Culture of Honour

Culture of Honour. Oh, I love this. This is really the core of my operating, thinking, my philosophy, is to create a Culture of Honour and it’s a fundamental foundation block for the way that I’ve led different companies over the years and I’ve always tried to operate this way. Sometimes more successfully than others. But really it’s around valuing the individual.

We all have intrinsic value. So each person, regardless of what their role is, whether they’re wrapping parsels or chairman of the board, turning up to the board meeting in a big Merc. Or different roles. Sales. You might be area manager. You could be working on retail. Could be doing a number of different roles, but every single individual, from my perspective, has intrinsic value.

And if you bring that mindset to the table, then you tend to treat people in a different way. You will give everybody dignity and respect and take the time to listen to them.

Everybody has value.

You might have different roles. You might have different responsibilities. Some skill sets are rarer than others so they get paid a little more. But when it comes down, everybody puts their pants on one leg at a time. We’re all human. We’re all flawed individuals. We all have our good days and our bad days.

And, we all bring our whole person to work and there might be other things going on in our world. So giving each individual, regardless of their role, respect and dignity and treating them with honour goes a long way to creating an environment where people they feel valued.

If people feel valued, they are engage, they are productive, they do the things that they’re meant to do and we need to demonstrate that.

So creating a Culture of Honour where people are respected and they have dignity is foundational for great leadership,in my humble opinion.

So be open to people. Be open to the ideas that might come from unexpected people that are in your world, regardless of what their role is. And when you’re having a meeting, take the time to listen.

We have 2 ears and 1 mouth. That’s a good ratio. Listen twice as much as you speak. And if you’re having a team meeting, if you speak first and define the issue and the solution, all innovation will be gone. People would just agree and say “Yes, that’s a great idea”. But if you take the time to listen to others first, hear their ideas, allow some debate, and speak last, (you sure will be surprised at how much output they can give).

 I love Simon Sinek’s work, if you can track him down online, he has some great thinking around leaders speak last. It’s a really good thing to look up. You should check that out. He talks about the importance of allowing others to input first. You, as the leader, should be the one that should wait, listen, learn, be the student, not the critic, and ultimately speak last. Indeed, these are wise words from Simon Sinek.