Respect, Inspire, Empower: Core Values For Teams

Respect, Inspire, Empower: Core Values For Teams

Sean: With the pandemic with 1,600 employees, you mentioned earlier that you guys were over communicating. And I heard from someone that no one ever left his job because the leadership over communicated, that is an amazing, amazing thing to do. But I’m wondering with the 1,600 people, were there ever a problem that began in terms of like they wanted you to support them?

Because here in the Philippines, we didn’t get any support from the government. In fact, the government expected SMEs and business owners like myself to be the one to give support to our people. And the business owners themselves have also been stricken around by the pandemic.

So it is very, very different. And there are some people who are upset about that because some business owners just can’t give anything, you know, did that happen to you guys? And how did you deal with that?

Charlie: I made a lose or alluded to it earlier that we look at our team members as an extension of our family and that in one word to describe our culture at ABC. It is family.

So we’re not going to rely on any external force for being whatever you want to call it, to take care of our family. You know, we’re going to do everything that we can and everything that we think is the right thing to do to protect our family members.

And we were doing things to help support and protect our team, the CDC over here in the states, the center for disease control, they would put out their recommendations for guidelines on what to do, and once they put them out, we would look at them and go, we’re already doing this.

We’ve already been doing it for weeks sometimes months. So we’re going to be ahead of the curve with a lot of things, because of the perspective that we take, that we actually do put people over profits because we can. Because most public companies, they’re a slave to one thing and that’s, you know, giving value to their shareholders.

Value means profit. We’re a business too. We need to make profit to be in business and sustain the long run. However, it’s our theory that when you put your people over the profits, that usually the profits take care of themselves, and that was shown to us, you know, almost a fact during this past year of the pandemic.

Sean: I’m wondering what other values does your culture intentionally hold on to? Aside from people over profits, you seem like you have a very strong company culture and it seems. I mean, it’s four generations. “Hello, it should be right.” But you know, culture is going to be built, whether you are intentional about it or not.

A lot of companies aren’t. They’re just like, you know, culture happens, just let it happen. Just let the employees run culture, right. Or let the HR run culture. But it has to be a top down thing where the leaders would intentionally shape it for it to be a healthy culture that people would like to work in. I’m wondering, are there other principles or values that are to your business that shape your culture?

Charlie: Our mission statement is pretty easy. It’s we make everyday celebrations better for our team members and guests. And we have the word team members in front of guests for that very reason. And we have three core values that drive behavior and those three core values are the words, respect, inspire, and empower.

And again, they’re pretty easy to follow, we can get in a deeper conversation around each of those three. And when we’re training somebody at ABC and then we’re onboarding them, we’re going to go deeper. But just the high level for your listeners – respect, you know, respect yourself, respect the team members, respect the business, respect the foundation of the company, respect the guests and the vendors that come in our stores.

You know, my, my five-year-old. What respect means. So it’s, it’s not like someone can say, well, what does respect mean? We know the difference between right and wrong. It’s pretty simple. That’s all we intend it to be. We don’t intend it to be much deeper than that. Just the difference between right and wrong. Inspire. Inspire people with what you’re doing, inspire yourself.

And then lastly empower. We do have a culture of empowerment where we’ve got our rules, we’ve got policies. We’ve got our code of ethics and all of the things like that – that you have to have when you have this many team members, but there’s a ton of leeway. We hire people from much bigger corporations all the time that come to us and they just see the look of all on their face after a month or two.

And they’re like and they cannot believe how empowering we are and the leeway that we allow our team members to operate with to make decisions. And, and you know, it, it’s certainly going to vary from area to area and time of the year and all of those things. But those three core values drive the behavior. And our mission statement really drives all decision-making. That we’re going to look after the team member first, before the guests, because if we do that, then we’re going to take care of the guests.

Sean: That’s awesome. Charlie. I learned a lot from me tonight and if people want to get in touch with you, because if your amazing story and how you guys are just doing things over there at ABC, how can they best reach you?

Charlie: Yeah, my LinkedIn profile, Charlie Bailes and shoot me a message, connect with me. I’d love to hear from anyone. I’m also fairly active on Twitter @cebailes is the name for that in the notes, but those are, those are the two socials that I use.

And yeah, I’d love to hear from anybody. Please reach out to me I appreciate the opportunity to come on your podcast, Sean, and you know hear from you. And it’s cool to be talking to somebody on the other side of the world too, but what a time to be alive, right?

Sean: Yep, what a time to be alive – I certainly agree. And Charlie, it’s my pleasure to have you here in the show. I learned a lot from you. I’m sure the listeners tuning in are also learning a lot and well I’ll have your LinkedIn and your Twitter link on the show notes and leadershipstack.com.

Charlie: You know I just do this cause I just love talking to really awesome people like yourself. Just sharing what I can, because we all have this ultimate goal of just making the world a better place. And that’s certainly my personal mission. I hope your, your listeners got something out of this, you know, prioritize yourself being one of them, if not the most important one, because you’re going to be useless to everybody if you don’t take care of yourself.

Maybe that should be the title of my book. Right. Prioritize yourself. There you go.

Sean: Yeah. You know, dude, you should write a book. You should write a book. I see a lot of the stuff I did with how much you love doing what you do. I would encourage you to do, to write, just write it, just write a book and ebook, whatever it is.

Start a podcast, how you can he’s I’m sure you can help a ton of people, a whole lot of people for, by what you do, you have the authority, you have the position, you have the knowledge, you have the story you’ve gone through the gauntlet. You have, you have it, you know, it’s just putting it out there. And I’m so honored that I’m doing this with you now.

Charlie: Thank you. I appreciate your words and honor to be here with you as well, man.

Sean: Charlie, thanks so much.