Larger businesses often end up distant from the values that they were originally established upon. As companies grow, it is common for decision making to become more impersonal and outcomes-based rather than values-focused. This reflects the fact that as organizations get larger, they often establish incentive and accountability frameworks that are solely outcome-based. Even if your intention is to be nuanced and for decisions to be made with the company’s core values in mind, that is not what will happen if that is not what you are rewarding. This results in what I call “apathy of scale”. This is the “corporate feel” that so many in veterinary medicine complain about when they describe how large groups often operate.
Apathy of scale creates a sense that people interacting with your organization are no longer talking to a group of fellow human beings whose goals and values mirror their own, and now are talking to a corporation.
Being a values-focused company is much easier at the start because founders and leaders are directly involved in most of the work being done and decisions being made. Decision making can happen intuitively at that stage because your own personal values are directly reflected in your thought process. There’s no need to weigh “how does our company think about this issue?” because early on you are the company. However, as the organization grows the founders and leaders will spend more time leading and delegating and there will be more things happening in the organization that they are not directly involved in. You will need to hire people and entrust them with making decisions, which means creating frameworks and policies to guide them.
You get what you reward team members for!
The key to avoiding apathy of scale is hiring, firing, rewarding, and holding your team accountable according to your core values. You need to have trust and confidence that the people that you’ve hired will act in a manner consistent with the values that the company wants to embody.
Core values become performative when you are not rewarding and holding your team accountable to those values.
It is also important that those core values are authentic to the company that you’re running rather than the aspirational values of some other company that you aren’t. For example, it might feel good to say, “we’re not a profit-first company”, but if you are primarily rewarding and holding your team members accountable to things that make the company more profitable, you are a profit-first company and claiming otherwise in your core values is inauthentic.
At Associated Veterinary Partners, we have 5 core values that we have built the AVP Success Center upon:
- Act With Integrity
- Proactively Get Things Done
- Be Accountable
- Be committed to the veterinary profession and our local communities
- Draw inspiration from these shared values
AVP is committed to being the partner of choice for veterinary practices and teams. We are proudly vet-founded, vet-operated, and not private equity-backed.
If you’re a practice owner interested in finding out more about opportunities to partner your practice with AVP, or a veterinarian interested in becoming a co-owner, please contact me at bill@yourvetpartner.com.
Dr. Bill
#yourvetpartner