Request: techniques for defining company values

December 04, 2024

by a searcher from University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School in Greenfield, NH, USA

I recently bought a 10-person, 20-year-old company which has never formally defined its company values. I'd like to use part of an upcoming team offsite to run an exercise to help establish our values, but not sure how best to do it.

In 'Traction', the author describes an approach which involves asking the leadership team to identify top-performing employees, followed by the characteristics of how these people work, then distilling the resulting list into a set of company values. I'm not sure that this approach would work well for a company of our size.

I'd love advice from anyone who's led or participated in effective exercises for defining company values like this.

2 Likes

39 Replies

228 Views

Replies

Reply by a searcher
from University of Pennsylvania in New York, NY, USA

My business is very similar to yours. We did the Traction exercise a few months ago at our first All Hands, handed out sheets of paper and pens, and asked everyone to write down the name of the person in the company they most admired / respected who demonstrated What Right Looks Like for our company.

Then I collected them, and read them out loud (team didn't know I would do that up front).

Crack some jokes as you are shuffling papers, "You guys better be writing nice things about me..." or if you have a junior employee paired with a senior employee, "If you didn't write about [NAME] it's gonna be really awkward in the truck tomorrow...."

Once you get to reading it out loud, it's honestly pretty moving. Could tell it meant a lot to some of the senior guys who really have invested in the junior team members, and might not have ever seen that publicly recognized / affirmed / valued by their peers. This was the first time I felt the whole team was really "bonded together" since closing.

After reading everything, I said, "Thank you for that, I'll be using what you just shared to draft our Company Values - not what *I think* our company stands for, but what you all have demonstrated through your actions."

The next phase (where we are living right now): build the ever-growing list of ACTIONS / HABITS / ROUTINES / PROCESSES / EXPECTATIONS that align with those values, and recruit / train / develop your team around it.

Reply by a searcher
from University of New Hampshire in Phoenix, AZ, USA

Thanks for the tag, ^redacted‌. There are some great recommendations in here from ^redacted‌ and others. I do this with my client's leadership teams through implementing the Pinnacle business operating system. Whether using the methodology from Traction, Zappos, or others, I think the most important parts are to make them genuine/authentic, easy to remember, and clear. Try to not have too many or else they will get diluted and people won't remember them.

I love how Trainual has made their values into short sayings that are fun, super unique, and rememberable....rather than the generic "Integrity" or something that like. An example of one of their values that I remember years later is "Carry the groceries." Meaning help the old lady carry the groceries across the street...be quick to offer help to customers, employees, and others because it is the right thing to do.

From there it is all about having the system in place to really reinforce the values and behaviors so that you live them day in and day out. ^redacted‌, I'd be happy to chat more to share some tips!

+37 more replies.

Join the discussion