Our Core Company Values: We Even Put Them On a T-Shirt

By Chuck Gault, Max Coating President

We spent some time a couple of years ago developing core values for our company. We gathered our management team and supervisors together in one room. We talked about what our core values should be, and we ended up with four. We even put them on a t-shirt.

Here’s what we came up with:

Honesty
Respect
Empowered Team Members
Continuous Improvement

The idea is that if you have core values in place, they are a guiding principle for running a successful business. They are like a mirror you can hold up and say, “I’m going through my day, I’ve got my normal challenges—am I thinking about those values?”

For instance, let’s say you’re sitting at your desk and the phone rings. Your customer has an issue. As with any situation involving a customer, the first thing you should do is think about the company values. It’s easy to say “No, that’s not our fault!” But that’s not what our values would guide us to do.

Our values would tell us to acknowledge the customer’s issue. After that, you do some investigating. Find out where, when, and how something went wrong. If the problem was on our end, we take responsibility and resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Being guided by our value of continuous improvement, we then work to make sure that issue is corrected.

About a year after we first got together to develop our company values, I started thinking. What does the rest of the company think of our values?

That’s when I nervously gathered everyone into a room. I asked them to grade us on how well we were applying these core values to our daily business practices. Honestly, I was scared and expecting the worst.

Had we forgotten the core values and failed miserably? Or did we implement them every single day and pass with flying colors? You’ll have to check back next week to see!

Birmingham, Alabama-based Max Coating is a leader in the metal finishing industry and provides electrocoating and powder coating services for automotive, industrial and agricultural manufacturers. Learn more at www.maxcoating.com.