When I am in the middle of buying something, sometimes I back up and look at the experience from an existential perspective. I enjoy looking at the process that is taking place to see how the different parties are interacting and their overall posture in the exchange. While there are exceptions, I have been disappointed to see how often the process involves lies and manipulation just to get the sale. It sometimes leaves me wondering if there is such a thing as ethical sales. Then, however, I remember good sales…ones where both parties were looking out for each other and were collectively trying to create a positive outcome for each party.

There is something amazing about the people and things that aren’t normal in our world. Consistently, we find that great dreamers, innovators and inspirations aren’t normal. We can even take that further to say that quite a few people that have done amazing things in our world were labeled as highly abnormal. If this is the case, maybe it is worthwhile to evaluate how normal we actually want to be.

As we added team members, many other business leaders and friends counseled me that I needed to make sure that I didn’t hamstring them. I was counseled to be sure that I actually delegated well and empowered my team members to run with things and, also, fail. Because I don’t tend to do things halfway, I set out to make sure I properly and fully delegated. While failing to delegate is damaging to a team, I found something that is similarly, if not more, damaging…abdication.

When I first started my career, I ran into a problem as the organizations I worked for were content to keep me in a specific position indefinitely. I sought out my managers to find out how I could build a career path but was met with blank stares. I wasn’t content with this setup so I began looking around for what I call vacuums, places where there was a need and an absence of appropriate skills to fill that need.

Growth is a really interesting concept. On one hand, you could call this one of the most obvious values to have. On the other hand, it is a value that many organizations easily overlook but spend a lot of time figuring out how to achieve.

For us, growth is not a goal in and of itself as much as it is an outcome. We believe that when we are doing the right things for the right people and for the right reasons our actions will help them grow which will cause us to grow as well. To this end, growth is an outcome but a very necessary outcome.

When we sat down to write out our core values, we had a long list. As we worked to whittle it down, we found that a number of values were distillates of other values. As an example, we see honesty as a distillate of integrity. Because of this, we wanted to narrow our values down to those things that were root values and were causative of the other values we have. That is where we came up with Impact.

Often, we think of integrity as a concept relating to someone’s character and integration as something relating to processes and systems. The reality, however, is that the two words are intertwined.

We all have things that are important to us but it’s easy to get caught up in the hustle of everyday life and forget what’s important. We can either completely forget our values or, at the very least, end up making small compromises that end up getting us far off of our path. I struggle with this as well.

Often, we work with our clients to help write IT policies for their Employee Handbook. I have mixed feelings doing this as part of me wants to write out every detail of the policies while another part of me wants to scream and just say “do the right thing!” This exemplifies the different approaches to writing handbook policies. One approach is to detail every single possible element while the other is to provide an overriding vision for what is considered right and wrong and expect people to fill in the gaps with common sense.