Why We Should Care About Business Values

I wrote a version of Heavy Chef’s values yesterday.

It’s live on the Heavy Chef website now if you want to check ‘em out. We call our values ‘ingredients’. They’re called ingredients cos our business is called ‘Heavy Chef’ and… ah, never mind, you get the picture.

Side note: I never know when the ‘chef’ theme thing is getting too much, so let me know if we ever push it too hard.

Back to our ingredients (values): My friend, brother, business partner and early investor in Heavy Chef, Mike Perk, reminded me of something important recently.

Mike said, “Values are only real values if they translate into behaviour.”

Mike works on crafting culture within organisations, so he knows how hard this values stuff is.

Another way of interpreting Mike’s statement is ‘behaviour is the only true indicator of a business’ values’.

I’m a branding nerd. I love the concept of creating a convincing brand - which is why I’ve become so obsessed with business storytelling recently. It’s clear to me that a strong brand relies on a good story and a strong story is only believable when aligned to a business’ values and behaviour.

Side side note: do yourself a favour and watch the Heavy Chef discussion with bestselling author Lauren Beukes and acclaimed public speaker Pierre du Plessis on Storytelling.

A brand is essentially a message that contains a promise. The brand identity of a business lives or dies on whether we can keep that promise. This brand promise is usually conveyed via narratives and myths. The level of ‘believability’ with which you are able to convince people will determine how successfully your story and your brand cognition will spread.

Here’s the thing. If most of us do an audit of our values, we will likely be surprised at what truth emerges.

The simple way to do this is to ask ourselves, what behaviours are repeated by me and my team? If those behaviours don’t match with our written values, it indicates a disconnect. That misalignment means that our brand promise is being broken - often subconsciously - and we’re going to steadily lose the trust of our audience.

In other words, if we don’t align our values with our behaviour, the brand that we’ve worked so hard to build, will die.

If behaviour disconnects from values, the audience stops believing.

So, for example, if a stated value is ‘innovation’ and yet our behaviour reveals that we’re stuck, stagnant and fearful of change, we need to either choose a different value or change our behaviour. That second choice is hard.

Side side side note: there is a third choice, which is ‘change the people within the team’ but let’s not go there right now.

Now, you may be thinking, all this stuff seems a bit extra. Why should I bother about fluffy stuff like ‘values’ and ‘stories’ when I have bills to pay, sales to make and coffee to drink?

Well, there are obvious drawbacks to not having your values clearly defined (lack of purpose, spineless organisation, nebulous team structures, brand decay), but for now, let’s underline three benefits:

Having clear values will attract the right team. This is particularly important in SA. Values cut across race and gender. If you have clear values, then you’ll attract a diverse team that works well together.

Having clear values will detract the wrong people from joining your team. Speak to any seasoned manager about the consequence of having toxic peeps in the mix.

Having clear values creates a moral compass. This is super important when making tough decisions, especially with sneaky ethical stuff that inevitably comes about when you grow.

Last year I wolfed down Jim Collins’ Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 which I rate as one of the best books on business I’ve read, ever.

In it, Collins summarises thirty years of his and his team’s research, compiling the salient lessons from Good To Great, Built To Last and all his other books into a 300-page cheat sheet for us to apply to our own organisations.

Here’s the spoiler alert: Collins’ work can be summarised into the maxim that a successful business is about 1) people and 2) values. Collins is one of the most respected thinkers in the business world. Do yourself a favour and read BE2.0.

Side side side side note: Check out Collins’ interview with Tim Ferriss as well, it is also really insightful.

If Jim Collins says so, it must be right, right?

I thought of inserting a ‘what would JC do?’ joke here, but I won’t.

We’re seeing this theme come across over and over again in the recipes on the Heavy Chef entrepreneur learning platform. We’ve recorded learning bites with hundreds of entrepreneurs and this theme is prevalent in the recipes of dozens of our ‘chefs’. Luminaries such as Bonang Mohale (Business Unity SA), Sarah Rice (Skynamo), Jade Kirkel (Sorbet), Greg Webster (Dermastore), Adrian Gore (Discovery), Gary Kirsten (India/SA cricket coach) and many others have echoed the importance of values, behaviour, brand and stories in their discussions with Heavy Chef.

What do you think?

What do you value?

How do your values line up with your behaviours?

How believable is your story?

Peace -