Welcome new subscribers! It’s been a lot of fun hearing from so many of you on things you like in the newsletter and stuff you’e like to hear more about. Keep it coming! This week’s issue is inspired by a conversation I had with a friend recently about company values.
I talk a lot about company values (here, here, here, and here). I believe values are one of the best things you can do for your company and this issue focuses on how I ran the process to establish core values at my company.
Friend’s dilemma: my friend joined an early stage company with a mission around diversity. The founder set the mission but the team isn’t really living up to it. Whenever ideas bubble up on how to address something internally, there is some initial excitement from the founder but ultimately no action. Even worse, sometimes those ideas get squashed right at the onset. Why? Because founder knows best.
My thoughts
Culture that isn’t intentionally set creeps in. When you don’t have a formal mission or values to guide culture, inherently the company culture becomes whatever is felt by the people at that point in time or by the founders.
This isn’t necessarily bad, but I do think it’s exponentially harder to create a healthy company culture without some guiding principles. My friend joined the company expecting that they’d be working to diversify the ecosystem (industry and team) and yet every chance my friend got to make a real change, it was shut down because the founder’s thoughts on diversity were different than my friend’s.
Now here my friend is, unexcited to come to work, not willing to keep raising suggestions, and resenting the company for not living up to their values. Now amplify that out for all employees. Everyone at the company has a different view on what diversity means to them and how they want to work toward that mission. Maybe some folks don’t even care about that mission at all! You’ve got a big clash between personal values and company goals.
By setting company values, you explicitly call out what the company, well, values. It helps draw a line between personal values and company values, which is incredibly important.
Cult or Core Values?
Good company core values can quickly fade into a cult-like culture. You know the companies I’m talking about. The Kool-Aid companies with cutesy names for their employees, lots of swag, etc. There’s a fine line between cult-like culture and healthy, good, clear core values.
Look, there are some good things that come with the cult-like followings of company culture. It means core values are clear, often communicated, and you’ve hired a team that believes in the core values. As with anything though, too much of a good thing often leads to not-so-good outcomes. With company culture, it manifests as group-think, closed walls with clear outsider vs insider mentality, etc.
Balance is key.
So you want to set some core values
Here are the steps I took when we set core values at my company. Hopefully this is helpful for anyone who’s thinking about setting some core values.
Try to get in early. The earlier you can identify some values, the better IMO. It just makes everything easier.
Founders/leadership set the mission/north star. You probably already have some form of this, if not explicitly. Why did you start the company? What’s the big vision? Why are you doing this? Document it. Say it often. Remind people why we’re here as often as you can.
To start the core values writing process, I involved my whole team. We were a small team at the time and had a clear mission but didn’t have values yet. Once you have folks on the team, you’ve already got some sort of culture, so run with it. You don’t have to involve the team FWIW, but this is how I did it.
We met as a group and started a group discussion on what was important to us. This ended up looking like a word cloud (respect, transparency, clear goals, etc.). There is no leader for this section. It can’t come from the top if you’re trying to have a completely open process. Do have a moderator though. Try to get everyone participating. You may want to try having everyone prepare values in advance and submitting them anonymously to start the conversation.
Then we broke into groups to discuss and to try to come up with core values around the key elements discussed in the group setting.
Then we met back as a group. We selected a few of the values that felt the strongest and best fit for our culture.
Then we circulated a doc that folks could add comments to and edit.
We met again a week later to go through the feedback and came up with final core values.
We have an iterative process and give ourselves the flexibility to adjust over time. We ended up reviewing the core values a few years later at one of our offsites and made some adjustments to the core values. I’m not sure this is 100% necessary, but it was nice to do a refresh.
^ Our core values at Artemis.
That’s all there was to it.
I’d love to hear how you think about core values as a founder, investor, or employee. Reach out or comment to share your stories.
In case you have any interest in random agricultural things, I interviewed Gator Halpern from Coral Vita this week on my LinkedIn Live series. It was so fascinating. I did not know that coral reproduces both asexually and sexually! Highly recommend a listen and following what Coral Vita is doing.
