Why businesses need to know their core values (and live them)

Why? If your company’s core values can’t be easily remembered, how can you expect your team to know them, live them, or embrace them?

I’ll back up a little. This Monday, I’m facilitating a core values and behaviours workshop with one of our Two Tides clients, and I’m pumped. Having been coaching one of the owners one-on-one for the past couple of months, we’re now ready to bring the wider Senior Leadership Team into the learning journey.

Fortunately, this client has well-defined core values that are memorable and limited to just four. This was part of their brand strategy project completed a few years ago, involving in-depth interviews with the owners and leaders to capture the DNA of the business—to understand what makes them unique.

As Jim Collins says, “You don’t set core values; you discover your core values.” And for this client, this process helped them do just that.

What are core values?

Core values are our rules for behaviour; they already exist within the organisation and remain constant.

The goal of our workshop is to help the leadership team understand how these core values translate into behaviour within the business.

Now, here’s the fun bit. Using the “Mission to Mars” tool, the leaders will choose some A-Player individuals within the business who are going on a Rocketship to Mars. With the language barrier on Mars, they need to find the best people who represent the culture with how they act and behave.

When we share what these people do and how they behave, we start to see what makes them credible with their peers, what makes them competent in their roles, and why they represent that core value.

It’s these behaviours that we capture on the whiteboard. By being purposeful and understanding what behaviours we want in our business, we can create what David Friedman calls ‘culture by design.’ We are intentionally documenting what we want our culture and behaviours to be.

These are the set of behaviours that become the norm for how we operate. We can call these on-brand and off-brand behaviours, or as Brad Giles explains in Made to Thrive calls them ‘cool’, and ‘not-cool’ behaviour. I can see this catching on in a workplace, “Joel, that’s not-cool mate.”

Embedding core values 

The next step is making sure these core values leave the SLT meeting and become embedded in our organisation. Why? If people don’t know about them, how can we hold them accountable?

There is nothing more frustrating than seeing someone in your workplace get away with something. Poor behaviour, not living the core values, or doing something ‘un-cool’ is one of these situations. We want to build a thriving team of productive A players who are aligned with the core values.

And for those who aren’t, well, there needs to be serious consequences, such as being exited from the organisation.

With core values defined and behaviours mapped out, the final part of our workshop will focus on how to embed these core values throughout the organisation.

• Storytelling: A common tool is storytelling – we even used it for our Mission to Mars exercise; we told stories about who we would bring and why. In your business, you should do the same.
• Recruitment: Core values don’t start when someone walks into your company. From the minute you start recruitment, you need to share your core values – it’s really a great ‘speed dating’ tool to quickly determine whether there is synergy there.
• Onboarding: During onboarding, the core values will be used too. New staff will see them as they walk around your building (maybe the values are on the office walls or in their new company diary), and stories will be shared about great team members, their ‘cool’ behaviour, and how they are a great rep for the company values.
• Performance review: Your core values are part of your performance review process too. A major piece of whether you’re performing in your role is whether you are aligning with the core values.
• Weekly updates: I’ve even seen CEO weekly updates sent out using the core values as the subheadings for delivering messages.
• Internal comms: And if you’re of a larger size, your internal newsletter or Teams channel may have a shout-out area, again shining the spotlight on those whose actions champion the values of the organisation.

Remember, core values are an important framework for any successful business. They provide the rules for behaviour. They are unique to your organisation and truly represent you.

From our youngest memories, we are given rules to conform to that tell us how to behave. In the workplace it is no different.

Define your core values, tell people what behaviour looks like, and build a culture that holds people accountable when they don’t meet the standards. 

Time to take your core values from a generic list to a powerful representation of your organisation? Chat with our business growth consultants at Two Tides today to find out how we can support your CEO and leadership team through this process.