Values Provide Fuel for Staff Performance

Managing how your employees work won’t necessarily guarantee high performance or a healthy bottom line.

“We think that what drives performance is actually behavior-based,” said Brant Menswar in his closing keynote at the virtual CAMEX22, Building Bridges: The Fastest Path to High Performance. But, he added, behavior is a weak indicator of performance.

“What drives high performance,” he stressed, “is values.” Employees are apt to work harder and more efficiently when they are invested in the values of their workplace.

“We do our best work when we care about work and feel we can make a meaningful contribution,” Menswar said. The highest-performing organizations, according to Menswar, share three traits: they are purpose-driven, embrace collaboration, and foster resiliency.

In order to connect values to employee behavior, campus stores must start by defining those values. What purpose drives the store? Prior to CAMEX, he invited NACS members to peruse an online list of 125 possible core values and check those they thought were most important. Some members chose more than 60.

“The average person selects at least 30 values as important to them,” Menswar noted. “There’s no way you can honor 30 things every moment with consistency.” Some values can be grouped together, but you should focus on no more than five or maybe six values, he said.

The top three selected by NACS members were integrity, family, and teamwork. Integrity and family are good choices for core values, he said, but teamwork isn’t really a value and neither is leadership, he added. Employees are required to work as a team, no matter if the team functions well or not, and the same goes for people in leadership positions.

Menswar’s own core values, which guide his work as a speaker and author, are creativity, impact, family, hope, empathy, and authenticity. He encouraged attendees to find their own core values, which will help provide clarity of purpose and action.

“Values are the glue that holds us together when things get rough,” he said.

Collaboration, the second trait of high performers, means employees must be working toward the same goals. “Working together without alignment is cooperation, not collaboration,” he said. “You have to have shared goals to collaborate.”

Resiliency, the third trait, enables employees and organizations to get through the most difficult times—such as a pandemic, layoffs, delivery delays, and inflation.

“You find your adaptability goes through the roof,” he said. “You’re able to effect change so quickly and with such impact.”