The Missing Corporate Value

For those who have worked with me you know it is my opinion that Values are the most important piece of any business. From my perspective (my perspective being the purpose of life is in large part the moral growth of an individual as well as the love they develop for their fellowman), it is my opinion that more importantly than what we do as businesses is how we did it. This is something that Wall Street would strongly debate but it is something worth debating.

Besides the moral perspective of values, businesses need values in order to guide them in their decisions and to create a foundation upon which they build their business into what they have envisioned it to be. Values are critical for long term financial success. Some of the values that you will find in many companies are, and should be, integrity, hard work, respect, innovation, and customer service. I love these values and feel that they are critical.

However, it is my opinion that there is one value that is always missing - at least I have never seen it written and framed along side the other values. Its absence is the very evidence of its necessity. The presence and support of this value would make all other values possible and lived at all levels and much more of the time. The value that I recommend to you and your company is the value of Humility.

Humility is anything but weak. It is the strength to admit wrong, the strength to admit right, the strength to grow, the strength to listen, the strength to communicate, the strength to change and the strength to work together rather than alone. It is the strength behind all of the values - the absence of which fundamentally weakens them.

Can you see how this would help the value of communication for a senior management team that doesn't want to share with their employees their failings? Can you also see how this would strengthen communication with a management team who in the past has thought their ideas superior to those of their employees? Can you see how this would strengthen the value of innovation by managers accepting the fact that those who work for them may have great ideas that would benefit the business but that they never thought of? Can you see how this would strengthen the value of respect by encouraging coworkers to admit wrong doing and to encourage forgiveness?

I think you get my point. Pride is something within all of us and it is my belief that pride, which helps us climb the corporate ladder for a time, will eventually work against us. Humility is the way forward. Humility is the Corporate Value needed but ignored, because after all, that would require we admit we were wrong - about a lot of things. Pride is fundamentally the weakness of mankind, and therefore our downfall. It would follow then that humility is the true measure of a man's strength and also of our companies. The bigger the pride, the harder the fall.

Yes, its absence is the very evidence of its necessity. This value could do a lot of good for a lot of people.