Porsche Digital’s Guiding Principles 2.0
Why do guiding principles matter? Guiding principles are crucial for developing and scaling an international organization with an agile and lean mindset. They support employees in making decisions and take responsibility for those decisions, which is a very important step towards self-organization.
Simply put: Guiding principles describe what we believe about how colleagues of a company ideally should work together and which values they share.
As Porsche Digital has grown, so have the guiding principles that reflect our common values. With its global network of nine innovation centres around the world, Porsche Digital is truly an international organization. We aim to reflect that fact and thus developed one set of global principles for our entire organization. We collected feedback from our colleagues and incorporated that feedback in the development of our guiding principles 2.0.
Global alignment
Moreover, we started with a specific goal in mind: Global guiding principles are aligned and defined in order to grow and work together globally with the same set of principles. One major challenge in this regard was global alignment, i.e. dealing with and bringing together local specifics and time zones as well as different opinions, perspectives, and expectations to bring everyone on the same page. So, how did we do it?
We held two remote workshops for synchronous alignment, in addition to using Miro and one collaboration doc for asynchronous work. Utilizing a diverse, cross-functional, cross-chapter, and cross-location approach, we developed guiding principles that everyone in our company can identify with. For us, it was teamwork at its best.
How we work together
Eventually, these are our seven guiding principles:
Passion, Focus, Teamwork, Courage, Commitment, Improvement and Respect.
These principles describe how we aim to cooperate as one global team. They are part of our onboarding activities, and we aim to ensure that every new colleague has heard about them. Moreover, we are holding guiding principle workshops to promote shared understanding and talk about how they translate to our daily work. Finally, we continuously reflect on the principles in our retrospectives.
About this publication: Where innovation meets tradition. There’s more to Porsche than sports cars — we are developing new digital products and services — always with our customers in focus. On our Medium blog, we tell these stories. It’s about our #nextvisions, emerging technologies, and the people that drive our digital journey. If you want to know more, follow us on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
