Core Values Your Firm Can Live By

Source: Accounting Today

In this article, Rob Lees and August Aquila discuss the importance of a firm's core values, noting that quality firms not only identify core values but also operate by them. Lees and Aquila offer the following suggestions to help your firm develop core values that truly matter to your team and can guide its actions.

• Choose core values that genuinely matter to you. If these values are actually going to influence your team's decisions and behavior, you must choose core values that you want to apply to yourself.
• Provide clear examples of the practical implications of each core value. To operate according to your core values, your team needs to understand specific behaviors that exemplify each value.
• Your leadership team must lead by example. Employees must be able to see partners not only espousing the core values, but practicing them as well.
• Core values need to be taken seriously. If they are open to compromise, they become ineffective.
• Core values should be foundational and unchanging.
• If you want your core values to be embraced and practiced by your team, incorporate those values and their corresponding behaviors into your team members' performance evaluations or reviews.
• Communicate your core values publicly. Your firm should want potential clients and potential team members to know who you are and what you stand for.

For the complete article, read “Walking the Walk.”

From Accounting Today, August 1, 2012, SourceMedia Inc., One State Street Plaza, 27th Floor, New York, NY 10004, 800-221-1809.