5 Strategies to Keep Your Core Values Alive

Your Core Values are so much more than words — they’re the heartbeat of your culture. They shape every aspect of your practice, and when you keep them alive, they become a powerful filter for hiring, accountability, and team alignment. Kirk says it all the time, and it’s so true: “All roads lead back to Core Values.” If you haven’t identified your Core Values, that’s step one! 

Keeping them alive doesn’t happen naturally, so you must intentionally weave them into your practice. There are many ways to do so, but here are five of my favorites!

1. Tell a Story

Every time you share a story about something that you or the practice did, it’s an opportunity to pull in your core values and demonstrate how those behaviors represent your values. For example, one of our Core Values is “Give is Greater Than Get,” so when speaking to a team member, I can relate the small acts of kindness we do every day. In doing so, they now have a concrete example of what that value looks like, which helps keep it alive.

2. Recruit & Onboard with Your Values

Your Core Values are incredibly useful during the hiring/onboarding process for a couple reasons. First, they help you measure the right candidate when hiring, ensuring that you’re recruiting a team member that aligns with your values. Second, if you expose your new hires to your Core Values from the start, they’ll internalize them much more quickly, ensuring that they’re showing up daily. 

3. Use Positive Reinforcement

When you have the right people in the right seats, they want to know how they’re doing, and they want to know if they’re behaving in ways that are outlined in your Core Values. You can facilitate this by tying your performance evaluations back to those values and asking questions about how they embodied specific values. You can take it even further by rewarding or recognizing whenever a team member represents a Core Value in your practice’s day-to-day.

4. Include Your Community

Kirk often says that “your favorite people value the same things as you,” so by encouraging your patients to embrace your Core Values, you’re going to create an incredible work environment. I love seeing practices that shout out patients on social media or have a patient of the week section in a newsletter, because it reinforces that we see our community as people, not just patients.

5. Create a Theme to Reinforce Them

Dedicating a period of time, whether it’s a week, month, or quarter, to a specific value is such an incredible strategy to keep your values alive. For example, if one of your values was “Always Be Growing,” you could start a book club or attend CE together to help grow as a team. Regardless of what you choose to do, it will reinforce your Core Values and make them part of your team’s DNA. To make this strategy easier, I recommend tracking your Core Value shout outs, because it will let you know if one isn’t being shouted out as often as the others. 

Bringing your Core Values to life and keeping them alive will transform your practice, but it’s up to you as the leader to set the tone. You must be the example and live the values you want to see, because the team won’t buy into something you’re not willing to exemplify. You can get started on this journey today! All you have to do is start small — pick one Core Value and focus on it this month. As you share stories, recognize it in others, and talk about what it looks like in real situations, it will become a living part of your practice!

To learn more about ACT and how we can help you build a Better Practice and a Better Life, reach out to Courtney!

Tune in next time and learn how to avoid the toxic habits that destroy your practice culture!