Establishing Core Values that Actually Impact Your Business
Do you know what’s great about having a mission statement and core values? On their own, absolutely nothing. Unless you’re purposefully integrating them into your business, they’re all just words in your employee handbook that nobody actually reads. But they don’t have to be.
Establishing core values is a cumbersome and time-consuming process. I get it. It takes work to get it right, but the payoff is huge. The five Ms of Great Core Values: Manifested, Meaningful, Memorable, Minimal, and Methodical are essential to building your company’s culture and brand. Our team at Ciircles has created this guide to establishing core values that can actually impact your business. Keep reading to learn more about this crucial process for every business flounder, owner, or leader!
As a bonus, at the end of this article we will share our own core values and, over the next few weeks, we will deep dive into each of them as we have presented them to our own team.
Let’s dive right in.
The 5 Ms of Great Core Values
What do you want your company to stand for? What are the core values that guide and drive your decisions? Great core values act as guardrails on the road towards your ultimate goal. They help your team become even more self-sufficient by providing a standard by which to say yes and, more importantly, no.
If you have ever gone through the process of establishing or discovering your own core values or those of your business, you know that it’s a difficult journey. How do you possibly decide what belongs on this ever-important list?
While I can’t take the challenge away completely, I can provide some guidance to make the process a little bit easier. I can also give you some advice on how to make the core values you do finally end up with effective and impactful.
The following 5 Ms are the essential ingredients that create core values that help define your company culture for your team and demonstrate that culture to the rest of the world.
Manifested
When you start this process, it’s likely that a lot of values are going to make the initial list. One of the most important elements of great core values, though not likely a surprise to you, is that they should actually be manifested within your company and among your team.
Another way of saying this is that if you aren’t already demonstrating that value day-to-day, it’s probably not a core value.
There are two kinds of values you might be struggling with, actual and aspirational. Actual values are those that are manifested and true today. Aspirational values are those that you may desire, but are not yet foundational behaviors.
Discovering these manifested values can be fairly straightforward, and can be done as a leadership team or company-wide. Look at your team and ask, who do you admire and why? Who is knocking it out of the park consistently, and to what traits do you attribute that success? Who could you not live without and why?
Taking some time to look at your current team, the values they demonstrate, and how they feel about them can go a long way towards discovering what is already true and core to your team.
Meaningful
You don’t have to look very far to find a company with uninspiring core values. Many include things like integrity, courtesy, efficiency, respectfulness, etc. These kinds of lists suffer from a number of issues.
For one, many of them are table stakes. What company doesn’t value integrity or respectfulness? These kinds of values should be the default for businesses, and humans for that matter. There may be some companies that don’t value these things, but I don’t want to do business with them. I would guess that you don’t either.
In addition to being table stakes, they are too general to inspire. Among Ciircles’s core values, all four of the above traits are included, as you will see at the end of this article. However, they go deeper. They carry a story or an idea. They carry meaning specifically for us.
If you look at some of the things that you have communicated to your team over the time you’ve been together, it’s likely that you will find some quotes, stories, or ideas that are already core values. Not just core values, but meaningful core values. The kind that have already been inspiring you and your team.
Memorable
I have worked at companies with core values so obscure that I always had to look them up. How can you be guided by a core value you can’t even recall without assistance?
In order for core values to be impactful on your day-to-day activities, they need to be accessible when you aren’t thinking about them. In order for them to be accessible, they need to be memorable.
Making them meaningful goes a long way in making them memorable, but there is more we can do. Use words or phrases that capture the essence of the value instead of the specific value itself. Instead of Courtesy how about Kindness to a Fault? Which one gives a stronger reaction? Or, more importantly, a stronger impression.
Another way to make your values memorable is to make them active instead of passive. For instance, a passive value might be Positivity. That same value could be presented as Always See the Good, an active value gives people context and direction.
Minimal
Do you want to make your values completely ineffective? Follow what many companies do and create a list of 8 to 10 sentences that no one could possibly remember.
Remember that great core values need to be accessible when it matters. No one should have to look them up, much less read a chapter to remind themselves. That’s why great core values need to be short, sweet, and to the point.
There are two ways you keep your values minimal. One is to make sure that each value is not too long in and of itself. I recommend 1 to 4 words in most cases. They can be longer if the phrase is truly memorable, but I would err on the side of brevity if I were unsure.
Another way your core values should be minimal is in the list itself. Having a dozen core values isn’t doing anyone any favors. Remember the adage, if everything is important, then nothing is important. If you have 20 core values then you have no core values.
In most cases I recommend a list of 3 to 5. That feels like the right number on both memorability and meaningfulness. If the list is shorter it might be that you don’t have enough clarity on what behaviors drive your business. If it’s much longer you run the risk of obscurity.
Methodical
This is one area that I see even less among most companies, even if they follow the other four Ms. What I mean by methodical is that they aren’t just presented in an unordered list without any content of priority. They are presented, as much as possible, in order of importance.
There will come a day when you or your team is presented with a challenge that causes one or more of your values to be at odds. If your values are your guardrails, what decision will they make then? By placing them in some sort of priority order, you are telling everyone that when two values collide, this is how we respond.
Another part of being methodical is how, where, and when you present your values. Your core values aren’t going to be intrinsically known by all. Everyone needs to be presented and then reminded of them from time to time. How you approach that will depend on your own company culture, but be assured, if you never mention them, your team will forget them.
Our Core Values at Ciircles
At the beginning of this article, I promised that I would share our own core values with you. As much as possible, we have tried to follow the rules we laid out above.
What follows are our 4 core values and a brief description of each one. They drive the work that we do and how we interact with one another. We don’t live them 100% of the time without error, but I believe we live them more often than we don’t. When we do fail at any one of these, we usually feel it and hold ourselves accountable to them.
People First
We are not a product company; we are a people company. People serving people. People over profits. Choose others over self.
Partners, Customers, Stakeholders, in that order.
Be a Cheerleader
We ought to be a force of positivity to the world. Assume the best, and be people’s biggest fan. Celebrate wins, and give grace in defeat. Be an encourager, highlight the good. Be generous and show gratitude.
Embrace Fun
More than jokes, memes, and fun video chats. It’s is a conscious effort to not just engage in silly conversations, but harvest joy and fulfillment out of your work.
Make it Better
Always strive to improve, take risks, fail forward, and leave things better than you found them. Best is the enemy of Better.
The last thing you want is for your company to be rudderless. If you haven’t already, or it’s time to review your current core values, take the time to make them meaningful, memorable, minimalist, and methodical. And certainly, make sure they are actually being manifested in your business today.
Sign up today for our newsletter which includes new content every week on how we’re helping businesses like yours become a place people love to work.