3 Values Great Leaders Embrace

I am Steve Stoute, author of the book, “The Tanning of America,” founder of UnitedMasters, as well as creative solutions company, Translation. So when we talk about building a company, most companies have core missions and values that the CEO or the founder has that’s going to be the DNA of the company. It leads to how you — the kind of people you hire, your expectations, your ambition. It’s the things that’s most important that if you don’t have those ingredients, if those aren’t the framework in which the company operates in, then you’re going to attract the wrong talent, and you’re going to lose sort of your North Star — what you’re trying to obtain. And I think that that is the CEO’s responsibility.

How you go about coming up with these values: out of all the things that you feel are important, what are the top five, six — I would say no more than seven things — that you need every employee to fully understand and embrace, and use that as the guiding principles on how you operate. And everyone has that shared understanding. I’ll start with our first one, which is getting on the plane. What do I mean by getting on the plane? When I first started building the business, there was this opportunity where you could, like, call somebody and, like, pitch them the idea or try to move them from point a to point b. And for me, I thought it was very important and that people respected and appreciated the idea that you will actually get on the plane to come see them to have that dialogue, even if it was 15 minutes, a half hour. And I know that seems extreme to many, but I can’t tell you how much of a difference maker it’s been in my career, the fact that I was able and I prioritize physical presence in order to show you: a. how much I cared about what I was saying, and how much I cared about the importance of us connecting in a real way. And that effort, it may have helped ideas that weren’t as great go further because, it led to a dialogue that turned into something else. And in most times, it helped an idea that was already good be prioritized over another idea that could have been as good that came from somebody else because I actually did the work to get on the plane. That is one of the values that I learned early on as a difference maker as I was building the company.

Conflict is critical to success. You show me an organization that seamlessly gets through conflict in a positive way, and I’ll show you a winning team. Accepting that there’s going to be conflict and running towards that conflict as part of the values of the company, for me, I think is important. Because in my organization, I don’t want people to think that I think that conflict is something that’s a bad thing or an aspect of poor performance. I want people to know conflict comes when two people who are high performing have the same goal, but see it going at it two different ways with the right intent: perfection, success, ambition, growth. In an organization, you want conflict because you want to hear two, three, four, five different perspectives on why that marketing plan will succeed or fail, or why the product color should be that color versus that color, or why we should name it this, or what the priorities are that’s going to lead to the most success, or there’s four candidates. Which one should we hire? If you put the company at the center and you remove yourself, and what’s the best idea for the company, regardless of the fact that you guys may disagree? It allows you to think through, I can challenge this person as long as I am not disrespecting them while I challenge them. So framing conflict as something that could be positive towards a better outcome for the company when you walk in the door as a leader, to me, is important. Conflict is not a bad word. How you deal with conflict can make it a bad word.

Being fearless helped me tremendously throughout my career. The first thing you can do is lead by example. If you want a team of people to be fearless, obviously, you as a leader have to be fearless, and they have to see what fearless leadership looks like. So when I go throughout my career, you take it back to starting a beauty company with Carol’s Daughter, a beauty company that, you know, we ended up building and selling to L’Oreal at one point. I didn’t know anything about the beauty business. But what I did know is there was a problem there that I could solve. And the fearless part was being able to say, “I can go into this area and solve a problem even though I don’t understand all of the elements of the beauty business itself.” That’s for me what fearless has been for me in business. Like, not being afraid of the failure that seems imminent because you don’t know the industry itself. Not being afraid of what you don’t know, but knowing that you’re willing to go into it with a big, open heart and a wealth of acceptance of what you don’t know, and all of that stuff coming together would lead to a better — would lead to a great outcome.

Know what you don’t know. Embrace what you don’t know. Find joy. Find freedom in saying, “I don’t know.” And then learning what you don’t know will develop the muscle memory you need to take that fearlessness and turn it into something. I can’t just say being fearless at everything is the right answer. But in chasing your dreams and chasing your ambition, it certainly is critical.