After about a year of operating, a team I led decided it was time to intentionally set our Company Values. We had been operating from our guts, which is typical at most startups, but the time came when we needed to solidify a mutual understanding of what we thought was most important when guiding the behaviors of our team.

What we ended up creating was immensely powerful, and a tool we used daily at the company for many years.

A Note to The Wary

“Theory leery, theory weary, why can’t I be theory cheery?” – Tom Erickson

In theory, it is obvious that a tool like intentionally stated Values (company or otherwise) would help coalesce a group of people around an accepted set of behaviors. In practice, though, that is not always the case, so many people become disenchanted with Values in the corporate context.

I get it, but stick with me because I have seen Values work wonders.

How It Started

At this point there were roughly 20 employees at the company, so we called our first offsite. At the offsite, we began by discussing the companies we each admired most in our personal lives. That conversation yielded brands like the ones below:

For some of these brands, we compared how we would describe these companies as consumers of their products, versus the ways the companies described themselves. It was interesting to see the union of those descriptions, which informed how we would think about our own values – we needed to be able to live the values, so they would be expressed all the way to our customers.

I’ll fast forward to the end, where we landed on what would become our values: Skilled, Finished, Honest, Respectful, Listening, & Learning.

It’s Not Enough To Come Up With Values: You Have to Use Them

I’ll be honest – coming up with the values is the boring, easy part. The hard part is living them. As we all know, routines can be immensely powerful, so we came up with a variety of ways to incorporate them into our day-to-day and week-to-week:

• Discussion about values and how to express them during each employee’s onboarding meeting
• Included them in every board meeting and company meeting
• Weekly “Values Alignment” meeting where we pulled out examples of our values being lived out via customer reviews
• Annual values-based awards & bonuses
• Incorporated the values into our Master Services Agreements – so our partners were also aligned

Most importantly, the values were a check & balance whenever we were on the cusp of making an important decision and we referred to them in those critical moments. Company values are a powerful tool overall, but also helpful day-to-day. I’d recommend them to anyone!