This is a three-part series of articles on building, growing and supporting company culture. The first article in this series discussed whether a startup’s culture can survive its initial phases of growth. This article will take a look at something even more foundational: A company’s core values, how it can identify them, and how those values can fit into the larger idea of company culture.
Inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was a phrase that recurred throughout the works of the Ancient Greeks: “Know Thyself.” Plato’s own works repeat this maxim several times.
Self-knowledge has been an important concept since the first human communities formed because it informs the reasons we act and behave as we do. The same maxim applies to organizations, too, which just like individuals, can know themselves through thoughtful reflection.
This is the point of developing core values within a company. These values let employees and clients know what your company stands for, and help organize the actions of every team member toward your company’s goals.
This self-knowledge at the organizational level forms the foundation upon which company culture is built.
Identifying Your Company’s Core Values
It’s very difficult to nail down a set of core values that define a company and guide every team member’s actions. Writing down and trying to adhere to a handful of general virtues feels inauthentic. Instead, core values tend to reveal themselves over time.
Business coach Roberto Erario, writing at the Function Point blog, offers several angles of approach that he advises his own clients to take when identifying their companies’ core values. Here are three of them:
- List a handful of situations that could serve as microcosms for what the company is all about. Erario’s examples: “a client had a problem that your team solved quickly and with care; your team worked hard to meet an important deadline but made sure to have lots of fun while getting the work done.” Then, find the common thread among those events.
- Pick out a handful of people within the organization whom you feel would be good ambassadors for the company, then describe what among those individuals’ character traits lead you to each choice.
- The counter to point No. 1, Erario recommends listing a handful of business situations that were especially frustrating. “Include situations where you thought ‘this is a such a waste of resources’ or ‘this person is not showing any commitment at all,'” he writes. Then, identify what values were not lived up to or were violated in each instance.
Putting Those Values into Words (and Ensuring Those Words Have Meaning)
Next comes the hard part. You have to take those values you uncovered, which are likely still nebulous, and turn them into clear statements that team members and clients can all immediately understand.
“Core values should make sense to outsiders and employees alike,” Casey Scott writes for The Newsletter Pro. “Then, when everything is clear and concise, it becomes easier to apply your values to the real world. Team members can recognize and celebrate others within the organization who are living the values and contributing to company culture.”
(For reference, check out The Newsletter Pro’s Core Values.)
Marketing veteran Andrea Goulet Ford writes at her BrandVox blog that one quick way to give these words real resonance is to simply start each statement with a verb.
“For example, if you want your employees to act with empathy when interacting with customers, instead of just saying ‘empathy,’ you could say ‘embrace empathy,'” she writes. “Embracing empathy has way more meaning than just the word empathy.”
Ford also warns organizations not to follow their values so closely that “you develop a cult in the process.”
“You can laugh, but it does happen. It breeds a culture of uber exclusiveness where outsiders are shunned, newbies aren’t welcomed, and creativity and innovation are stifled. Find a balance between new ideas, perspectives, and rules of engagement and you will be fine.”
Empowering the Team
Next, help these words you’ve found to describe your company’s core values translate into action. This happens at the individual level, across all team members.
Scott recommends that team leaders “escalate the celebration of your core values to activities and events” to bring those values to life.
“When your team members are participating in something bigger than themselves, they make real connections,” he writes. “The company’s values, and by extension, its culture, transform into something tangible people can grab onto and take with them.”
When there is a disconnect — if the core values fail to resonate with a team member, whether by disagreement or misunderstanding — that team member can become disengaged quickly.
“This might mean that the employee simply doesn’t like what the company does, but more frequently, this is caused by a lack of clarity on what the company does in the eyes of the employee,” writes Don Harkey, CIO and partner at People Centric Consulting Group.
Harkey reiterates Scott’s recommendations: “Employees should be exposed to the great things your organization does.”
This is where strong leadership comes into play. The best way to translate your company’s core values into the work that team members do is to explicitly connect their work with the values, the mission and the vision you’ve laid out.
“Employees know what to do,” Jeff Haden writes at Cafe Quill. “They’re trained and guided and mentored. They know their jobs; they know their tasks, their processes and their guidelines.
“What many employees don’t know is why they do what they do. Processes are great, but rolling out a process without explaining the underlying reasons for that process is a dictate — and no one likes dictates. Explaining the reasoning behind a process helps employees inform that process rather than simply be trapped by its constraints.
“When employees understand why, they no longer simply follow — they also lead.”
4 Examples of Well-Thought-Out Core Values
Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate how a company identifies its core values is to see how others have done it. Below are four especially good examples.
Devbridge Group: A Software Design and Development Company
“When we tried [to write down our core values], the only thing we had in common, it seemed, was premature hair loss,” Devbridge Group President Aurimas Adomavicius wrote in June. “Couldn’t agree on values. Didn’t seem genuine. After several attempts, we shelved the concept, rolled up our sleeves, and got back to what we knew how to do — make software.
“Seven years have passed and what I realize in retrospect is that we weren’t ready. We had little in terms of identity, so trying to establish company values was like trying to cook a meal without the ingredients. Honest company values can only capture the essence of what the team already believes, not what you wish to force feed into your organization.”
Here is Devbridge’s resulting list of company values (notice the verb-first phrasing):
- Make Great Things
- Have Fun
- Seek Mastery
- Embrace Transparency
- Take Ownership
- Deliver Results
Officevibe: An Employee Engagement Software Company
“The first thing we did, was define our mission,” Officevibe Director of Content Jacob Shriar wrote in 2014. “This is important, because it really sets you up for the rest.
“In one sentence, if we had to sum up what we’re trying to do, this is it. Build the most epic place to work, have fun, and innovate.”
Connectifier: A Recruitment Intelligence Company
Connectifier co-founder and CEO John Jersin told Pingboard in January that he hadn’t yet begun to consider values or company culture until the founding team made its very first hire.
“After we got a signature on an offer letter, we slid into a low level panic about how to make the office seem less lonely,” he said. “Whether we needed to start buying snacks and even whether we should play music during the day. Over time, we stopped worrying about the little things; realizing our culture was more about why we did things, rather than what we did. In other words, culture is about our values and how those values influence the actions of the company.”
Connectifier expresses its values and mission in a couple of statements right on its About page. Below is the description for the listing “Who We Are.” Notice how the team’s tech background is so core to its identity, though the core values themselves are not explicit:
“Connectifier is an AI company. Our goal of building intelligence into employment platforms requires a heavy focus on distributed systems, information retrieval, and scaling. As such, our team draws from places like Google, Amazon, Stanford, Microsoft Research, NASA, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley National Lab.”
Lightning Lab: A Digital Accelerator in New Zealand
Tech entrepreneur Dan Khan wrote last December about his own experiences with communicating core values for Lightning Lab:
“At one event we hosted at the Lab, we received a negative comment about our core values, suggesting thirteen were too many to be useful and three would be more appropriate. I thought about this over the next few days — I’ve seen plenty of companies who have values like ‘Integrity, Trust, and Honesty,’ but these are ‘table-stakes’ for me, and after considered thought I stood by the values we created.
“Why? Because my team and I referred to our values daily (and by number!) to help drive and promote our desired behaviour, especially aspirational values like ‘#7. Ask for help more than we think,’ ‘#9. Feed the ecosystem,’ and ‘#10. Be grateful for the help we receive,’ all highly relevant in the giveback ecosystem that startups and accelerators operate in.
The Resilience of Core Values
Khan’s story in particular highlights a key benefit of having well-thought-out core values: They form a resilient constitution. Having that stable foundation is certainly important to startups and accelerators, as he said, but even mature organizations are buttressed by their values during lean times.
“While core values are stable, the marketplace certainly isn’t, and that’s where interim beliefs emerge,” Chris Cancialosi writes at Forbes.
“For example, if market share dips, your organization must shift its focus and adopt new guiding principles in response. While these company-wide tenets may be reactionary, they’re no less important. They can be the driving factors that trigger a change in behavior or a new initiative that helps you stay competitive.
“As your attention shifts, a chasm can form between your core and interim values. This is where frustration is born. The key is to only implement interim values that directly support your core ones.”
images by:
Bhoj Raj
Javier Calvo
Ryan Wong