Have you mapped out your company’s core values?
Core values should be one of the most important things for a team, which is why this week on the Content Machine Podcast, we’re talking about everything you need to know to start defining your team’s core values.
Sometimes core values are unspoken. Every team is built from different people, so every team develops its own set of values. But oftentimes, you should flesh out these ideas. Why? Because unlike a mission statement that generally talks about our why and our team goals, and you can check out our episode on mission statements if you haven’t already, core values talk about how we should act on a daily basis. Something to consider is that core values ought to be simultaneously true and aspirational. So here are three things that make core values meaningful presence, celebration, and evaluation.
With core values, you want to make sure they are visible and present with your team. If you are not regularly refreshing their value and meaning to your team, why should you expect them to remember them and work by them? We want to make the ideas behind our core values sticky. Sticky meaning easy to remember when considering how we operate the company. How can you do this? Well, one, make a standard graphic for each value and make it easy to use. At Adelsberger Marketing, our multi-talented designer Katie Howerton, took care of this for us. She took our values and put them together with graphics that are fun, visually appealing, and match our company’s themes. Having something that your team can easily find and visualize will make the concepts easier to remember. Think about ways that you can get these graphics in front of them. Maybe it’s on stickers or a weekly review of one of the core values as pieces of the company’s identity. I have seen several places that put the core values on the wall of the organization, and I’ve seen others make swag like coffee mugs with the values printed on them. Help build them into your company culture by making them a regularly occurring part of the life of your team. Ideally, like a mission statement, the team should be able to say what those values are if prompted, and that isn’t just going to happen through Osmosis.
You should celebrate your core values. We work every week to cover one of our core pieces of identity, which I include as themes, mission, vision, core values, during our midweek catch up call. This is a way for me to keep those things in front of the team, but it is also a great opportunity for me as a leader to look for staff members who are doing these core values in a notable way and celebrate them for that. It’s not always a weekly thing, but it’s a tool I can use to encourage staff members who are going above and beyond.
And finally, we use it for evaluation. This is a methodology used by EOS or entrepreneurial operating systems. Each quarter we sit down with each team member and work with them to review on a small scale whether they are practicing core values or not. The scale we use is plus, plus minus, or minus, meaning I did this and I’m doing this, I could improve in this or I’m sometimes showing this value, or I did not do this. The simple scale gives some additional accountability to team members because they are having to evaluate themselves, and it helps them see the core values more clearly. With our team, we start with a self-assessment, and then go over that with them and talk through each point.
Core values need to be true, meaning team members and even clients can see them in the organization. And they need to be aspirational because the truth is, we can always be a little bit better. In a future episode, we’ll talk through the core values at Adelsberger Marketing and what they mean to us. But if you’re wanting some more information on core values, or if you need some perspective on a jumping off point for developing your own, make sure to tune into future episodes of the Content Machine Podcast.
If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to drop us a comment or an email or text it to a friend. Does your team already have a set of core values? We’d love to hear back from you. Shoot me an email, send me a text. I’d love to hear what you’re doing at your organization.
