A Quick Guide to Creating Your Core Values
I recently polled my LinkedIn network to ask them what I should write about in my next post. The winner? Culture.
I was somewhat surprised that culture was the #1 requested topic; in my experience, culture is popular during ‘peace time’ and, given our current economic climate, most startups definitely find themselves in war time.
But maybe that’s the point? While founders are learning to sink or swim, maybe they’re also wondering how to define their culture so they keep motivating their teams and attracting the right talent.
Before I go on, there’s one thing you should know: I firmly believe that the key to a strong culture is intentionality. I have yet to see a company that has no set values, rituals, habits or artifacts have a strong culture. Note that I’m using the word strong and not good, ethical, or friendly. A strong culture means that it’s pervasive and cohesive. You can have a strong culture that centres around competition, secrecy and results-driven and you can have a strong culture that is collaborative, transparent and process-driven.
The first step in institutionalizing your culture is to define it through some core values.
Creating your values
First and foremost, you might find that you don’t need values until you have employees, scale a bit, and realize you need a way to create behavioural cohesion so that decisions are being made to your preference. It’s not a bad idea to determine what you want your values to be early on so they’re already prevalent by the time you have a team.
If you do have employees but no values, I suggest that you start this process by surveying them and asking what they think your values should be. You might be surprised and inspired by what comes up.
Types
There are three types of values:
Founder-based: these are values that reflect the founders’ personalities
Accidental or Employee-based: these are values that arise from your team’s common personality traits and interests
Aspirational: these are values that are currently lacking but that you think are crucial for future success
There’s sometimes a 4th type of value that’s mentioned called permissive — permissive values are supposed to convey the minimum of behavioural standards. In my opinion, that’s what an employee handbook is for, so I don’t include it.
Amount
How many values should you have? I say less is more.
You want your values to be used frequently and consistently. That’s easier to do if you have three to five. A few years ago, I was interviewing for a job at a wellness app startup, and the recruiter told me with a straight face “Yeah culture is huge here, we have like eight core values. Can’t really name them right now but yeah culture is important.” Yikes.
It’s best to start with a few and add more over time as your culture evolves.
Structure
Once you’ve come up with your values, I recommend standardizing them by using the same structure:
One-Word: Grit, Integrity, Passion
Action+Adjective or Verb+Adverb: Respect for People, Be Accessible
The “We”: We Care, We Are Resourceful, We Believe in People
The Phrase: Move fast, break things. It’s best to do one thing really, really well. Accept and delegate responsibility
When all of your values follow the same structure/nomenclature, you make it that much easier for people to remember them and use them in every day situations.
Quick Do’s and Don’ts
Do
✔ Have a healthy mix between all value types
✔ Be honest/upfront about the culture
✔ Be consistent in value structure/wording
✔ Use and repeat the values as often as possible
Don’t
✘ Have conflicting or untrue values
✘ Have values because they “look good”
✘ Have too many values
✘ Conflate values with habits or customs
Don’t forget to have fun.
Setting your core values is one of the cooler things you’re going to do for your organization, so don’t rush through it; take your time and enjoy the process.
Once you have your values, there’s a million things you can do with them to strengthen your culture. But that’s a topic for another post :)
Good luck and Godspeed.