Your Salon/Spa Culture is Defined by Its Values
That level of refined values-based behavior doesn’t just happen. It’s designed and meticulously cared for. Most importantly, it begins at the top.
The structure, discipline, values and guiding principles are the granite blocks that a salon/spa culture is built on.
That doesn’t mean a salon/spa is so rigid that it’s incapable of
changing. It just means its core behaviors are deeply rooted in its values.
Tampering with the values of your salon/spa is much like tampering with the forces of nature. When the owner or leader compromises your company’s values, it can cause a tidal wave of otherwise avoidable issues, problems, and drama.
Here are some common real life examples of how an owner/leader can compromise the values of their own company:
- Misusing your company’s finances: You would fire an employee for stealing. Just because you’re the owner or leader, it doesn’t give you the right to use company cash as your own personal slush fund. KEY: Taking cash, misclassifying expenses, taking supplies or running personal expenses through the company, are willful values and ethics breaches. Oh, one more thing: Tax evasion is against the law.
- Making up the rules as you go: Nothing does more damage to a business culture, staff morale, and performance then suddenly announcing a new rule, policy, or procedure, that no one saw coming. KEY: Making up new rules on the fly immediately places the company’s values on the hot seat. All of the issues, frustrations, lost productivity, lost respect, and lost trust in leadership, can be avoided by mapping out processes and outcomes before hitting the launch button.
- Not keeping your word or outright lying: A leader earns the trust of others one day at a time. KEY: You can’t build a dynamic company around a compromising leader that breaks his or her word, lies, or says whatever is convenient at the time.
- Overriding the authority of others without their knowledge: Why empower others or share accountability if you see nothing wrong with going behind their backs to get things done your way? KEY: The wish of every leader is for employees to think, act, and make decisions like an owner. That cannot occur if the leader is meddling, overriding and “snoopervising” all over the place.
- “Do as I say, not as I do”: Leaders lead by example. Demanding one set of standards for everyone else and a lower set for leaders is the cardinal sin of leadership. KEY: Failure to live the company’s culture is a values compromise.
Here’s my challenge to you: A well-defined set of values should handle the occasional dart with ease.
When it’s the leader that’s hurling the darts, the governing values will fail, taking with it the vitality, productivity, and profitability of the entire company.
If you’re the one hurling darts at the values of your company, it’s your responsibility to address your own leadership and communication styles without delay.
Changing your leadership style takes time and discipline. Strategies coaching can be a worthwhile investment to ensure that your new leadership style is a worthy, appropriate and permanent fix. Click here to find out more.
If compromise is coming from a leader below you, address it without hesitation.
Preventing the degrading of governing values is so much easier than fixing the damage done to a company’s culture.
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