Employee morale has everything to do with employee values. The higher the alignment between the business's culture and its emplyees' values, the less anyone has to think about morale per se. It's no accident that morale and morals have the same root. In international studies, culture has been determined to be one of the most important indicators of sustained success.

Bandaid "morale boosters" won't truly sustain any business in tough times. In fact the costs and distractions can be draining. However, even the exact same investment in the exact same activity can yield very different results when the entire culture is values-driven.  Find out what matters to employees and make way for their answers because when employees have to check their values at the door, entropy results. (Entropy = resources not devoted to mission accomplishment.)

Create a business culture where people can bring their whole selves to work and high morale becomes a way of being rather than something to chase after. Even on bad days, especially on bad days, strong cultures are able to count on a high base level of morale. There's a prevailing myth that in tough times nobody can afford to deal with "fluffy" things like culture - a fallacy with absolutely nothing to back it up except fear. The down times can be the most fertile times for building a company with the kind of interconnectedness that holds together through thick and thin.

Wheatley talks about fields:

"I can’t touch it but I know what it is.  What we’re doing is creating a field
through making things truly personal.  At the heart, we’re
encouraging personal meaning.  We’re reframing safety from
something that people need to the idea that being vulnerable is
something that people need.  This is where growth happens.  One
of my favourite quotes, I’m not sure who it’s attributed to, is ‘To
make meaning is human.  To choose the meaning we make is to be
leaders."

It's been a rough month with a Verizon phone switchover. After hours of working with company reps and finally with a higher up who had the power to make a change, all was supposed to resolve in the wee hours this AM.

When I couldn't receive the call from USA Today columnist, Steve Strauss, for our interview for his Small Business Success Secrets podcast show, I found out that my phone situation is worse than ever - completely down!

That's entropy for Verizon and for me - and for Steve - lots of resources draining down a hole that just isn't that deep. My phones aren't complicated.

As a small phone and internet based business, FIOS technology matters but it's already cost me more than I'll save with in my new 2 year contract. Athough they can't get me up, if I go to another company, there's no way around automatically paying the penalty for cancelling my new contract plus I'd lose FIOS. No warm fuzzies in the customer loyalty department.

As a business consultant, I question how this all scales up to Verizon-sized issues. Despite having a relatively minor issue that fell between automation and organizational cracks, I've cost them a bundle in support hours.

I met one excellent top level manager who's working hard for me, and one-for-the-books awful service rep, and a whole lot in between over the last month. What they have in common triggers my consulting and coaching instincts: I smell a culture problem.

There's a lack of cohesion, lack of accountability for resolution,  no leadership empowered enough to rectify the hole in the system that my pretty simple account fell through, and a long process to even get through the frontline automated and live operators to access that disempowered leadership.

They sure can't be breaking any stakeholder loyalty records internally or externally because it's no fun to work in that kind of muck  and since culture is one of the best indicators of sustained success, I wouldn't invest in the stock.

Whether you're a business owner or top level executive, if you consciously develop the culture around you, you'll fortify your organization against this kind of nonsensical entropy. Consciously building your culture will yield a synergistic organization that continually meets criteria for excellence and that ongoingly evolves that criteria through dedication and innovation.

Coaching exercise:

• Identify a specific problem at the front line of your business or service
• Connect the dots between that and the top. The best way to do that is to figure out what values are operative on both ends. ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
• Identify the values matches and mismatches and you'll be getting at the core of the problem so that not only will the front line symptom resolve, you'll do systemic development in the process because values development is cultural development.

Some new friends started calling me "Indiana Joni" after I shared about how I'd been in the Amazon with a tribe who recently stopped head hunting/shrinking, with a group of village chiefs in the remote African bush, at universities, Asian temples and monasteries, Seminary, and with countless thought leaders, and many leaders in their fields. They connected the dots between my travels and my insatiable curiosity about what it takes for everyone to do good and do well.

Traveling a path of many paths, and developing a consulting practice in values-driven leadership and cultural development, has taught me there are undeniably universal values and principles that support humanity's best interests. I'm 100% convinced that pretty much everybody wants to live and work by those values.

What's lacking is the infrastructure to do that because today's norms reflect a dangerously sick culture that does not value values adequately. Too many leaders and systems are still operating from the broken platform of a crumbling profit-at-any-cost paradigm. Although values-void concepts of success  have set new benchmarks on the universal scale of failure, many leaders have yet to incorporate the real deal: values-driven leadership increases profits, share prices, innovation, stakeholder loyalty, teamwork and more.

I've learned a lot from working with top leaders and from exploring the world: Want to do well and good? Start with curiosity. Buddhists have a concept called "beginner's mind." They teach that "expertise" has a front and a back, a yin and a yang.

Here's the link to an excellent video by Simon Sinek on being a leader who sparks inspired action.

How the brain makes us loyal to people and organizations who believe what we believe; how and why "purpose" matters; getting past the tipping point.

The "why" drives behavior yet few leaders capitalize on that neurological fact.

Simon Sinek:

How great leaders inspire action