Company Pillars of Belief

One of the crucial elements of building a solid company culture is having a company values structure that is active, talked about, and regularly practiced. I’ve always referred to these as pillars of belief or foundational principles. And I may use them interchangeably throughout the rest of this article.

Most people understand that it’s good to have a commonality in the workplace, but it is not required for a company to run. Many companies are functional in impersonal work interactions and individual self-interest but often have less-than-desirable cultures. However, if you’re looking to build a company culture that allows people to make decisions independently of just leadership, and build a company culture of mutual trust and improvement, you want to establish common grounds to work from or a company structure for pillars of belief.

For example, many years ago I worked for a startup company looking to grow it self and reach a larger audience.

The owner of this company is a good man, knows the direction he would like to go, and genuinely does his best for his company and for those around him.

The biggest challenge he faced as a business owner was his lack of establishing a foundational understanding of the company’s pillars of belief. Now if you’re looking to be self-employed, every decision within the company has to go through you. This is a great model. But, I know that his desire was to move into more of a business owner role and be able to trust people to run his business without his direct involvement.

The challenge he faced was being able to duplicate himself.

Because every decision was going through him, and his mood and decision-making would change daily, it was nearly impossible for the company to operate in a way that was acceptable without his direct involvement. So the environment was impossible for anyone to run the company the way he wanted because he was the foundation. Whoever could have taken a leadership role would still need to refer to the owner on nearly every minuscule decision.

And now nearly 12 years later, he is still the primary point of contact for decision-making within the company, and he hasn’t been able to find a suitable person to take over.

So what are the pillars of belief within a company culture?

Pillars of belief are the guiding principles by which anyone working in the company should be able to make decisions.

Your pillars of belief should be discussed in every decision that gets made, it should be a living concept within the company that helps in the decision-making even on the day-to-day.

For upper management, it’s crucial to use these as guiding principles, because this is how you train your managers to think in an individual setting about the greater needs of a company and for situational concerns that arise within the company.

For frontline employees who understand the company pillars of belief, it gives them the empowerment to deal with customer service issues get creative, and find the middle ground between what the company expects and what the customer is asking about.

So when situations arise regarding strategic partners, are you able to position yourself within the deal that allows for you to maintain your pillars of belief? If your strategic partner doesn’t hold the same values that you do, the question then becomes are they the best partners to work with?

In hard economic times, when the topic of personnel reduction arises, can you go back to your pillars of belief and make decisions through that?

The pillars of belief offer a great guiding tool when it comes to promotion time. Those within the company who strive to live by those principles generally have the ability to teach them. Or at least it gives good criteria for those who might be able to teach them.

The same is true for personnel reduction, sometimes economics do not allow for a company to stay afloat with a massive workforce in a down economy.

Knowing those who within the company adhere to and strive to live by your company, principles are generally leader material, and the ones you would want to keep in the situation of personal reduction.

But that’s a different blog post entirely.

So how do you establish pillars of belief?

Well, one of the first steps we took as a marketing firm shortly after I accepted the role of VP of Operations, was to look at some fantastic books.

I can share with you our list of core values, but understand many of them are not original thoughts.

As a matter of fact, in the resource section of this website, you’ll find many of the books that we referenced in order to create our pillars of belief.

Because we’re an international company, with a workforce throughout the world, we found that finding a book that had the principles we were seeking after and sharing that book, gave us a similar foundation as we strive to make day-to-day decisions.

By everyone reading books like leadership and self-deception, two second lean, creativity, Inc, and story brand, we all have the same info source, so what is left for debate is the implementation on the day-to-day.

With that as the base, here are the Revity values and affirmations:

Quality always
Honesty and candor
Integrity
Work hard then go home
Lean- always improve
The box- assume positive intent
Progress over perfection
Where’s the story?
Feel fast- fell forward
If it bugs you, fix it
Quality ovary efficiency
Stop the line
Money kills innovation

Every Monday in our morning meeting we go through these affirmations, and sometimes even highlight ones that we feel we need to work on as a company.

You’ll notice in our list quality comes first. It actually comes twice in the overall list.

You’ll also notice that honesty and integrity are addressed in different places. Although they have similar meanings, there are very important nuances

Honesty in candor, help us get to the heart of the problem quickly.

Eventually, we’ll cover each of these topics individually, and in greater detail.

But first understand the importance of pillars of belief are guiding principles for hiring, training, advancement, correction, and identifying who are the leaders.

Pillars of belief allow self-employed owners to become business owners, if you’re able to duplicate your own efforts, you can eventually start trusting people to make decisions on your behalf and on behalf of the company.

If your aim is company growth, helping those who work for you understand your goals as a company, and your pillars of belief are the guiding principles to get you there, and everyone is striving for personal improvement, as well as company improvement, The path to success becomes much easier.

For further information regarding the pillars of belief we’ve adopted as a company, check out the resource section for the books we’ve adopted. This list is growing, so check often.