values baseline Archives - Successful Blog

(Updated in 2020)

Liz Strauss. Photo by Anne Helmond

10-Point Plan: How to Use the Values Baseline to Make Decisions

The Amazing Testimonial

They say other people, our customers decide our brand. I’m no longer convinced of that.

I had the most fabulous experience at BlogWorldExpo. While I was talking in the hallway, a woman I respect came up and put her arms around my waist. She looked at the people I was speaking to and said …

I respect and love Liz Strauss because she’s intelligent, generous, real, and she truly cares about other people. But what’s even more important is when I talk to other people about her they all say the same thing that I just did.

Wow! What a testimonial.

It left me thinking … how did that happen? What makes a brand that everyone describes the same way?

I think it comes from the values I chose and the questions I use to simplify decisions and be clear on my business and my brand.

How a Values-Baseline Can Simplify Hard Decisions and Build a Strong Brand

When you know your values and establish a brand-values baseline, every decision — business or living — becomes easier. Rather than thinking through the situational details. Values push us up to the larger picture. We’re left with simple questions. My brand values are authenticity, creativity, intelligent perception, love, and connections. So the questions I ask myself about my life and my business sound a lot like this ….

Is this delivering brilliance? Is this an intelligent connected idea? Does it connected intelligent people in a brilliant, seamless effortless way?
Does this shine with informed trust in ourselves and others? Does it show authentic belief, integrity, and confidence and a willingness to decide when to set aside fear?
Is this smart and sensitive? Does it show respect for the intelligence and heart of the people I want to work for and with? Will it move our business, our lives, and the lives and businesses of the people we care about forward?
Will this good news or bad news be truthful, generous, and leave a place to stand for the other person or the business?

So when a difficult real-time decision drops in my lap, I make visit those questions or questions like them — all of them drawn from my brand-values.

Suddenly deciding comes more easily. The decision might be whether to spend some money, take a project, redesign an event, or tell a friend what she’s not doing. By the time I get through the questions — an answer is clear and the direction is true our values.

In this new social business world, we have a chance to live and share our values rather than let people try to find them in a broadcast messages. In that way, an individual or a huge corporation can be the values-based brand and attract the people who value what they do.

Live your values. The brand story will ring clear and resonate.
And like telling the truth you won’t have to remember what you said yesterday.

All of your decision will reinforce you, your team, and your business.

What values and questions might define your brand for you?

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

READ the Whole 10-Point Plan Series: On the Successful Series Page.

(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

10-Point Plan — The Brand Values Baseline Defined

Three Reasons Get Us to the Task at Hand

Now the core team returns to discuss the feedback from the stakeholder leaders who’ve helped them identify the brand values baseline. Review the words each group has returned with and talk through the meaning until the group can roll up the short list to three words that stand for the foundational core values that drive the business. Try one from the head, one from the heart, and one from the long-term vision or meaning.

An example might be these three that drive SOBCon:

Delivering brilliance: We believe in intelligent, elegant connected ideas that raise us up to higher thinking.

Trusting fearlessness: We believe in authentic trust in ourselves and others that has no room for fear as it stand with our intelligent ideas.

Deep Strategic Vision: Our quest and our purpose is to move ourselves, our businesses, and those around us forward with leadership born of strategy and deep meaningful purpose.

Or brilliance, trust, vision. Those three words wrap up the sentences and make the an easy reference for every decision that drives our business. Other people on the core team can choose their synonyms and as long as they mean the same thing, we can trust in the variations and the mutations that will grow from them.

We have our values aligned.

What three values drive your business?

READ the Whole 10-Point Plan Series: On the Successful Series Page.