If you ask my two elementary school aged boys, “what are our core values?” They will tell you our family’s 7 core values without hesitation.
“Praise, Passion, Relationship, Accountability, Innovation, Servanthood, and Excellence.”
If you ask all the orphans in our orphan care organization in Cameroon, “what are our core values?” They will rehearse the same 7 core values to you without missing a beat. If you ask staff members in our orphan care organization, they will tell you the same core values. If you ask students at Servants University, “what are our core values?” They will tell you the same thing. If you ask participants of my Greatness Camps, “What are our core values?”, you know what they will say.
For the past decade, I have been a student of leadership and have had the privilege to lead thousands of people and coach and mentor many different people from different walks of life. One thing I’ve seen in every successful person and organization that I’ve studied is that culture (both personal and corporate) is crucial to success. Our culture defines and shapes everything we do. Core values shape our culture, our brand, and everything about our strategy. By shaping our culture, they influence everything we do. They help us choose how to live and also help us measure our success.
Core values shape our culture, our brand, and everything about our strategy. By shaping our culture, they influence everything we do. They help us choose how to live and also help us measure our success.
Several years ago, after studying hundreds of books, journal articles, blog posts, and other resources on leadership and effective culture building, I came up with 7 core values of success that I am using to guide my personal life, my family, my work, and every profit and nonprofit organization that I lead. In order to make them easy to remember, I created an acronym, PRAISE, that represents them all. The first core value is “praise”, and the remaining six start with the letters of the word PRAISE. For example, “P” in praise stands for “passion”. “R” stands for “relationship”, “A” stands for accountability, and so forth.
Below, I share how I, as a leader in my organizations, use these core values. For each member of our team, their supervisor sits down with them and they jointly come up with behavior goals that satisfy each core values in the context of that person’s job.
The 7 Core Values of Success
1. Praise
Praise people and celebrate successes.
Behavior: Several times a week, find something good in those you work closely with and praise it. Celebrate every achievement. Look for reasons to throw a party for them. Keep a song of praise in your mouth. Never lose your song.
Praise means praising people, lifting them up, calling out the best in them.
2. Passion
Clarify and align your purpose and calling with your daily work, do work you love and find meaningful, and fit within our culture so that passion will result.
The word passion is used in two major ways. First, passion is the strong feeling or emotion you get from doing something you love. This strong feeling is so rewarding to the person that they will do this thing for free or make huge sacrifices to do it. They can’t believe it that someone would pay them to do it. This strong feeling often involves feeling fulfilled and having a sense of meaning in life. Second, passion can be used to represent the thing itself that you love. For example, one may say soccer is the passion to mean that soccer is something they love to do.
Simon Sinek said it nicely. “Passion is not an actionable word. It’s correct that those who do the things that they’re passionate about do better but it’s not helpful advice. So the question is where does passion come from? Passion is a result. Passion is an energy. Passion is the feeling you have when you’re engaged in something that you love. Passion is the feeling you have that you would probably do this for free you know and you can’t believe somebody pays you to do it.”
Behaviors: Hire team members who know their purpose, feel that their calling is to do what you are hiring them to do, love what you are hiring them to do, find meaning doing it, and fit within the culture of the organization. The result of that is that they will feel passionate about their work.
Focus on developing their strengths not their weaknesses. Create teams of people who love different things but have the same vision so that they can complement each other. Recruit only team members that are passionate about the work we do. Focus on helping current team members to discover their DESIGN (purpose) and live it. Frequently expose our people to the impact that their work is making in people’s lives so that they can become motivated to continue to do great work.
3. Relationships
Relate to each other as family. Show respect and loyalty.
Relationships are the currency with which you build a successful life. The quality of a person’s relationships determines the level of their success. It’s been wisely said, “Show me your Friends and I’ll show you, your future“. Our relationships create and shape our future. We value choosing and building purpose-driven relationships. We prioritize quality and depth over quantity. We value choosing and building relationships that will enable each of us to reach our full potentials in life and enjoy the journey of life to the fullest.
Behavior: Treat those you work with as family. They are not just employees but family. I will care about their lives outside of work and care for their loved ones as well. I will work to remember their birthdays, their accomplishments and their stories.
Related: The 7 Core Values of the U.S. Army.
4. Accountability
Account for your actions; Be responsible for your actions. Take responsibility. No excuses.
Accountability is the state of being accountable. It’s the willingness to account for one’s actions, take responsibility for them, and to disclose the results in a transparent manner. It also includes the responsibility for resources entrusted to us. Accountability helps us to focus, push ourselves, and endure until we succeed. We are accountable for the time, talent, and treasure that has been entrusted to us.
Behaviors: Take responsibility for what is entrusted to us and be accountable for our actions. Financial transparency with donors and closed-loop communication are some behaviors to model accountability.
5. Innovation
Innovate our processes, products, and services.
Innovation is coming up with an idea or invention and turning it into a product or service that creates value for which people are willing to pay.
Behaviors: Create an environment where 1) people feel safe, 2) people feel free to experiment and make errors, 3) Where there is no fear, 4) Where there is love, support, and trust, and cooperation.
6. Servanthood
Serve selflessly.
Servanthood is the condition of being a servant. It is serving others, working hard every day at what you do, and putting the interests of others first.
Behaviors. As a leader, I will be a servant leader. I will serve the people(staff) who serve the people (customers). I will seek to serve and not to be served. I will not focus on telling my people how to do their jobs but will instead:
-1) Ask, “I know your goal is excellence, how can I help you do your job better?” Then listen.
-2) Create low-risk spaces for employees to think of new ideas (see innovation above).
-3) Be humble & courageous.
-4) Have strong faith (belief) that we will win as an organization.
7. Excellence
Be excellent at everything we do.
Excellence is getting really good at what you do and becoming the best at it. This doesn’t mean doing your best. It’s more than that. It means always reinventing yourself and giving your best until your best is really objectively means doing things in the best possible way. Excellence is not to be confused with perfectionism. Excellence comes when a person focuses on their gifts and talents and becomes good at them. Excellence means producing work that has a wow factor. It is creating what Seth Godin would call a purple cow.
Behavior: Set clear performance goals for each of my team players. Then coach them on a day to day basis to achieve their performance goals. Finally, evaluate them and reward them for their great work.
Conclusion
When you study every successful person in history, you will see an expression of all of these core values in their lives. These core values have done amazing things in my life in helping me grow personally and professionally. They are producing a lot of fruit in our family and organizations.
Feel free to use them to build a better life for yourself and your family. Â If we are not intentional about our values and the culture we want to create for ourselves and our loved ones, others would create one for you. Hollywood movies, television, Facebook, and other channels will give you a culture to live by. The only problem with that is that you may end up wasting your life.
