When it comes to influencing the behaviour of your employees, you can take one of two attitudes. You can create detailed guidelines, policies, and online trainings to inform people about the rules and get them to comply. Or you can define the values of your company - which in other words means describing the priorities to be taken into account when making decisions - and reinforce them by providing concrete examples and visibly living up to those standards. The former can help reaching people - but there's no substitute for the latter.

In a small organization, the founder(s) have a big influence the company-wide behaviour through their own actions, from selecting employees to the way they conduct themselves. There is no resources to create policies or guidelines and limited historical data-points guiding the team. In this case the "values" approach is implemented by default. An aspiring entrepreneur and leader needs to be aware of that the values he puts on display will perceived as the priorities for the organization. Early hiring decisions will influence the team as it grows, and new hires will self-select and adapt to the behaviour they find in a company and/or team. Understanding one's own values and how one is perceived by the environment is paramount. The same lesson holds true for anyone who starts leading people - whether it is in small or large firms.

As the size of a corporation increases, so does the complexity. Interactions with the CEO become rare for low-level employees. In order to influence their behaviour, HR departments will work out the famous policies, guidelines, and online trainings. Those are certainly helpful to share information. But they are insufficient to help people making decisions in ambiguous situations, where there is no clear guidance in the policy. In those cases, people will look around and think about what their manager, or the leader of the business unit would do. That's going to be the behaviour they implement.

If a leader leaves implementing the policies to the HR department, the online trainings become a "check the box"-exercise for compliance. But there will be no way this prevents behaviour that is not in line with the companies values. In order to influence behaviour, leaders in any organization - small or large - need to lead by example and communicate this clearly.

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Please share your comments and inputs (via comment function, twitter, e-mail, etc.). In my short write-ups I address topics that I am particularly interested in because they align with my values and beliefs. As such, they are always a reflection of my ideas, thoughts, and opinions. The only thing I am positive in that regard is that I do not have all the perspectives, all the knowledge, or all the facts - help me be better tomorrow.