Dear Reboot: Establishing Company Values
How to ensure that the values you list match the values you live out in your organization.
In our Dear Reboot series, Reboot coaches aim to provide guidance on common leadership dilemmas. If you’d like to submit a question to be considered for our Dear Reboot column, email us here.
Dear Reboot,
I want to establish a working list of values for my young company so that all new hires will be on the same page, as we plan to grow fast. Where do I start?
Thanks!
Berkeley
Dear Berkeley,
I’m so glad you are thinking about this at this stage of the company. Once there is more than one person in the company, doing things and communicating with each other to get things done, it helps to know how we do things around here. There are also likely aspirational values that you hold as a company doing work in the world and furthering the vision. You’ll want to be sure that the values you list match the values you live out in your organization.
As Patty McCord notes in The Netflix Freedom & Responsibility Culture Deck:
“Our values are what we value. Some companies have nice sounding value statements that have nothing to do with how the company really behaves (how we are is a lived example of what we value). The real company values, as opposed to the nice sounding values, are shown by who gets promoted, rewarded, or let go. Real company values are the behaviors and skills that we particularly value in fellow employees.”
One of Jerry’s infamous questions is a great litmus test when you consider your company’s lived values and the culture that results: How would you feel if your kid came to work for the company? If you wince or hesitate in any way, then it’s time to revisit those values. Every person who works there is someone’s loved one. Never forget that.
Lived values are more important than static values. Indeed, when the lived values don’t map to the stated values, trust is undermined. In an earlier post titled How Early Do You Need to Create Culture in Your Company? we address this from the importance of consciously creating an aligned culture:
“Values directly answer the question: “how do we behave?”. You need to be able to visualize the behavior in action. People will often say, “trust is a value.” To get to the heart of this value, people need to know what trust means. Is there a specific aspect of trust that is getting attention? How do I behave with trust? Perhaps, it’s the context of care, the sincerity, the reliability, the competence, all described in behaviors we take in the organization. You get empty values when there’s a list of words on the wall that aren’t understood or embodied by the organization. Every value needs an explanation: “with this value present, that means when this happens we behave like this.”
What is the list of values you’d create for your organization currently? What are the values you’d like to see in your organization? What are the values that are actively lived out in the organization? (For a list of values help you see what’s possible, and find the right words, a quick google search for ‘list of values’ will get you to a good pile of words to choose from.)
As you pull together a list, look at the list of all the values that you want to establish as part of your organization, and ask yourself the following questions:
- When were these values lived and/or when have they played out in the team and organization?
- Of this list, which ones feel aspirational? If they are aspirational, how would you like to see these values lived out in the organization? What’s currently working? What would you like to see more of? Are these values that can be lived out in your organization, or are they competing with other behaviors?
- What does each of these values mean in practice? What do they look like in terms of how the company operates? Another way to think of this is: if an employee asked what one of your stated values looked like in terms of company behavior, what would you say?
- If you asked your team what the values of the company are, what list would they come up with? What would be the overlaps? If you showed your list to your colleagues, where would they say those values show up? Where would they poke holes in the list?
To this last point, many times founders and executives feel the need to come up with a website-worthy list of values all by themselves. But, as you know, the organization is a collection of individuals, each of whom helps shape, in explicit and implicit ways, the culture that you’re creating together. If you want your company values to really reflect the shared values of the individuals who make up the company, we’d encourage you to engage the team in the process of values identification. There are two simple ways to do this:
- Get people to tell each other stories of peak moments from their lives/careers working with others as part of a team. Encourage them to dig deeper and get curious about what conditions were present that allowed those peak experiences to happen. Listen to one another and pay attention to overlap.
- Ask people to imagine a specific point in time in the future (12–18 months out) at which point the team is wildly successful. Use those words: wildly successful. Say a concrete date (e.g. June 8, 2021). Ask, “If we were to find ourselves, on June 8, 2021, wildly successful in all that we’re trying to do at the company, what do you imagine it would look and feel like to be a part of the organization? What values do you imagine would be operating for us? Don’t worry too much about how we got here just yet…just let yourself imagine that we’re already there.” Again, listen to one another share and pay attention to overlap.
A process like the one described above (which can be self-facilitated or facilitated by an outside coach) makes values discovery an experiential, vital exercise, as opposed to the heady, rational, word-smithing-to-death process that it all too often is.
When talking about company values with the team and future hires, the ability to include examples of what these values look and feel like in action paint a picture of what it’s like to be in the organization. Stories of these values in action will accumulate as the team can see these as ‘how we do things at Our Company’. When and how these values show up and are exemplified is something that can be woven into the culture via feedback, all-hands, 1–1s, and other recognition. All of this added context to the more succinct list of values is equally important so that it’s clear how these behaviors play out, which will shape the team and company moving forward.
As the company grows, it’s worth revisiting your values list and making sure there’s still alignment in what you say you live by and how you’re actually living out life within the organization.
