company. We CAN select team members that instinctively do these things.

QUESTION: Should we spend our time creating regulations, rules, laws, guidelines, and best practices or should we take that same energy to find and hire only the people that instinctively operate according to our core values??

We cannot legislate morality. We cannot legislate performance. We cannot legislate decision making that benefits the company. We CAN select team members that instinctively do these things.

To learn more about Core Values and how to discover them for you and your company, email me at Kathie.Mcbroom@thinking-organization.com