Hey, startup founder, are you confident the values on your careers page are creating the impact you want?

I’ve experienced numerous values-setting processes - as a recruiting leader, founder, and startup hiring coach at Lightwork - and am here to explain the difference between values that work and those that aren’t worth the HTML they’re displayed with.

Use this post as a guide to formulating values that drive success by creating a real, differentiated shape for your team culture.

Let’s dive in!

 

Why Have Defined Values?

 

Your company vision is a pie composed of three pieces:

 

   

• Your Mission explains Why your organization exists
• Your Product shows What you’re building
• Your Values tell How you’re building it

What about Who? These are people excited about the mission, want to work with the values of the company, and have the skills to execute on what the company is building.

 

What Are The Benefits Of Good Values?

 

Explain the cultural norms and boundaries

Your values say, “we like when people do this; we don’t like that.” Newbies can use the values as a guide to the “why” behind organizational choices made before they arrived.

Empower individuals to make decisions

Making good decisions comes down to understanding what’s important – values define that importance. Individuals who aren’t empowered wait for a higher authority to make the decisions for them, slowing progress.

Encourage the company’s tribal identity

Startup teams believe the world should change in a particular way and they’re willing to take a risk to drive that change; this belief is powerful and bonding; you want to encourage it to help your team drive through the tough times.

That the team believes something strongly that most others don’t is what makes their success possible. It’s the Peter Thiel question applied across the team.

 

Which Values Should You Explicitly State?

 

Growing up, my father told me, “You can have it all… you just can’t have it all at once.”

Of the many things you value, how do you choose which to highlight?

 

 

Implicit Values

Most of your values are implicit – these are undefined cultural norms. While powerful, they can’t be relied upon in moments of disagreement or tension and don’t provide a blueprint for decision-making. This also means they don’t have to be polished; their role is more intuitive.

Explicit Values

Explicit values are your organization’s superpowers – they describe a way of working that differentiates your team from others. They require deep consideration and polish because of their prominence.

To maximize your explicit values, craft them so they describe which side you prefer in a difficult tradeoff. It doesn’t matter if the tradeoff is expressed in the title of the value or in a description that accompanies it, but it should be explicitly stated.

Why is this important? Because we want our values to help us make hard decisions, and hard decisions are those where a difficult tradeoff is being made. Explicitly stating values to aid tradeoffs empowers your team and distributes high-quality decision-making.

 

Selecting Your Explicit Values

 

Finding the right explicit values requires deep introspection. Here are some prompts to guide a conversation with your leadership team:

• What about our way of working is pivotal to success?
• What are we willing to sacrifice to achieve this way of working?
• If we don’t ____ we will fail.
• We’re comfortable consistently choosing ______ (positive outcome) at the expense of _______ (valuable resource).

 

CAUTION:

Failing to act in accordance with stated values is one of the most undermining things a team can do. This behavior will drive away your highest integrity people first, creating an accelerating downward spiral.

In other words, to borrow from Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements, “Be Impeccable With Your Word.”

 

Structuring Your Values

 

After identifying your explicit values, the challenge becomes stating them for maximum effect.

If we ask ourselves, “how will my team use these values?” we’ll quickly come to the conclusion that they’re most beneficial in making tough decisions. It may sound obvious, but the reason decisions are tough is that the choice involves a tradeoff between things that are objectively valuable.

With this realization, it becomes clear that we should state our values in a way that explains which side of the tradeoff the company wants.

This is why values that point to a universal good without highlighting a tradeoff are less effective; it’s often easy to find that universal good on both sides of a hard tradeoff.

Tough Tradeoff	Value
Customer Service <> Cost	“Customer happiness above short term profits”
Iteration Speed <> Planning	“Iterating towards a plan instead of planning towards an iteration”
Focus <> Flexibility	“Improving focus at the expense of flexibility”

The inverse of each of your values should be appealing — just not appealing to you. If it’s not, continue refining your articulation.

An iconic early Facebook motto, “move fast and break things”, is a great example of a well-articulated tradeoff. This approach worked well for a nascent Facebook, but it would have worked terribly for a ceramics boutique. The boutique would want employees to “move slow and don’t break anything.”

If you follow the link to the Facebook example, above, you’ll notice something striking: Mark Zuckerberg lists five Facebook values, but only two of them point to tradeoffs (if you read the text under each value, the tradeoffs are highlighted by the “internal sayings”).

I don’t think it’s surprising that the two values that clearly state tradeoffs are the ones Facebook held strongly to. You may agree with me that the other three - “Be Open”, “Build Social Value”, and “Focus on Impact” - have a murkier history at the company.

 

Testing Your Values

 

Your values should help you choose between talented people; particularly to make the assessment “this person is very capable and talented, but not a fit for us.”

Exercise

Think of someone you believe to be great, but who you would not want on your team for reasons other than skillset. This person would be a wonderful fit for a team other than yours. Do your values describe why this person wouldn’t fit?

Exercise

Examine a tough decision you made using the tradeoffs your values highlight. Do your values point to the solution you believe, in hindsight, to be right?

 

Navigating Values Change

 

Organizations change and so do their values. Select the right values for today and tomorrow, but not years down the road when you go public. Many companies go through multiple iterations of their values; don’t hold on to what isn’t working for you - find what will.

When you do change values, discuss the following with your team:

 

Why Change is Necessary

Give clear examples of old organizational values failing to guide the team towards desired outcomes. As we’ve discussed, this should highlight the wrong tradeoffs being made.

Example

“We failed to meet customer expectations in our new product launch. Our old stated value of ‘Innovation’ failed to clarify the balance we want to strike between new ideas and reliability, leading our team to prioritize new functionality over usability. As a result, our support team has been overwhelmed and our customers are asking for refunds.

It’s clear that our emphasis on shipping within a tight deadline, when coupled with our desire for innovation, led us to make tradeoffs that didn’t result in customer satisfaction.”

 

New Tradeoffs

Reframe the previous examples of organizational failure through the lens of the updated values and the tradeoffs the team is now being asked to prioritize. How should things have gone differently? Give examples for various decision types at different levels of the organization.

Example

“While we want to continue to prioritize innovation, to avoid challenges like this going forward we are going to explicitly deprioritize release speed. We will no longer set timeline expectations around innovative features with customers. We understand this may impact short-term revenues, but believe this will reduce unnecessary support costs and lead us to a healthier business.”

 

New Values Language

Wait to explain “what” the new values are until after solidifying the “why” to avoid misinterpretation. The words you’ve chosen are mantras meant to invoke meaning; focus on the meaning!

Example

“Our new value is ‘Innovation, not haste’ – we value the intersection of quality and innovation, and we won’t compromise that by insisting on speed.”

 

Importance of Values Alignment

Transitions can be jarring and it’s important to hold space and time for people to recalibrate, but it’s possible that some of your team will not want to make the tradeoffs your new values highlight.

Unfortunately, it is non-negotiable that your team and your values are aligned. Once the dust has settled and you’ve given team members a chance to process the changes, determine who is championing your new values and who is uninterested in their uptake. Encourage those not enthusiastic about the change to leave the company (on good terms, with severance).

Example

“It’s essential that our culture shifts to embrace this value. If this is not a cultural change you want to be a part of, we understand, but this will not be the organization for you going forward. Allow what’s being asked to sink in. If you find you’re not comfortable with these changes, see your manager for further discussion. We’ll make generous severance pay available to those who prefer to optimize for speed.”

 

Putting Your Values to Work

 

Once you’ve got the right values, ingraining them in your team’s decision-making - especially in hiring activities is top priority.

Quickly communicate the essence of your team’s values with well-formed sourcing messages. This will impress the right candidates and help poor fits to self-select out. Continue your process with values-aligned interviews to create an underlying sense of cohesion, resonance, and emotional safety for well-matched candidates.

Post-hire, ingrained values repeatedly deliver on expectations set during interviews to create an employee journey that continually deepens trust. With that trust comes incredible benefits like improved employee satisfaction, reduced turnover, and increased referral rates.

If you need help breaking through barriers with values selection, articulation, and application, Lightwork offers coaching for startups on this and other subjects relating to talent. Schedule a call with us to see how we can help you maximize your values.