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Three steps to discover the core values driving our company culture

admin June 20, 2024

Like an infant not being aware of its personality, a startup cannot properly articulate its culture and values. Sure, you can be smart enough to describe your espoused values, but your enacted values will have to emerge over time — they are not designed upfront. And the culture and values of a startup can be in a state of flux for awhile.

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Needless to say, the three lists of values differed significantly. Some values that we used in our bonus system never emerged in our online discussions, including, interestingly enough, the most popularly attributed “commitment.” And vice versa, there were some values clearly identified in our conversations on Slack and Zoom that were not available when we credited each other in Bonusly.

Another issue was that our team used different words that almost (but not quite) meant the same thing. For example, I consider riskexperimentation, and learning all to be in the same category. And I also decided to count honestysincerity, and candor as the same thing. This is how we were able to discover our core company values.

Three steps to discover the core values driving our company culture

After all this soul-searching and tag-counting, I found that three values were mentioned in each of the three sources for this assessment:

  • boldness (or initiative or assertiveness)
  • kindness (or compassion or helpfulness)
  • creativity

And the following seven values were mentioned in two out of the three sources:

  • flexibility
  • patience
  • spontaneity
  • risk (or experimentation or learning)
  • honesty (or sincerity or candor)
  • trust
  • fairness (or integrity)

Based on these results, I suggested to the team that we make the first three values our core values. This means that, from now on, we should use these to guide our daily decisions. And because phrases are easier to remember than a list of words, we changed them into these small but memorable pieces of text or value statements:

  • Dare to be bold.
  • Always be kind.
  • Make it creative.

For some of us, this may be a challenge. For example, I have no problem being bold and creative — I do that almost without thinking. But kindness is the one I struggle with all the time, and it’s good to have this reminder that the team appreciates more kindness. Other team members may struggle with boldness or creativity. It is up to the team to remind ourselves (and each other) of these core values on a regular basis.

Three steps to discover the core values driving our company culture

We agreed to use the first three along with the next seven values making up our ten value list of tags in Bonusly:

  • #boldness
  • #kindness
  • #creativity
  • #flexibility
  • #patience
  • #spontaneity
  • #risk
  • #honesty
  • #trust
  • #fairness

It will be interesting to see how the new list of values is going to change our perception of performance and collaboration as a team.

As I said, a team’s culture and values can change. This is probably even truer for startups and younger teams than for mature groups. It will be worth doing the entire exercise again in a year or two, based on the stories we will have then.

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