How to choose your company core values
This video and the article are part of a series of exercises taken from the ResultMaps workshop, “How to Accelerate Results with Accountability + Ownership." This exercise works best after you’ve completed the “How to Build a Vision that Sticks” workshop, which you can find here.
By creating a company vision statement, you establish a clear picture of the future your organization is aiming to create, in terms that will be easy to convey to a team charged with making that vision real.
The next step, after you’ve laid out your company’s general direction, is to create core values to guide the behavior of team members when they’re making decisions - especially decisions they have to make that are not perfectly outlined in their day-to-day assignments.
When we talk about core values, we aren’t talking about behaviors like integrity or honesty. Those are table stakes - basic permission-to-play. What we are looking for is something more concrete. In this article, we’re going to give you a method for developing clear core values that are easy for your entire organization to understand, and that help you move beyond hiring based on gut feelings, and instead toward a hiring process based on alignment with your company culture.
The decision design exercise
Let’s say one of your employees is faced with a difficult situation. A customer needed something urgently, last-minute, and your employee had no way of knowing that this was coming. Still, this individual really rallied and delivered, even in this situation in which the customer might have known they weren’t necessarily being very reasonable. The employee dropped what they were doing, really delivered for the customer, and as a result, the customer sent a note back to the CEO or another leader explaining how much it meant to them and what it meant to the company.
When something like that happens, you should call it out, and work to design such behaviors into your culture. If you’re able to talk about the story, and give a title to it, you have a core value. You can use the template below to run this exercise:
Another scenario to help you understand this method: let’s say something has happened within your team that really pissed you off. Flip that thing around and instead ask yourself, “how do I wish the people involved would have behaved?” Can you think of a story in which somebody behaved just right, in just the way that you wanted? Employ this approach to fill out the above decision design template.
A real-world example
We at ResultMaps once had someone take much more of a leadership role over the direction of our production architecture. He was doing a great job, but it was difficult for me, as a leader, to adjust to this new role he was in. I kept wanting to check everything he was doing. But, I recognized that what was important was that he was taking action. Sometimes his actions were perfect, and sometimes they weren’t, but he was communicating and he was exhibiting what we call “a bias toward action.” Those happen to be two of our core values here at ResultMaps.
So, even if he hadn’t read my mind for each assignment he’d done, he did everything that anybody could be reasonably expected to do (by hitting our core values). Now, instead of micro-managing, I instead own the process of clarifying what I need him to do - which is often just letting him do his job. When we have core values outlined, we get to exemplify and reinforce the behavior we want.
The 1-page vision in ResultMaps
ResultMaps users can store their core values in the 1-page vision, which is a single source of truth accessible to everyone on your team to refer back to at any time. Learn more here.