Provoking Your Greatness - Misti Burmeister

Company culture experts urge leaders to establish clearly defined values to serve as a guide for decisions and behaviors throughout an organization.    To ensure they have the best representation of the values shared among those in leadership, companies often spend gobs of cash and time on experts who ultimately produce a document aligning the most common ideals.    Mounted on the wall, and often on the website, these key words or phrases are meant to ensure everyone is on the same page about what’s expected and acceptable.   While these values are typically inspiring and alluring, they often fail to produce the intended result—a strong team environment. In many cases, these key phrases wind up serving to weaken trust, accountability, collaboration and productivity.   Stopping into Best Buy to exchange a gift I received for store credit, I headed to the customer service line. Fortunately, the line was quick and I was walking toward the exit in less than 10 minutes.   As I made my way toward the exit, I notice