When we heard that Jeffrey Hayzlett’s newest book, The Hero Factor: How Great Leaders Transform Organizations and Create Winning Cultures, came out in December, we reached out to him to gain his insight into the role reputation plays in a successful corporate environment.
Since so many organizations fail at investing in employees and general employee culture, can you elaborate on why doing this adds to the reputational capital and value of a company?
You can only move as fast as your slowest common denominator. Unless your whole team is moving in the same direction with the same set of values, you aren’t going to get to where you need to be as a company.
There is study after study about people who would like to be paid more, but what these studies have found is that people really like to be valued more. So, companies run by people who care about their communities, the people they serve, and their employees, vendors and local communities typically have a lot more buy and a lot higher growth.
When you’re the CEO of the company you can say, “Well, it doesn’t always work that way.” But that is inaccurate. It always goes back to the values of the company: what you value as a leader and what you value with your team. When you focus more on values, everything else falls into place.
Companies like Bain always come up high in employee surveys. There are many other companies that provide best practice examples of what doing the right thing for one’s employees looks like. Your thoughts?
It often goes back to the founder. When one founder I know sold his company for $24 billion, he set aside a percentage of the profits for all his employees—making them instant millionaires. Harry and David and 1-800-Flowers are other examples of companies doing the right thing.
The best companies put employees at the forefront of what they do and how they do it by either compensating them well or recognizing their contributions. Companies on the opposite side don’t share information and have policies of intimidation. They don’t value employees’ input and don’t practice ethics.
Some founders have good intentions in the beginning, but then get off track with their values and caught up in the trappings of their own vanity.
North America has 28 million businesses. I can confidently say there are more reputable businesses that operate with great cultures than ones which don’t. They’re in every small town, every state, and every city.
Most of the businesses I know want to operate exceptionally well—but for many different reasons, not all of them can do that. This mostly has to do with execution, not values. I don’t think people are inherently bad. It is just difficult to execute a value system throughout a company’s culture and sustain it.
Are there any passages in your book that pertain to reputation management?
The most relevant passage is about the principles of how what I call HEROs operate. HEROs should have a stated value statement that they adhere to. They also need to be transparent regarding their internal and external communications.
Equally important is that there must be a focus on driving the business to those values and that everybody in the company is equally responsible for living up to these values.
If you don’t get out there, state your values and live them, your reputation will become what everyone else thinks it is. Without implementation, your value statement is only air. Reputation is the same. You can’t just talk about it—you must live it.
Jeffrey Hayzlett is a business expert frequently cited in Forbes, SUCCESS, Mashable, Marketing Week, and Chief Executive, among many others. He shares his insight on television networks like Bloomberg, MSNBC, Fox Business, and C-Suite TV. He is also the Chairman of The Hero Club, a place with the purpose to empower CEOs and Founders with the right resources, relationships, education, and experiences in order to take their companies into the next level.