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The Big Picture: How Values Drive Company Culture and Create Trust

A company’s values shape and drive its culture and are critical in creating trust. After I sold my software business, I had a couple years to think about what I would do when I started another business. I decided it all boiled down to a company’s core values and culture. The rest takes care of itself. When values are lived and demonstrated consistently in the workplace, trust is built. A healthy, trustworthy company culture driven by strong values has staying power.

Everyone in our company is responsible for putting our values into practice on a consistent basis. Instead of a top-down model (like most Asian companies have), we operate with a flat model where all employees are valued for their input and work. One way we put this flat model into practice is through our profit-sharing plan that all employees participate in. There is also transparency amongst all employees in the company, which aligns with our value of honesty. The flat model runs smoothly because our values are clear and we trust our people, which in turn translates to trust between Linkage and our business partners, customers, and suppliers.

Values and Your People
Many companies have nice-sounding value statements, but the real company values are demonstrated by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go. Real company values are expressed in the behaviors and skills that we particularly value in fellow employees. For example, our business development director has great business instincts and makes decisions that are right-on. A high-performing employee like her is given the freedom to take risks and keep making good decisions because she is encouraged to hone her skills.

It’s essential to hire employees who are high performers. We must respect and be inspired to learn from our fellow employees, whether they’re in service or manufacturing. Our values apply across all factions; manufacturing is more labor-focused, but the employees still must trust company leadership enough to tell them when something’s wrong. Both the manufacturing and service-oriented sides share the same values; they simply materialize in different ways. When we respect, learn from, and listen to our colleagues, a company thrives. We place a high value on freedom in the workplace because we only hire responsible people we trust. Responsible people thrive on freedom and are worthy of freedom.

Implementing Your Values
In addition to how you hire and manage, how your company handles customer service is a great indicator of your current values implementation and where it can be improved. When it comes to customer service, we are honest about what happened, communicate clearly, and use discerning judgment to determine the best course of action to support our customers. The feedback we receive from our customers confirms we are living our values when it comes to customer service.

How you communicate with your partners, suppliers, and customers is another area for intentional implementation of your values.

Our combined values of curiosity, communication and passion have given us the skills to successfully do business and serve customers in many countries, including India, China, Malaysia, the U.S., and Canada. When doing business internationally, it is vital that your values are clearly known and implemented, especially when you come up against other companies with different values.

A company should implement core pillars that are acted upon at every decision point. This provides an overall foundation of trust which is essential to building and nurturing mutually beneficial relationships with customers and suppliers, regardless of the country in which they operate.

One way to know whether your values are being lived and implemented successfully is when the company is running smoothly almost entirely on its own (without interference from high level leadership). When this happens, you’ll start to see a shift in behavior; employees get more vocal and expressive, share whatever is happening and where innovation is needed more openly. This open communication benefits all involved and improves both efficiency and effectiveness.

Creating a Company Culture
As values are demonstrated at each level of a business, they create the culture of a company. Consider the question: What gives us the best chance of continuous success for many generations of technology and people? Here are seven aspects of our culture:

1. Values are what we value
2. High performance
3. Freedom and responsibility
4. Context, not control
5. Highly aligned, loosely coupled
6. Pay top of market
7. Promotions and development

With the right, high-performance people, instead of a culture of process adherence, we cultivate a culture of freedom and responsibility, innovation and self-discipline. If values are the day-in, day-out lived principles a business is run by, the culture is the collection of behaviors and practices implemented on an ongoing basis. Values form the foundation; culture is the structure built on the foundation and may evolve over time.

Global Values Shifting
Countries, companies, and individuals are all motivated by different sets of values that drive their behavior. With the clashing of core values currently causing conflict between the U.S. and China, it’s even more important that our company’s values are clear and intact. As Thomas Friedman points out in a New York Times article, “America, China and a Crisis of Trust,”¹ trust is the key element missing, and needed now more than ever between the U.S. and China.

He writes, “...the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century—semiconductors—required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.” Friedman emphasizes how interconnected America and China are and how vital trust is in restoring the connection.

Add to this the India-China dispute over the border row in the Himalayan region, and it’s clear that trust is a scarce commodity amongst the top trading nations in the world when it’s most desperately needed. These two major crises of trust are driving business to Southeast Asia, where our business is coexisting peacefully and doing businesses with trust. It is our hope that the three nations with the most trading power will figure out a way to unite where they have values in common and restore trust with one another.

While trust may be lacking in some countries, a company that acts on its strong values will figure out how to make things work. Values like judgment and innovation can serve you well. Acquiring our factory in Malaysia is one example of how we recently navigated value differences and successfully took on the challenge of helping the employees adapt to our values, learn a new culture, and create systems to make the operation as effective as possible. It is rewarding to see how values can be adopted in another country by a newly acquired company to serve a larger vision when there is a basis of trust.

By prioritizing actionable values that produce consistent results, you can create a business culture that honors responsibility, freedom and above all, trust. Clarifying and implementing consistent values in business is essential to creating a culture of trust. As Friedman states, “establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have.”

References

1. “America, China and a Crisis of Trust,” by Thomas Friedman, The New York Times.

Mehul J. Davé is chairman of Linkage Technologies, Inc.