Our Experience Creating Bullshit Free Company Values
Writing about company values is really hard. If you’re at all like me, you’re a bit skeptical about putting the words company and values together at all.
Most of the time if you ask for company values it seems to me you get:
Or you might for your corporate values that are full of sunshine and light, but reality in the company is very different.
That would be:
But corporate values exist. And whether skeptical-me likes it or not, a company will always develop some values through its people and its processes. So this year we decided it was time to look at what values we have today — and how we preserve them and bring them out in the future.
Part 1: Get the Tribe Together
Back before NewsWhip, I was a corporate lawyer. One feature of biglaw I noticed was that “the absent are always to blame”.
When things went wrong due to poor communication between firms or groups or vendors (how 30% of everything goes wrong) the people on each side would circle wagons and start blaming the other side. “They know what we expected! They should have delivered blue widgets!” Or: “We were clear what we were delivering, they should have expected yellow widgets!” Either way: “Dammit, it’s their fault.”
It’s always natural to blame the guys who are not there. You don’t have the stranger’s perspective. You might never even have met them. You probably don’t trust them. We’re a tribal species, and the people in your group are your temporary tribe.
As we were hiring fast throughout 2015, it was obvious that we’d soon have a lot of team members in New York who would not know the Dublin product team. Over 2015, NewsWhip grew quickly from eleven to thirty five, spread over two offices in Dublin and New York, and we’re keeping up the clip — our current growth could put us at 70 by end of the year.
I got a little worried. I didn’t want NewsWhip to become a company where the absent are blamed — otherwise we grind to a halt.
Any fast-evolving technology company is actually a brain, with critical information stowed in many places: our salespeople who understand clients and product usage bugs, our developers who know our stack and what is possible to do with it, our product managers who know what’s coming down the line, our marketers who know our data and bigger narrative, our customer success team who can loop in product feedback, and our management who establish our direction and cadence.
Here’s a normal brain:
Here’s NewsWhip’s company brain:
For this multi-person brain to work, the people inside it need (i) some appreciation of what other people are doing, (ii) an environment of trust where they can communicate frankly and helpfully, and (iii) a willingness to communicate what they know and learn from others.
If these conditions are there, the company brain can be lightning fast.
As we hired in 2015, we made sure we were creating a fast brain. We hired collaborative, creative people and avoided anyone who just wanted to pick up a paycheck for a few months or years. Once the team was built up, we thought it was time to get together, so we organised the inaugural NewsWhipCon, — getting our global team into Dublin for a week of learning from each other.
At NewsWhipCon, sales people learned about how our technology works from the people who build it, our tech team learned how our sales process works from the people who sell it, and everyone developed some appreciation for what others in the company do. (This was followed of course by a long weekend of beer, dancing, bronze aged pipe playing and dolphin spotting.)
After NewsWhipCon we kept tight. We run an all hands meeting every week, so everyone in the company can get an overview of who is buying, what’s being built, and what to expect down the line from each department. And day-to-day regular calls and Slack chats keep everyone celebrating wins, shipping product and solving problems together.
Keeping information flowing is only part of the battle though. How should we interact? What qualities should we hire for? Without some explicit guidelines on how the qualities we value and should hire for, we might still lose our cohesion.
Part 2: Figuring Out Values
In February, our Head of Sales Kevin told me about an startup meetup he had attended one night in downtown New York, where the founder of a mature startup describe how he established company values. He got his management team together over dinner and asked each of them to suggest what the company values should be. From these, the group picked the best and most frequent answers.
I liked this idea, but for NewsWhip, I thought we should cast our net wider by getting input from everyone on the team. Everyone has a perspective and some unique viewpoint within the company. And company values sound to me more sincere if they come from the whole company.
So — what would it look like if we surveyed our team, got unscripted answers about what our values and characteristics are or should be, and used that as our foundation? At the very least, we’d have authentic corporate values, built from our DNA and what we like in one another.
So we ran a simple survey with everyone on the team:
Think of someone (or people) on the NewsWhip team you admire. Now: what qualities do they have that make them great to work with?
After everyone completed this survey, we pulled out the words, clustered related words or phrases together, and compiled a list of values.
The results were pretty amazing. If I was to go out and imagine a perfect set of values for our company, I still would not do as well as our team’s collective mind.
First of all:
A place that values collaboration and support is a place where information flows quickly, where we can rely on each other, and where we know what’s needed from us. That the largest number of survey answers revolved around collaboration, support, sharing and respect made me incredibly happy.
Nothing feels better than a buzzing room where members of the team are solving a problem together, teaching each other about the platform, or running fixes. Long may this last.
Next:
NewsWhip is a company that’s building from scratch, so we need to be creative. We’re inventing new technology, and maybe a new industry. We’re also understanding how to sell it, and how to tell our story. So we’re going to value, reward and encourage creativity.
Creativity can sometimes get confusing — sometimes nothing freezes the brain more than the command to “be creative” — blam! Our answer is I think to be creative with our problem solving — open minded thinking, being curious, agile, critical and imaginative. The builder’s mind.
“Fun” involves lumping a few things together that amount to us having positive energy with each other.
We share enthusiasm, passion, positivity, humour being friendly — and so we have fun together. That means simply enjoying each others’ company. And yes it also means sharing awful GIFS, dancing, and having encounters with giant chickens.
NewsWhippers value hard work and commitment. We give the extra mile to each other. Sounds boring, right? But if you like what you do and who you’re doing it with, you like to commit and work hard at it sometimes.
Competence — what a dull word! But what a wonderful characteristic if you need to rely on someone every day! Startupland can make a lot of noise sometimes about being a ninja rock star, an exception, a star. But putting all that aside, a team that’s knowledgeable about their work, efficient, on point and prepared each day means things will keep trucking.
As we have grown we have had the opportunity to promote many of our internal team into new positions of responsibility, because they will keep solving problems and being practical, on point, organised and sound (to use an Irishism).
This is not a value you hear about too often in the world of disruption and unicorns. But you can be quietly confident and humble and still change the world. And you can do it a lot more quickly as a team if you don’t have egos bashing into each other every day.
I bunched a few other words with “humble” here — intelligence without ego, genuine, honest and even being kind and brave, which is an amazing word to meet in a company survey. It’s a little hard to put all these words into one value, but they probably fit under a strong humility. And I think we see right there here we want to encourage and bring out in each other.
***
Right away we know our values are a guiding light, not a ten commandments. We’ll work with them and see how we need to evolve them as we grow and welcome more people to NewsWhip in the future, and as we learn ourselves. No organism is static, including the NewsWhip brain.
Our next task as a team is to embed the values into our hiring, our incentives and our culture, and make sure they stick as we grow. We’ll make them front and center, so in some tough moment or struggle, we don’t forget who we are and how we do things.
I don’t think what we did with company values was very genius or exceptional. We just discovered something that wise people probably know already: when people have time to stop and think, and are asked what they want to do: they will want to bring out the best in themselves and each other.
What we learned in our exercise is that we can bring out the best in each other and create a company that (hopefully) continues to do that. If you’re fortunate enough to have the opportunity to explore and develop your own values as a company, I urge you to give it a go. You may be pleasantly surprised.
