What is Humbletude and how can your company use it
We recently revised our core values to reflect our evolving culture at Animoto. As we crafted each value, we identified the importance of distilling our ideas into a single word that was not only memorable, but also resonated with our company spirit.
For our first value we asked ourselves, “How do we communicate the importance of collaboration while encouraging our team to push the envelope and be innovative?” As you can imagine, trying to translate that meaty idea into a single word was no easy task.
In the end, we decided to create our own term for it — Humbletude.
What is Humbletude?
Humbletude is a humble confidence. In other words, it’s a blend of being humble AND having attitude — get it? Humble + Attitude = Humbletude
The combo of the two is vital to our core values because, as our President and Chief Video Officer Jason Hsiao likes to put it, “Being humble makes you a great teammate; having ‘tude makes you a leader.”
For our team, a person who embodies Humbletude is someone who:
- Recognizes the value of diverse opinions
- Is open to new ideas
- Confidently pushes back when needed
- Is comfortable giving and receiving feedback, seeing feedback as an opportunity to grow
Or, if you need an even simpler description, Humbletude is a balance of the humility needed to respect other people’s ideas and the confidence necessary to advocate for your own.
Humbletude in action
We knew it wasn’t enough to just tell people what our values are — we needed to find ways to integrate those ideas into our culture. The following programs and initiatives illustrate some of the ways we’ve encouraged Humbletude at Animoto.
Recognize employees for outstanding performance
We have monthly and biannual awards, recognizing individuals who have embodied our core values and gone above and beyond in their jobs. Individuals are nominated by peers and management, and recipients are announced during company-wide gatherings.
We also use an internal recognition tool called Disco, which integrates directly with Slack. This tool allows employees to give props to each other in public or in personal channels within Slack.
We’ve even created custom emojis for each of our values so employees can recognize each other in Slack for embodying our values and “bringing the ‘tude.”
Create avenues for teams and individuals to share their work
To encourage the free flow of ideas and to give our teams an opportunity to take pride in their work, we’ve created regular opportunities for sharing our endeavors.
For instance, every Friday we have something called Demos, where each team has the opportunity to showcase a project they’ve been working on. By doing this, other teams are able to give feedback and celebrate each other’s wins, helping individuals build the confidence needed for true Humbletude.
Cultivate a transparent culture where folks feel comfortable sharing ideas
In addition to weekly company-wide meetings, our CEO holds an anonymous Q&A session once a month. Employees across all teams are encouraged to submit feedback, ask questions, and give kudos. These Q&As let us see our CEO practicing our core value of Humbletude by absorbing and responding to our concerns, which in turn develops trust between our teams and leadership.
How to spot Humbletude
When assessing candidates for Humbletude, we focus on behavioral questions — a methodology based on the premise that past actions are a good indicator for future behavior.
Below are just a few of the questions we use:
- Tell me about a time when it was necessary to admit to others that you had made a mistake. How did you handle that?
- Tell me about the last time you worked on a project and got zero recognition. What happened?
- Give me an example of a time you faced a conflict while working on a team. How did you handle that?
- Give me an example of a time when you were able to successfully persuade someone to see things your way at work.
- Tell me about a time you were dissatisfied in your work. What could have been done to make it better?
- Tell me about your proudest professional accomplishment.
We pair our behavioral questions with the STAR Method, an approach to asking follow-up questions during an interview. STAR provides structure for the different answers you should tease out of every interview response: the Situation, Task, Action, and Result.
We’ve found that this method provides a holistic view of a candidate’s experience. Curious to learn more about STAR? Below is a slide from our internal interview training which can be your guide.
Once we’ve checked a candidate for Humbletude, we then assess another of our core values — Oomphosity. But we’ll cover the details of that in our next post.
Does your company have a core value similar to Humbletude? We’d love to hear about it! What initiatives and programs keep your employees engaged? Let us know in the comments below.
Does Humbletude resonate with you? Join our team! We’re hiring!
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