Values done right
Anyone who has spent any time in the workforce is familiar with the idea of corporate values. Often, they are seen as text on the back of your ID card, or a poster in the hall, but never truly taken seriously. Why, as a startup with the opportunity to start fresh and make an intentional culture, would we want to advocate for something seen as a joke among big corporations? Because done well, it matters. A lot.
As a new fledgling company determining at your core what you value, and what you want your future employees to embody is powerful. Take hiring, for example, you know that you need engineers who know how to code using the specific technology. That’s table stakes. But what about curiosity to search for new ways of doing things? Or an ability to work effectively with a team? If these are things that as founders you believe will give your company an edge, why wouldn’t you screen and hire for them? Or, take performance conversations. Do you believe that continuous feedback and communication are essential to a high performance culture? If so, why would you only schedule performance reviews once a year, or only prioritize negative feedback?
How do you determine your core values? First start with your business. What are you trying to achieve and what is the aim of your business? Values should align with your overall vision of the company and its future goals. For example, take Apple. In the late 1990’s they rolled out their “Think Different” campaign. Yes, this sounds like marketing, but it was marketing for how they wanted to operate within the company as well as how they market to consumers. Apple was known as the maker of computers for mainly creatives and education. Of course it has greatly expanded their market since then, but at the core of how they develop products, or push employees to abandon what they think are limitations, and to explore something entirely new that has not been done before, they come back to “Think Different.”
Get outside the standard set of values you may have heard in the past and be creative. But always be authentic. Employees can smell inauthentic values from miles away, and they will believe the company is equally inauthentic. As founders you must not only create the set of values, but live and demonstrate them every day, and help your employees do the same. Once established, find ways to bring them to life. Many companies will create “value awards” where they reward employees who have demonstrated a particular value by telling their correlating story to illustrate how it is being implemented and give concrete examples to the rest of the staff. In your performance evaluations not only articulate what people are doing well, but also how they do it. The values are the “how.” Do you have salespeople who kill their monthly quotas, but no one wants to partner with them for fear of being taken advantage of? This is the “how.” In remote companies there has been a big push for fun, or happy hour type activities. Why not tie them back to a specific value to ensure everything ties back to what the drivers of the business and support the DNA of the company?
As founders, consider values creation as a foundation of how you want to build your company. Many candidates, especially new to the workforce, want to know that their own personal values are a match with the company’s core values. Start with yourselves. What drives your passion? Why did you create a new startup company? Be creative, but honest. A list of values should roughly be between 3-5 concrete ideas. Stay away from purposefully vague statements and be specific and purposeful. Brainstorm, ask advisors, ideate on possibilities. But don’t wait. A company of 50 people without a clear vision and values will lack structure, employees may not know where to increase their efforts, and behavior will not be focused productively.
Establishing a core set of company values brings clarity to difficult decisions, hiring, evaluations, and honestly, terminations. It’s a code of behavior we hold one another against. Building the foundation of a successful startup starts here.
