Welcome back to work woman. It is going to be another awesome episode. We are in a series, The Teamwork Series, which is the book that I wrote. I opened the book up by talking about how many employees we had at the time of writing this book. Cartoon ventures had drumroll, please, 66 team members. So when I wrote this, we had 66 team members. We now have over 180 team members across all of our organizations. So I have learned a
few things since writing this book. And so this Core Values chapter, I go deep into the thought process behind your core values. I'm on chapter four and I want to share with you. First off, why have core values if you're not sold on even having core values in your organization? I like to think of it as this organizational code. It's the expectation. It's defining who we are, what we believe in, and how we can hold each
other to the standard code. You have to decide as a leader, as a business owner, what type of business do you want to run? If you are of this mentality of ten x and you want to grow quickly and you want to exit and you're here in order to create massive value that pays out financially, your core values probably can't be fun or excitement or even productivity wouldn't really be a core value because what you're actually
looking for is results. Whereas if you're a business that is a little bit more laid back, maybe your family business, you don't have aggressive growth targets, but you'd like to grow 50% year over year, or you'd like to grow 10% year over year. If that's more in alignment with where you're at in your business life cycle, you could probably afford to have some softer core values to ensure that
that culture and that environment is in place. But if you're not clear on the type of business that you're running on, you're not clear about where you're headed, which would be the previous podcast on vision. It's going to be difficult for you to craft core values that actually fit, because all of a sudden it just turns into this long list, and business owners get caught in this long
list all the time. Because when I think about our business, if I didn't know what my target was, it would be really easy for me to just start to think, well, I want a business that's fun and energetic and playful, but I also want things to get done, and I want it to be organized, and I want things to be efficient, and I want people to be innovative. And so every quality of a culture, all of a sudden you're like, well, I want all of that. And here's my tip on this. You have to be clear on
the values that are going to be the underpinning. That's going to be the bedrock of whatever that target is. When I think about our core values, they were created to get us as quickly as possible with as much leadership and like true, great business savviness, that's a word. I'm not sure if that's a word, but hey, we make things up on the show. It's my show and I get to make words up. We created them with with this idea of we are creating this environment to
hit a target. And if we hit our target, a lot of people's lives will change in the process. But if we don't hit our target, we're going to be like a lot of other companies that just kind of have employees that stay in the same roles year after year. If you haven't gone through the vision piece, I would really encourage you to go back and establish what your vision is, because it's going to help you craft these core values. I naturally have a bend and I'm going
to sell you. On why I believe Cardone Ventures core values are the right core values, but what I sell you on that, it's oftentimes because I'm thinking with man, your goal is the same goal as mine is, which is to make as big of an impact as quickly as possible. But I do have to acknowledge some people don't want that as their goal. And right now, I'm not going to sell you on why you should want
a bigger goal. However, if you are that person, I would suggest reading the ten x rule to change your mind, but I digress. So in the book I introduce the criteria for how to establish your core values. And three main criteria that I start with is this idea of hiring, rewarding, and firing off of these core values. Now, hiring isn't
that complicated. I will touch more on how we incorporate this into our hiring process, but I want to laser focus you in on when you're choosing your core values and when you're implementing your core values, how do you use them in order to promote the behavior that you are looking for inside your organization? How do you use them for the purpose of promoting people in your business if you're not using them for promotion and. You're only
using them to hire people or to fire people. You're missing like 95% of your workforce that is with you. And not just in onboarding and not just on a performance improvement plan are about to get terminated. Like the whole the whole life cycle of the employee, for the most part, is actually spent in, okay, how do I become best at my job once I've done onboarding? How do I excel at that role so that I can be the person that gets promoted when that opportunity arises?
One reason I love every one of our core values is you're really able to use them across every single position in an organization. There is a significant difference of the inspirational level that somebody is contributing at, at an entry level in an organization versus an executive or a
senior level in an organization. There's different levels to inspiration, and at the highest level, should be the person who's creating the vision and the ideas and living out and fulfilling the core values across the board to the organization.
But at every level, you should expect inspiration. So we open this office in Scottsdale almost a year ago now, and for me, executive presence would be our leadership team members ensuring that there's office culture, ensuring that there's community there, figuring out ways to engage our our team members, not just their department, but showing up for the company at large, the whole place being present there, instead of just hiding in their office or sitting back on their heels and
watching things happen. Like that's true inspiration. As a receptionist, the lack of inspiration would be I would find it not inspirational if somebody, um, was greeting us at the front desk every single morning and never turned the lights on and never really, like, looked up and smiled at people and didn't make it a warm and welcoming environment.
You're not being inspirational when you're just kind of blah and have a more monotone energy, so you see how you can use inspiration as a way to correct behavior. Because if I had an executive who wasn't actually contributing on meetings and for you leaders out there, I know you've had this experience before where you're leading a meeting, you're like creating the agenda and coming up with all of the items. And then when you ask for feedback, when you ask for questions, when your peers or your
subordinates should be like saying something, it's just crickets. Crickets are not great. Crickets do not show inspiration. There should be somebody else in the room that's like, oh yes, and then there's this piece of it who can just build off of it. That's executive presence. So if I was having that issue, I'd say, hey, you're not showing inspiration when you show up to these calls because you
just sit there. And again, it's a way of of reinforcing these core values without just picking on people for nitpicky things. It's, hey, we represent something that's bigger than just ourselves. We represent these core values. One core value that people love to throw around there is safety especially. We have a lot of clients in the construction space, um, and team members who do in some cases could be doing dangerous things where their safety is put in check.
Can all of us agree safety is important? Yes, safety is important. But does safety apply to your bookkeeper? Does it apply to your recruiter? Does it reply to your marketing manager? I probably wouldn't adopt safety as one of my organizational core values. I would put safety in that roles job description and if the person isn't meeting their job description at that point, I would fire them. Everyone's
favorite topic firing people. When I use a core value to terminate or put somebody on a performance improvement plan, I'm trying to focus on what is the thing that we already told that person, hey, this is the expectation. The core values function as this baseline accountability, uh, metric. If somebody isn't sending in their reports or they're not showing up on time or they're not hitting their targets, I can automatically default to our core value of results.
That person could be the happiest, the smallest, the kindest, the sweetest, the class clown. Like whatever. Like the most liked person. But if at the end of the day, they aren't hitting their results, if the target isn't being met, then there's no other thing I have to come up with in order to say, hey, this isn't working out. Because if the result isn't there, why? Why is that person on the team? It shouldn't be emotional when you
think about it that way. Is. If it's taking longer or it's not at the quality or it's just not getting done at all. You have to remember for for my people pleaser leaders in my people pleaser business owners out there, you have to remember that the reason that somebody is working for you is because you're paying them to do something. It's not like a friend hangout day. It's not a daycare. It's not your babysitting. Like you're there to say, hey, I'm paying you $40,000 a year.
I'm paying you $80,000 a year. I'm paying you $120,000 a year to do XYZ thing, to complete some task. And if they aren't able to complete that task, should you be renegotiating their salary to decrease it because they're not actually able to do the job you wanted them to do? Probably like that. That would actually be very logical. But instead we feel like we have to coddle people and we have to hold their hand and we have to, you know, bend over backwards to allow people in our
environment who just really aren't meeting the mark. When you think of it like this, it becomes so much less emotional because if somebody isn't meeting the mark, all you have to do is say, hey, this is the target. Is this a skill or will issue? Is it because you're not willing to put the time in to figure out how to hit the target? Or is it because you don't have the skills necessary to hit the target? If it's a skill issue, we can fix that. You
can give people skills. People can go to trainings, people can do things online. They can read books. There's no shortage of different ways to increase people's skills. But what you can't do as a leader is fix somebody will. If somebody just doesn't want it bad enough, if somebody isn't interested in doing the thing that you've asked them to do for whatever reason, why are you letting them
stay in the environment? So this idea of results oriented as a core value for me is the ultimate core value. If I had to pick just one core value, I would absolutely pick results oriented because without results, there's nothing else to fall back on when people aren't completing the things that they need to complete. And when you tell people that you value results, when you tell them that you value your results, you actually have to value results.
This crazy thing happens with core values, where you have to live into the things that you say that you are. And as a business owner, you might not all the time feel like your results oriented, and you might actually have not set up your team for success because you never told them what the targeted results should be. You thought that they should just read your mind and it
just doesn't work like that. So when you're expecting people to be results oriented, you can really clearly start to differentiate, hey, was it my responsibility that I didn't set them up for success? Or is it this lack of willingness issue because I did everything I could to provide that person with the skills necessary to be the best in their
role at Carton Ventures? Our core values are something that we talk about every single day, and on the next episode of this podcast, I'm going to get into how we actually use our core values, how we perpetuate them, and how we tie out mission vision core values altogether and really use them in a performance related conversation. But some other core values that I would like to share with you guys as like potentially good options. Um, but
just ones that aren't ours would be responsibility. They love this idea of responsibility. If across the board you expect that people don't just think, oh, that's not my job. And they don't just think, oh, they're responsible for this one thing, but they take ultimate responsibility for things going wrong. You're not going to end up at the end of a year, at the end of any given period of time where you didn't hit your target thinking, man, nobody
cares as much as I do. Well, nobody cares as much as you do because you never let them know that you wanted them to care that much. And again, it's something that you think as a business owner. Oh, this is so obvious. Of course I would want my
my team members to bend over backwards. But if you never communicated that, like, why would they expect that some business owners, contrary to your current belief, some business owners don't actually want their team members getting all up in their business and changing things because they want to do things the way they've always done them, and they don't want to grow, and they're stuck in their ways. Like,
that's a lot of experience, experiences that employees have. And when you open your mindset up to say, man, what am I actually demanding out of my environment because I communicated these things, you're going to find that your team is like, okay, I either agree with this or I don't agree with this. And when they don't agree, they're not a fit. But when they do agree, when they're not doing those things, here's like, hey dude, what happened here? Oh,
there is this issue. Well, who's responsible for that? Well, so and so.
Should have done this. And then they didn't communicate that.
But. But who's responsible? Well, if it's that person's department, it's their responsibility. And ultimately everything rises and falls on leadership. That's what John Maxwell says. So ultimately, what you should always know as a business owner is regardless of how your team fucks up, it's your responsibility. It's your responsibility that you didn't train them, that you didn't communicate with them, that you maybe didn't hire the right person, that you
overestimated what they could contribute. Like all of that comes down to you. So if you take that ultimate responsibility, it's going to be easier for your team to actually take that on as well because they know, okay, it should have been me, but it actually is you. And if I think if the business owner thinks, man, I made the wrong hire because this person isn't willing to do what it takes, then you're being the responsible person. By no longer having that person in your environment. You're
being irresponsible. When you allow somebody in your environment that you know isn't capable of doing that work. So I love this idea of responsibility similar with a core value of like, ownership. Um, taking full ownership and having professional pride is something that nobody talks about. And yet everybody expects, which is so silly because if you expect it, then you should say it. One of the biggest fights Brandon
and I have ever gotten into. I give you guys all of the little back stories that we don't tell everybody else. The Workman Podcast is a very special place because I love you guys. Um, the biggest fight that we ever got in, as it related to the business was this idea of the core value of intentionality. And I was just like, I am going to win this argument. I am right on this argument. I want intentionality as
our core value. So it was between intentionality and alignment, and it was just one of those battles I, I picked it, you know, my grandma used to say, pick your battles. This one was like, I'm fricking picking this battle. This is my battle to win. I don't know why I was so dead set on it. I turned out dying on that hill. Because we move forward with the core value of alignment. But I'm still a little salty. But I love this idea of a core value of intentionality.
It's something that I wish I had as a core value to hold my team accountable. Because when you're when you're telling your team, hey, we're intentional, it prevents, like winging it. It prevents the one off stuff, it prevents thoughtless action. And there's a balance between massive action and being intentional, but really getting people to think with, man, what was my intention before I showed up to work today? What was my intention before I started this meeting today?
What was I trying to get out of it? When you train people to start thinking like that, you'll find that they will be more proactive. But again, if you never are talking about these things, you're going to you're going to really struggle having your team develop this culture that becomes these things because they were never told. No
one ever let them in on the secret. And then you're all pissed off and frustrated because you have a team of people that doesn't really help you, and that isn't the way that you want them to be, but it's because you did silly things like put fun in your core values, when really fun wasn't what you were trying to incentivize people. How would you fire somebody for not having fun? I know we haven't touched too much
on this criteria firing. I highly suggest you read the book to go into like the thought process around this, but think about that. If our core values are used to hire, reward and fire people, when there's a termination that occurs, in what instance are you going to give somebody in their performance improvement, um, or in in their annual performance review? You need to be more fun. Like is that legitimately something that you would be worried about
not having in the environment? There's a lot of things I worry about not having in the environment discipline, follow through, accountability, but fun. Like I'm going to get somebody in trouble for not doing fun. Okay. That's just that's outrageous to me. So again, I get that it's something that people want in the environment. You want to create a fun environment. There's no rule that says just because it's not a core value doesn't mean that the culture can't reflect that thing.
Our team has plenty of fun, there is plenty of jokes and laughter, and our organization loves dad jokes. There's no shortage of dad jokes that go in our group chats every single morning on our daily team call, but it's not something that is like a pillar of the organization. I also think our clients would think that was ridiculous
if we mandated that fun took place. Fun is great, but results come first with that, next week's episode is going to be extra juicy because I'm going to dive into how you use your mission, vision, and core values. If you are at this point in the podcast and you've been listening through teamwork and you do not have your mission vision core values hammered out, please solidify these. Please, please, please.
Because if you don't, you're going to watch how. The whole business operating system crumbles when you don't have clarity into these things. So this is one of those things don't pass. Go get your vision, get your mission, get your core values written down, and you're going to see all of the other places that we use these. And if you don't have them, then you're going to continue to be confused. And the last thing that we need is to create confusion inside your environment. So I will
leave you with this. Define your why, clarify your where and figure out how you want to describe your culture. It's that easy. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't put it in this corporate jargon. Oh, I need to come up with my mission or vision or core values. Just just where are you going? Why does the business exists? What is the culture look like? And when you can jot down those ideas, this should take you no more than 30 minutes. This is not a two week project. It's not a
six month project. It's not something that you should try to figure out over the course of the next year. Take action. Commit to something. If you need slight tweaks or a slight rework here and there, it's not a problem. Fix it later, but get something that's good enough on paper right now. As always, I absolutely love connecting with
you guys on the Workroom podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, if you got value out of this episode, if you know business owners who struggle defining their core values or are really struggling in their growth, please send them this podcast and knowing that you got value out of it. I would love a review. It would mean the world to me. We read the reviews on our team every single week, so a five star review and then any comments that you have or suggestions for content that you'd
like to hear? We would very much appreciate it. I cannot wait to talk to you guys next week on work. Woman.