Your company’s going to have a culture whether you like it or not. Obviously, most people with toxic cultures didn’t set out to create them. Cultures—toxic or otherwise—will develop by themselves over time. It’s like that forgotten yogurt in the back of your fridge. If you don’t eat it on time, even the good cultures can go bad and leave you with a mess you’d rather not deal with.
You might have had every intention to clearly define your culture, but, being the busy entrepreneur or CEO that you are, you never had time to get to it. I’ve also encountered many startups whose founders opted to cater to canned cultures that fit the current trending themes. The founders take those trends—such as work-life balance or a “collaborative environment”—aiming to serve a higher purpose and call it their “culture.”
You simply can’t mantra yourself into a culture that you think will resonate with people without action to back it up. Today’s employees aren’t buying it, and neither are your candidates or your customers.
The likelihood of a culture creating a thriving company increases exponentially when you invest the time and care into developing your unique core values. When you actually sit down and hammer out your core values, you’re moving past just hanging up a poster of aspirational quotes and crafting the backbone of your business. These values become your secret weapon. And when you get it right, magic happens. Your teams all row in the same direction productively. People stick around because they feel the sense of belonging that comes from a shared culture and values. And your business? It thrives.
Defining Your Core Values
In Gino Wickman’s book Traction, he provides an exercise to help you define your core values: identify three people who stand out to you, and list as many attributes as you can for each person.1
When my team did this exercise, we ended up with twenty-five words. Our team found clear, overlapping characteristics that the individuals seemed to share. In the book, Gino recommends narrowing the list to three to seven core values. We ended up with five, but we weren’t done yet. Gino encourages you to think about them for thirty days before really settling on them. During those few weeks of percolating on ideas, I considered each word thoughtfully and came to understand that two words were not a good match. We found words that were a much better fit. With the change, we had our full set of core values:
1. Curiosity
2. Accountability
3. Awareness
4. Holistic view
5. Trust
We also defined each of these values further, so there wouldn’t be any confusion about what we meant by each of these terms.
After defining these values, we established a common language for communicating standards we could measure ourselves against. It enhanced our ability to perform and identify those traits in future hires.
Hiring on Core Values
Hiring for your core values exponentially increases the chances of an individual’s success as a team member. Here’s how we incorporate our values into our interview process: As part of the interview process, candidates will meet with my leadership team and are asked questions designed to suss out examples of the candidate demonstrating that core value. After the interview, we debrief on the candidate using a relatively simple yet effective scoring system.
I like to say that people don’t take jobs; they take companies. That means you need to build a great culture that will attract the right people for you, who will propel you forward. Your authentic core values also help pinpoint the qualities candidates need to have to be successful in your organization. And on the flip side, hiring people who embody your core values will keep your culture strong. Remember this when interviewing prospective employees, no matter the size of your organization!
Investing the time to define and communicate your core values and hiring people who embody them is your fast track to building a dream team that’ll run circles around the competition.