Communicate Expected Standards and Hold People Accountable

Don't post your corporate values where customers can see them.

Instead communicate to your employees the values you expect everyone in your organization to live up to and then provide positive and negative consequences that reinforce the importance of those values. As they say, talk is cheap. Either you are going to make the expected values real and meaningful or they will quickly lose all credibility.

Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, has made it VERY CLEAR that players and coaches are expected to behave with a certain standard of values. He has suspended superstars who rarely have ever faced such serious negative consequences in their careers. As he said to PARADE Magazine on October 18, 2009, "We are role models. People look up to us. I think when a high standard is communicated to everybody, people will meet it. I thought it was important to make that clearer."

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