It takes thoughtful, dedicated work to get your company values off the wall and into the life of your organization. Frank Kelly III, CEO of Kelly Benefits, shares examples of how their pervasive culture is realized within the company daily. You’ll learn what action statements are and how to use them to put an organization’s principles into action.
Truth You Can Act On
1. Use Action Statements to Bring Culture to Life
Our action statements are what they say, things we expect all our people to act upon regardless of their faith background. We do have a mission that says, we’re an organization committed to the pursuit of excellence in an effort to bring honor and glory to God. Well, some of the nearly 500 people who work at Kelly benefits may not believe in God and that’s fine, but we do not compromise on our action statements. And those are something as simple as ‘we get better through our pursuit of excellence.’
2. Highlight Lived Values Through Storytelling
We like to tell stories. Stories matter. People enjoy stories and they love to hear stories about their coworkers doing special things. It then inspires them to go, ‘Wow, they went the extra yard. I want to do that, too.’ So we’re always looking for new ways to share stories of our people living out our values and action statements in relevant ways. I’ll share one example: we give time, talent, and treasure to people and organizations in need. We had an employee who had only been with us for a year, and she was sitting next to another employee who came to work one day and was visibly distraught. She’d had a doctor’s appointment the day before and was told she needed a kidney transplant. Our employee, had a dream the night before that someone was going to need a kidney, and right on the spot, she said, ‘I’ll give you my kidney. If I’m a match, I’ll give you my kidney.’ And literally, a month later, she gave a kidney to her coworker.
3. Reflect on the Anchors of Your Culture
I first wrote our mission in 1991, showed it to my dad and brothers, and they were like, ‘Yeah, whatever, we already knew that.’ But we had nothing in writing until ‘94 when we worked with a consultant who advised us to refine the mission. We all needed to own it. We did that and then a number of years later we came up with a vision statement and our values statement. Then we went through a tricky time. We had a key employee do something really not right and we ended up in a very difficult situation. We were on our knees begging God to help us, and we felt God was reminding us of what’s important. So we came up with the cornerstone law: love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, love your neighbor as yourself. So those cornerstone pillars are really reminders of me and my brothers of the difficult time we went through. But I know a lot of the other people in our organization love and embrace them, too.
Book Recommendation:
- The Holy Spirit: Key to Supernatural Living by Bill Bright
Listen to the full episode: Episode 135: An Alive Culture Guide with Frank Kelly III
