Every business needs to achieve certain practical goals and tasks if it wants to be able to succeed, much less thrive and enjoy a substantial degree of long-term “sticking power.”
For one thing, it’s very important for every business to properly manage its financial resources and to allocate them as cleverly and effectively as possible, with the alternative being potentially severe financial issues that require seeking out hard money loans or other prospective short-term solutions.
Additionally, making sure that your company’s approach to marketing matches the tone of the cultural zeitgeist, and that you can clearly and succinctly demonstrate how your product or service can benefit your target customer demographic, is key.
On a fundamental level, however, every business needs to rest on certain core values and principles — things that will help you to consistently move your business forward, to overcome professional obstacles in your way, and to identify the best way of responding to different personal and professional conundrums that arise.
So, what sorts of values do you want your business to rest on? Here are a few points to consider while you set about answering this question for yourself.
Accountability flows down from leadership, and so does lack of accountability
As various influential business coaches and analysts have noted over time, accountability is one of the most fundamentally important values for any business — not least of all because it makes that business more adept at problem-solving, but also because it helps to foster a good dynamic within the team, and ethical behavior in general.
A key point to keep in mind is that accountability very often flows down from leadership. Companies run by individuals who can adopt responsibility and accountability for their professional decisions — and for happenings in the business more broadly — tend to conform to those same values.
On the other hand, if the leadership of a company refuses to take accountability and habitually passes the buck and looks for others to blame, it is almost a certainty that the same culture of blame-shifting will develop within the company more broadly.
Many of the values that a business will ultimately end up embodying at large, will have to be mirrored first by the leadership within that business — and accountability is perhaps the most important example of this.
A commitment to certain goals is not the same as a commitment to iterative improvement
Every business has certain particular goals and targets that they are focused on, ranging from things like achieving a certain milestone in financial growth by a particular date, to expanding into a foreign market or releasing a new product or service that has been in the planning stage for some time.
Ultimately, however, a commitment to certain goals is not sufficient in and of itself to ensure that the business in question develops the day-to-day focus on quality that ultimately helps it to achieve those goals.
One of the most significant values that any business can have when it comes to its ability to perform to a high standard on a day-to-day basis, is a commitment to the idea of ongoing iterative improvement.
James Clear, author of the book “Atomic Habits” has written about the benefits of striving to “become 1% better every day,” and this concept mirrors the Japanese idea of “Kaizen.”
Instead of remaining locked into a particular way of doing things that appears to work fairly well, strive to attain those small margins of improvement every day.
A service-driven professional mission can greatly increase the resilience of any business
In one clear sense, every business is “service-oriented” in that it provides a particular product or service to its customers that are designed to address some need or concern of theirs.
On another, deeper level, however, some businesses are driven by an ethic of doing good and serving particular causes — and these businesses frequently have a significant edge in terms of how resilient they are, how high morale is among their employees, and more.
Your business doesn’t need to be a charitable organization to benefit from being service-driven. Simply develop a clear sense of what the “big picture” purpose of your business is. What values and endeavors do you want your business to be in service of, beyond the obvious goal of maximizing profit?
The answer here may involve anything ranging from greater access to healthcare in the developing world to greater financial literacy among the public.