How to Move Your Company’s Core Values Off the Plaque on the Wall and into Daily Decision Making
Part 1 of a 2-part series on making Core Values count in your daily business
I was asked to speak to a local college business class recently. The focus was business planning.
I discovered that what most of the students have in mind when they think of the term, “business plan” is a detailed 30-page document, with forecasting, industry surveys and an examination of markets.
And yes, this is all part of sound and well-rounded business planning.
But I also encouraged them to think about business planning in a more cerebral fashion. That means thinking about the part we often leave out of planning discussions: the statement of core values.
Simply put, they’re the rules that govern how you, as a business, are going to behave.
Core values are what your customers and the people you hire connect with. They’re why they buy from you instead of from your competitors.
Your purpose and your core values statements need to be firmly in place – even before you select your partners.
Core values are where a lot of businesses fail. Because if the partners don’t come into the business with the same purpose – and if they don’t share the same values – it will be difficult to make progress in a unified way.
So, how will you make your values more than just a plaque on the wall?
It goes back to Simon Sinek’s Why Statement.
The why of the WHY
We discussed Sinek’s model in our blog post, “That’s So You Guys” . Sinek’s WHY means going beyond WHAT you want to do and HOW you’re going to do it.
It gets down to WHY you’re doing what you do in the first place.
Keeping that WHY at the center keeps the focus on those core values you set in place for your business. It gets them off the plaque in the front hallway and into the discussions where critical decision-making takes place.
Assembling a team of like-minded partners
How do you make your WHY – your purpose and core values – a navigational practice for your business? It becomes exponentially easier when you’ve successfully assembled a team of like-minded partners.
That means bringing your WHY to hiring. We’ve made hiring to core values such a high priority at Mavidea that we’ve built our hiring guide around it.
Model: A Values Based Hiring Process at Mavidea
- At Mavidea, we have a lengthy interview process. Sometimes, we go through four interviews before we hire a candidate. Because everyone on our team understands our values, we share a common vision of the kind of people we’re looking for.
- Several team members conduct the interviews. This gives us a chance to approach core values-related questions from a range of perspectives.
- A prospect might talk to Jake Davis, our COO, and even have lunch. The purpose is to check if our values are in line and see if the chemistry works.
- They will also meet with representatives from our functional teams to see if the working relationship fits.
- As CEO, I usually handle the final interview. After some small talk, I slide our values-based interview guide over to them. I ask them how they will be able to help us achieve those values and do it better than ever.
What happens next is fascinating.
They begin to bear their soul. You truly get a glimpse of who that candidate really is. It clears through all the cliché interview questions and cuts to the heart of what’s important to the prospective team member as a person.
We’ve found that if the prospect can’t get to the heart of what’s important to them -– if they can’t clearly state what they can contribute to Mavidea – then they might not be a candidate for us.
The bottom line is, if we all share the same values and want to get better at our aspirational goals, we’ll be more unified. We’ll clearly be more successful than a group of people who have different values.
