The Persimmon Group

For years, consumers and businesses have used the term “value” to mean “a good buy” — the financially least expensive or highest quality choice. But, the notion of “value” is changing. Now it is becoming associated with “what the business stands for.” A real shift is occurring in our economic culture, where companies that walk their talk — and their “talk” is values — is becoming the key reason why people choose to work for them and to buy from them.

Principled Leadership is quickly becoming applied by many companies to ensure their strategy and their culture pursues their core values. Identifying your organization’s core values, and then using them to make decisions, is the foundation to create a values-based culture. Principles — basic mores or rules that describe how we will conduct ourselves — are a great technique to ensure the culture “walks the values talk.” A company should identify its four to six key principles by which it will live, and then share them throughout its workforce.

What are principles? There are three criteria to help create a solid principle:

Would you rather be right or be happy?

This timeless question sums up real differences in the workplace today that are causing conflicts among the three prominent generations — Boomer, Gen X, and Gen Y (aka Millennials).

There are real shifts in how we lead organizations, higher turnover rate, and shifting expectations affecting how our companies and/or teams perform. Entrepreneurism is enjoying some of its highest rates in decades, and our young Gen Y’s are entering the workforce as the best educated generation in our history. So, where is the conflict?

In the wake of the Super Bowl, you hear much about success and measuring success. Were the New York Giants the only team that was a “success”? If you didn’t take the grand prize, was your season not a success? Or was your team successful if you had a winning record, if you overcame injuries or if you had cohesion in the clubhouse, even if you weren’t the one hoisting up the Lombardi trophy at the end.

In business, like in sports, most assessments begin with the bottom line: Were we successful? Did we deliver what we said we were going to deliver? Was our customer happy?

Other measures of success may include whether our company met our requirements for profitability or market share. These measures are very results-oriented, primarily focused on the outputs and outcomes of the plan.

As we welcome in 2012, we hope for a future that is successful, rewarding and where dreams will be realized. We often usher in the changing of the year with reflection on the past year, resolving to change or improve some aspect about ourselves. It’s a celebration of a “new day.” This year, I believe this has greater meaning than some of our past New Year’s celebrations and resolutions. We survived the roller coaster ride that was 2011 — market volatility, political stalemate leading to ineptness and general malaise. It seemed that many days started without us knowing where we would end up at the end of day. It was tough. ‘Nuff said.

Yet the latter part of 2011 brought an optimistic undercurrent that should remind us “that which does not kill us, makes us stronger.” A new year is an opportunity for us all. So how do we capitalize on it? Here are four things every business leader should do today to ensure their team takes advantage of the opportunities of 2012.

“The only constant is change.”

Have those words ever felt more true than now? In this time of economic volatility, yet a time when technology is changing everything around us at an accelerated speed, very little feels certain. The philosopher Thoreau, however, perceived change this way: “Things do not change; we change.”

Certainly, in business today, change is happening. Since the recession began, unemployment (or the fear of it) has been on most people’s minds. But as some industries and sectors see their forecasts improving, a different change is taking place: Voluntary turnover within a company’s workforce.