Living Our Values
More than posters on a wall
Your vision defines what your organization is pursuing. Your values describe the attitude and principles that you protect along the way.
Together, when communicated consistently, your vision and values work together to rally your tribe and align the organization around a common goal and attitude. When nurtured, it sets a tone of “people like us do things like this.” When truly embraced, they provide clarity on who to hire and how to act as a company. It brings clarity to when you should coach to improve performance or dismiss someone who isn’t a fit.
Polar Notion, our values…
- We pursue excellence, not perfection
- We create remarkable experiences
- We are effectively human
- We go boldly forward
It’s tempting to dismiss their importance, especially when we have experienced organizations where values are nothing more than just a cliche. But when values are alive and well within an organization, they drive the team forward and strengthen their resolve. Values provide a clear picture of what is and isn’t tolerated.
Experiencing Values
When we started Polar Notion, we went too long without articulating our values. Once defined, we dragged our feet in truly championing them. Our friendship pre-dated the company by nearly a decade, so we had a good sense for how we worked together. As designers and software engineers, we are different in many ways but the similarities are undeniable.
Everything shifted for us when we had to fire a team member. It was 2 months into his employment and something wasn’t quite right. The performance issues were easily explained by lack of experience, but something else wasn’t right. Before committing to a course of action, we sought outside perspective.
Sharing coffee with a mentor, he asked me to share our values. After I fumbled through them, he asked how many values our troubled team member aligned with. A pit formed in my stomach as the truth became glaringly obvious. It wasn’t his issue, it was ours. We hired someone who does not align with our values as an organization. Until that point, we unintentionally hired people who aligned with our vision and values. As we grew, that ad hoc process caught up with us.
My mentor then uttered a phrase that I’ll never forget, “If they are truly your values, you have to be ready to hire and fire based on them.”
When the team is small, everything feels personal and intimate. Negatively impacting someone’s livelihood due to our own ignorance felt unjust and irresponsible. Walking away from our last conversation with this team member, we agreed to reevaluate how we hired and the standards we set for the team.
Years later, that experience still resonates with me. As founders, team members commit to us and our vision. That is an honor we should not trivialize or be quick to forget.
Develop Values
There are resources online about developing values. They are probably excellent. We went with something less scientific. Leveraging our current team, the culture we’d worked to nurture, the behaviors we celebrated, and the attitudes we appreciated, we developed them together. Rather than defining aspirational values, we set out to define the ethos that currently exists within our team.
The goal was to turn the volume up on what served us well, reject what was off-putting, and lock in what mattered most. As we’ve grown, a unique pattern and style have emerged. The values of Polar Notion are how we label those patterns.
Champion Values
Today, we share them often. We are not the type to poster them across the wall, but that works for many people we’ve met. Our values read more like phrases and expressions so they work great on shirts, stickers, and even note pads. We share them during the hiring process, spread them throughout onboarding, and even use them as part of our criteria for promotion and raises.
If you’re not tired of hearing yourself say them, you’re not sharing them enough. But more importantly, rather than simply saying them, they should be lived. Calling attention to when you see team members living out the values is the easiest way to bolster them. Live them, don’t just say them. But you still must say them.
When you begin to see your values reflected in people you hire, and those same values resonating with your current employees, your company becomes the embodiment of your principles. This aligns the thought-process behind the decision-making and encourages your employees to stand behind a unified ideal.
Own Your Values
Five years into the business, a client defaulted on their invoice. We were working for roughly five weeks with five people, which amounted to $83,000. After dragging out collections for months, they proceeded to sue us in order to avoid paying their debts. With just a 14 person team, the hit to our business was catastrophic. The lost revenue, employee costs, and legal fees totaled in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Witnessing the impending demise of our business, I sought the advice of lawyers, mentors, and friends. Almost unanimously, the prevailing advice was to layoff our team or to file bankruptcy. As a business, it was clear that our personal assets were safe and we could just ‘spin up something new tomorrow’. It was common practice and clearly ‘just business’.
Within hours, my mind was racing. Despite the chaos swirling inside my head, one of our values stood fast in all the chaos. We are effectively human. Part of what this means for us is leading with a human-centered perspective and seeking empathy before efficiency.
While much of the situation was outside of our control, we still had the choice to defend our values. At times, it felt like the only choice we actually had. “If they are truly your values, you have to be ready to hire and fire based on them.” Giving ourselves a pass simply because times were hard would have called into question how deeply we believed them.
Rather than defaulting to layoffs, we challenged ourselves to make that the last resort. Ignoring decades of advice and expensive legal counsel, which I do not usually advocate for, we defended our values. It took more than 18 months to pay back our debts, but we didn’t layoff a single team member in the process.
It was expensive, exhausting, and stretched us in ways we would not wish on any entrepreneur. On this side of the chaos however, I can’t help but think it’s a small price to pay to figure out what you are made of and what you really value.
For us, we can say with confidence that these are our people.
