Excerpts on deciding on, clearly articulating and sharing, and promoting/âmaintaining the orgâs values
Chapter 17: Culture
Culture is the unspoken set of rules that people in a group follow when interacting with each other. You act differently when youâre in a bar than when youâre at a family dinner. Thatâs because the rules that run the interactions between the different nodes in the networks have changed. Culture is the name for those rules.
Values
By Alex MacCaw
Values are a critical element in your companyâs culture, and your company will function at its most efficient if your employees understand and share them. Once your team has a referenceable shared set of values they can make decisions without you, and more importantly evaluate candidates for culture fit. As the team grows interactions between new hires and the core team, who defined the company values, diminishes. Having a set of established and referenceable values helps disseminate those values to new team members without daily interactions.
One misnomer [my note: shouldâve been âmisconceptionâ; this activated my pedantry button] CEOs sometimes have is thinking they get to choose the values. By the time youâre 30 or so employees your company has a set of values whether you like it or not. Itâs now your job to codify whatâs already there. While it is possible to change a value, it will take a lot of work.
Agreeing on what your values are is the kind of statement that needs maximum buy-in, so it should involve your whole company. Send out a survey and gather contributions from everyone. Ask your team to suggest both a value and the name of an employee who exemplifies it. Then arrange all the suggestions into common themes and have your leadership team vote on the final cut.
Once you have agreed upon your values, use them to guide your hiring and firing. Bring in people who want to live by these principles and let go of people who donât. Otherwise, your values will have no meaning.
Distribute your values, print them out and repeat them until your team knows them back-to-front. Every week at the all-hands highlight a value and a person whoâs actions best exemplifies that value that week.
The following are an example of Clearbitâs values. They combine a short pithy statement (easily rememberable), with a longer description for clarity.
Care (Give a shit). Empathize with customers. Take the time to understand their frustrations, needs, and desires.
Craft (Master it). Own your craft. Never stop learning and improving.
Team (Work together). Teamwork makes the dream work. Fill gaps. Thereâs no such thing as âitâs not my job.â
Truth (Say it). Be upfront and candid. Say it like it is. Hold yourself and others accountable.
Initiative (Be resourceful). Donât wait for permission. Figure it out â or figure out who can.
Fun (Have it). Donât take yourself too seriously â life is short.
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[Regarding company meetings:] For another perspective, Peter Reinhardt of Segment shares: âWe use all hands for sharing across teams of what teams are accomplishing, working on, celebrating wins (reinforce our values), and recognition broadly⌠plus bringing in customers to talk. I find this much healthier than an obsession with whatever leadership team is talking about (although we do present the board deck + board topics once per quarter.)â
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[One goal of quarterly offsites is to âRefresh Vision and Valuesâ]
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Values
There are many ways to create your company values.
A simple one is to complete the following sentence: âThe rest of you in the company can make all of the decisions from now on, as long as you âŚ.â This is appropriate when the company is small and values are entirely aspirational.
Another version is to acknowledge the culture that you already have. To do this, each Leadership Team member should pick one person in the company who is NOT on the Leadership Team and exhibits a value that you wish would be a universal behavior. Name the person and the behavior. Then select 3-5 such examples. This method is best used when the company already has a sizeable team and existing culture.
Excerpts on deciding on, clearly articulating and sharing, and promoting/âmaintaining the orgâs values