This is a story without an ending.
Back in 2016, seven friends got together in a run-down, windowless office in the Financial District to debate a critical issue. The group consisted of two Harvard-trained lawyers, a crunchy West Coast software engineer, a grizzled ex-banker, and three upbeat idealists. This was Petal’s early team: our co-founders and recent acolytes who believed in the Petal mission. Despite coming from vastly different backgrounds, they shared a common goal: to create a workplace that didn’t suck and where they would each feel a sense of belonging.
Starting from the company’s mission to “Make life easier with credit that’s honest, simple, and accessible,” they asked themselves a series of questions: What made them distinctive as a team? What were their shared personal beliefs? What kind of people did they want to attract and work with? And, perhaps the most important: How could they ensure they would never sell out their mission?
Sifting through the ups-and-downs of their collective experiences, they generated a list of eight company values — values that they believed could guide them through the turbulent and foggy entrepreneurial journey that lay ahead of them. With these values in-hand — and an understanding that some were largely aspirational — they set about building Petal.
Fast-forward to March 2018, when I joined as Petal’s first Head of People: those original eight values had yielded a tight-knit team of 25 scrappy, curious and genuinely kind employees. Each had been vetted against those values, and — like me — were attracted to the mission and strong moral compass manifested by the leaders.
However, there seemed to be some erosion in the vim and vigor of the original values. While they were still being referenced in bi-weekly “shout-outs” and formed the foundation of our hiring standards, I found that most of the team could only recite 4–5 of these values and didn’t understand the meaning behind several others (“Invent the future”, “Be different, together”?). More importantly, they weren’t being referenced much in decision-making and our adherence to some — such as “Be honest and straightforward” and “Listen and practice empathy” — was spotty across the ranks.
It was time for a Values Refresh.
Despite my role and title, I knew that I couldn’t spearhead a Values Refresh without the full-throated support of the co-founders and other culture carriers. Not only was I new to the company, I felt a deep sense of responsibility to honor and carry on the values that brought us all together in the first place. Yet I also recognized the need to draw out the values that would get us from that point to 100, 200, 300 people…working in an environment that didn’t suck and where our employees — no matter where they came from — felt like they belonged.
At a previous company, I had led the creation of company values from scratch, relying heavily on interviews, synthesizing key insights, and summarizing the findings to the Executive Team, who then selected the values they felt best represented the company’s ethos. While I enjoyed having the “power of the pen” and the autonomy to apply my own judgment to what I felt were the most important values, the effort felt hollow because the company leadership didn’t care enough to get involved.
Petal’s leadership is very different. There was zero chance they would quietly stand on the sidelines of what they perceived to be a critically important initiative — one that would define our culture, the way we interact with our customers and our employees, and establish our standards for hiring, advancement, and dismissal. Three of the co-founders — Jason (CEO), Andrew (CFO), and Jack (CTO) — Trista, one of our earliest employees, and I committed ourselves to learning how best to approach the (re)development of our company values, poring over Patrick Lencioni’s HBR article on “Making Your Values Mean Something”, Jim Collins’ “Aligning Action and Values” , and — my personal favorite — the First Round Review article about “Draw[ing] the Owl”.
We then spent >50 hours over six months to discuss, challenge, and wrestle together the outline of new Petal Values. There were heated discussions about the types of values we wanted (core or aspirational or table-stakes?), lots of table-pounding, word-smithing, references to inspirational companies, and the like. Each one of us had our hallmark value: Jason kept expounding on Jeff Bezos’ ‘Day One’ philosophy; Andrew underscored the importance of discipline and high standards; Jack’s focus was adaptability through change; and Trista emphasized the necessity of humility and low ego. As for me? I pushed on the obligation of each employee to dissent when they disagreed or had a better alternative. Coming out of these sessions felt cathartic, like we had emerged from some kind of spiritual revival where we took turns as preacher and choir.
And what were we trying to achieve, exactly?
We wanted to:
- Capture the behaviors we felt made our community unique
- Anticipate what we needed to grow without losing our specialness
- Identify values that applied equally to our customers and our employees
- Winnow down the list to a set of <7 punchy, memorable behaviors that would stand the test of scale.
At some point, we realized that we were missing a massive datapoint: our employees’ perspective. So, as part of our mid-year employee survey, we asked the broader team to rate how accurately our company’s operations reflected each value, and what they might add or remove.
With the team’s input, we then enlisted the help of Tim, our then-new Executive Creative Director, who had cut his teeth as a copywriter at leading New York ad agencies. Many, many brainstorming and word-smithing meetings later, he emerged like Moses from the mountain, clutching his tablets: the 90% complete Petal Values.
To arrive at the finalized values, Jason and I presented these to the rest of our Leadership Team for their approval. Perhaps because we had so thoroughly discussed every pro and con of our values, that conversation was seamless.
Next, we had to announce it to the full team. But how?
We wanted to make these new Petal Values feel weighty and important, and initially considered doing something off-site — maybe a glamping retreat, or some other extremely time-consuming, expensive outing? And we wanted to time this announcement with the publication of a beautiful mini ‘zine of our values that our Brand Design team was whipping up. I envisioned a grand stage, suitable for an Apple iPhone launch, with Jason and the Leadership Team unveiling the refreshed values to applause and whistles, followed by handing out letter-pressed, hand-bound Petal Values books.
No such thing happened. Because we’re not that kind of company. Values are only as good as our application of them. And, taking our value to “Simplify” to heart, we chose a path that would let our new values stand on their own, without a lot of unnecessary window dressing. We didn’t need a glitzy production to prove that our values mattered; we just needed to demonstrate our sincerity and personal passion behind them.
So, instead of the Apple stage, we repurposed one of our monthly All Hands meetings to announce our new values. Jason, Andrew, and Jack got up and talked to the team about the origin of the values, why they mattered to the co-founders so early on, and how these initial values helped shape Petal to become what they only dared to dream it could be: a community of 70+ employees from all walks of life, aligned in our mission, and supporting each other to build a great company. Then, on our makeshift screen (aka a rolling white board), we projected our new values:
Each member of the Leadership Team shared poignant personal stories about what these values meant to them. Jack talked candidly about how, as a relatively young and inexperienced co-founder, he is learning to become the CTO he aspires to be by “listen[ing] with curiosity”; Ariana, VP of Product, shared how her formative experiences at a global investment bank inspired her to always “do right by the customer”; and Jason gave tribute to his grandfather, who, in his twilight years, had been defrauded by unscrupulous financial institutions hocking overly-complex products. To him, Petal’s value to “simplify” was to level the playing field for anyone who needed credit, without all of the abstruse jargon and fine print.
It was a bonding moment for the company, all of us crowded into a small seating area. We then turned things over to the broader team to share their own experiences and stories with our values amongst themselves. Later, team members recalled the “palpable electric vibe” in the room, and how “unified” they felt. And I could tell, from everyone’s faces, that the motley crew of seven friends in that run-down office were successful in achieving their goal from 2016: Petal isn’t a workplace that sucks, and — regardless of where you come from — if you believe in and espouse our values, you’ll feel welcomed and belong.
That All Hands meeting is one of my favorite memories so far at Petal. Another is when we took our founding Richmond team through the Petal Values. Seasoned credit card customer operations professionals, they have seen and been frustrated by how other financial companies treat their customers. As I read through the values of “Do right by the customer” and “Speak the truth”, someone in the back of the room shouted out, “Amen!” and “That’s right!” It was pretty incredible.
However, we know that “our job’s never done.” We have to continue to honor the values, use them explicitly in hiring and advancement, and apply them to the most difficult decisions. As Jason likes to tell new hires during our joint Introduction to Petal Mission and Values discussion: “Everyone who is hired at Petal has shown that they are a natural fit within our value-system. Even still, there will be moments when adhering to our values is challenging or inconvenient. These are the moments to look for — as it is especially in these moments that our values do their work.”
It’s been less than two months since we refreshed our values. It took us the better part of a year to hash them out, which allowed us the time to pressure-test and tweak them as we made business and personnel decisions.
Creating and refreshing values is not a slap-dash, one-and-done exercise. It’s a continuous process of self-exploration, radical inquiry, and vigilance. By applying the Petal Values to our everyday interactions, we aspire to nurture a healthy and positive work environment. There are too many companies out there — especially in the startup space — whose values hang on a wall without being refreshed, discussed, debated. They lose relevance and weight. That defeats the purpose of having values: to engage in a continuous conversation with employees about what kind of workplace we want to build and community we want to be.
At Petal, we commit to relying on our values to navigate both the internal and external dynamics of our business and our community. And keeping them at the forefront of everything we do.
This story will be always be continued.
