To be specific, here are the three levers they used to such great effect.
The first is expressed values: what you write on the walls. We donât mean that you should literally write out your âvalues.â Many leaders and many companies set about doing this and wind up with a list of generic values such as integrity, innovation, or, God forbid, teamworkâwhich are about as meaningful as Muzakâand then wonder why the whole exercise doesnât seem to have made much difference. Instead, apply some creativity to how you want to bring your meaning to life for your people. Donât tell them what you value, show them. What do you actually want them to see and to bump into at work?...
A second way to cascade meaning is through rituals⌠You already have rituals, whether they are conscious or unconscious, and these ritualsâthe things you do repeatedlyâcommunicate to your people what is meaningful to you. If we followed you around for a week, weâd see them. Letâs say you have a meeting: What time do you show up? Are you five minutes early, or five minutes late? What are you wearing? Do you catch up with your team members about their personal lives or do you launch right into business? Who talks first? Do you allow your team members to speak, or do you cut them off? Does the meeting go long? Do you hold people back to finish things up?
These are all aspects of your rituals, and we, your team, see them, make sense of them, and draw our conclusionsâwhether you want us to or not. The question, then, isnât whether you have rituals or not. The question is whether or not you are deliberate about what your rituals communicateâŚ
The third lever is stories. Chick-fil-A makes an art of its storytelling through the operator profiles during Seminar. The company dedicates time to going out to each operatorâs store, taking photos, and learning about his or her family and community, precisely so it can share these stories with the rest of the company.
Many of the best leaders are storytellers, not in the sense of writing a novel or a screenplay, but because they cascade meaning through vignettes, anecdotes, or stories told at meetings, on email chains, or on phone calls. They are always telling these little stories, because the stories that they choose to tell convey what they value. Stories make sense of the world: they are meaning, made human. Thatâs why religions tell stories about their messiah and the creation of the earth, and include parables within those stories that help us learn what is meaningful. And thatâs why you can tell a lot about what matters to a team by the stories that the team members tell themselves.