How To Work With Company Values
More than posters on the office wall
Many traditional companies have posters on the office wall with written value statements (like honesty and innovation) that are often vague and ignored. Most people in those companies don’t know about these values or don’t understand why they exist. The executive team probably wrote them because they thought that’s something a company should have, even though they don’t understand its real impact.
As I started studying company values, I realized that that could be very powerful. As my company, Cupcake Entertainment, was growing, I was looking for ways to increase its performance, and to work with company values seemed to me to be a good idea. However, I didn’t want to be one more company that writes them but doesn’t live them.
Values are the things you do
Values are not the things you want to be. They are the actions you do. I prefer to use values as verbs instead of nouns as you can measure and hold people accountable for them. They should influence every decision you make and how you manage the company daily. As Simon Sinek, author of Start with Why, points, instead of using “Innovation”, you could say “Look at the problem from a different angle.”
The first time I had something written, I ended up with five values. As we started to live them, we changed some details and added two more. At Cupcake, our company values were:
- Focus on the player
- Be goal-oriented
- Use data to learn
- Keep it simple
- Be a team player
- Manage yourself
- Pursue growth and learning
Company values are not something you write once and never change again. You have to keep paying attention to how your company is evolving and change what can be necessary.
Another example of that is how Facebook changed one of its values. At the beginning of the company, they created the value “Move fast and break things.” However, as the company was growing, they noticed that this was dangerous to have in a more giant company. You should be careful about breaking something and putting the whole Facebook social network offline. Because of that, they decided to change its value to “Move Fast With Stable Infra”.
Everybody should know, understand, and live the company values
One challenge we had was putting the company’s values into practice in a natural way. I did not want to have the values written down and set aside as many companies do. When I spent two weeks in Thailand with our investor, he told me to read a book that helped him grow his company. The recommended book was Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t. I learned many things from this book, but I believe that what most impressed me was how to work with values within the company. I brought the idea to one of my partners, the COO (chief operations officer), and we came up with an idea that made sense to our team.
We were a company that worked using agile methods. We held daily meetings and some other ceremonies. We didn’t follow everything by the book. We used things in a way that was good for us. We worked with sprints (development cycle time) of two weeks, and at the end of each one (every two Fridays), we had a slightly bigger ceremony. The idea we had was to create a specific ceremony to put the company’s values into practice. We decided to do that at the end of our sprints.
At this ceremony, each person on the team had to mention how another person had used some of the company’s values during the past two weeks. That made people pay more attention to what was being said at daily meetings and was an opportunity for people to compliment one another. It was very nice to see all teammates saying good things to one another using the company’s values. Everybody enjoyed this process.
Use your values to give feedback
How do we know when we did something wrong if no one tells us? Through feedback, we grow as we have the opportunity to learn and do something about it. I, as the company CEO, needed to help my team to grow.
I remember first reading about feedback in the book High Output Management, written by Intel founder Andrew Grove, where he talked about having daily conversations with everyone from time to time. For me, that was not feasible at the moment. A while later, I read The Weekly Coaching Conversations, which talked about weekly feedback conversations. This book finally motivated me to do something about it, and I decided to start with quarterly conversations. It was the best I could do at the moment. I needed to begin to help my employees somehow.
At Cupcake, we gave all feedbacks based on the company’s values. When you give feedback to someone, it is essential to focus on that person’s actions. It would help if you did not say “you are incompetent”, but something that emphasizes the action that was not done correctly and helps the person understand why changing it is essential and how it can be done. As I worked with company values as verbs (actions), it was easy for me to point to one of them when I wanted to give feedback.
It doesn’t have to be complicated
Working with company values helped me make better decisions and improved my team and myself as professionals. Company values should not be something complicated or bureaucratic to have in a company. They are not rules; they are guidelines. They should help you and your team make decisions faster daily.
One of my employees wrote me the following text after I left my company:
“Cupcake was the first company I worked for where the company’s mission and values were really applied, and not just used as a decoration in the ‘about us’ section of the website.”
As you can see, we live the company’s values intensely. When a new employee joined the company, we presented its mission, purpose, and values. We emphasized that we lived everything we talked about, but the person only realized how true that was when he started to live the company’s day-to-day life. Company values can help you if they are more than posters on the office wall.
