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What Values Define
So when we talk about building a company, most companies have core missions and values that the CEO or the founder has that’s going to be the DNA of the company. It leads to how you, the kind of people you hire, your expectations, your ambition. It’s the things that’s most important that if you don’t have those ingredients, if those aren’t the framework in which the company operates in, then you’re going to attract the wrong talent, and you’re going lose sort of your North Star, what you’re trying to obtain.
How you go about coming up with these values out of all the things that you feel are important? What are the top five, six, I would say no more than seven things that you need every employee to fully understand and embrace? And use that as the guiding principles on how you operate, and everyone has that shared understanding. And I can tell you as a company that’s been going for 20 years, bad behavior is contagious. So if people aren’t following those values or starting creating their own values or, I don’t know, ignoring the values overall. They know it, but they don’t care. That also becomes contagious. And when that becomes contagious, two things happen. The A-players who follow the values, they’re like, “This is not taken seriously anymore. Why am I here?” So you start to end up losing great people. And b. obviously, it becomes a company that you didn’t intend for it to be.
Who Should Uphold Values
If you’re a much smaller organization and the CEO, and you have the benefit of the CEO being able to touch everyone in the organization. When we were a company of 30 people, 40 people, I was able to see and touch. I knew everyone by name — first name, last name — kind of knew their situation, and they knew me. And that energy and clear communication of everything you mean and the values that emanate from you is some of the best times of any successful organization because that’s when it was that that small, tight group that kind of got things going and got momentum.
As you get much bigger as an organization, it’s hard to make sure that everyone who’s hired stands by those values, and possesses those values, or shares them. It’s easy to memorize them, but do you live your life? Do you live your work, life rather, through that value system? If you can retain people who come from that era and they do their job correctly, they’re continuing that tradition, and they’re making sure that they’re holding those people accountable. That’s where I think the People function becomes very, important to an organization. You build Human Resources if you’re building a strong functioning People department that are reinforcing the values that the CEO has laid out, holding people accountable for their performance, in reviews and things of that nature. But also the hiring managers who are hopefully tethered back to that core initial team, they know those values as well because they kind of got it through osmosis. They were around the CEO when you built the company, and what you hope to get is that that is passed on as the company starts to expand in the people that they hire. So between the People function and just the core hiring managers, those values are transferred over time.