EOS® tutorial: finding your company Core Values
Whether you like it or not, once a startup has five or more members there will be a culture, a set of behaviors shared by the team. Culture can make or break a company. Embracing it actively and embedding it into everything the team does, is more important than it seems.
Values deliver value
Being happy at work is important for all of us. When we are satisfied with the job but we have to interact with members that don’t share our core values and views of the world, work can turn into a miserable thing to do.
Today, many of our top places to work have employees who are aligned and passionate about their company’s core values. And, the byproduct of building their values capacity is increased business capacity!
At Mighty Block, we have this clear since day one, so we waited for the right moment to gather the team and reflect on what makes us want to show up and build web3 products as a team. It’s such an important milestone because it means there is a critical mass of happy people at the company and there is a shared set of values that for us are important.
I personally think that companies with a high percentage of knowledge workers (nowadays more remote than ever) will have to come up with ways of staying united and having a strong culture, or otherwise they will lose talent to other companies that do have a well defined culture.
Some additional benefits derived from core values
- Define your culture. Your core values will set the tone of your organization. They will be the underlying foundation and character of your business and the people in it.
- Change the way you do business. When you have a solid foundation, everything else falls in to place. It gives you a standard to hold to, and helps you operate more efficiently.
- Attract like-minded people to your organization. When you have a clear set of values, potential employees and customers who have the same values will recognize them and seek you out.
- Weed out employees who are not a fit. Adhering to your core values will quickly identify who in your organization is not on board. Whether they leave on their own or are helped out the door, you will have an opportunity to fill the position with someone who believes in your values.
- Dictate how you review, reward and recognize your employees. Your employees will know what is required and have a clearer understanding of your expectations. Core Values give you a measurable standard, and make it easier for you to show recognition to your support team.
Core Values should drive action
There are numerous daily opportunities for leaders to link core values to business operations, keeping them at the heart of everything you do:
- Guide decision-making. Our words and actions should be aligned. We must deliver on our promises. For example, if “quality” is a core value, then any products not meeting our standards should be eliminated.
- Serve as a competitive advantage. Having a set of specific core values tells customers and prospects what the company is about and clarifies its identity. Core values should act like a homing beacon for like-minded customers.
- Improve recruiting. People are the lifeblood of today’s enterprises, and top performers seek out companies with values that match their own. When hiring, go beyond skills, experience and abilities to include core values alignment. Design your interview questions and assessments around testing a candidate’s alignment with your core values to determine the best fit.
- Boost employee retention and productivity. One of the top reasons employees love where they work is because they feel alignment with a company’s values and mission. There are many ways to link core values to employee reviews, rewards and recognition.
- Improve customer retention. Core values help customers feel they have a relationship with your brand, improving retention. For example, customers might pay a premium price for our services, not based on the cheapest option, but on the most valuable one.
- Improve vendor relationships. We welcome partners who point to our values as a reason to join our network. They are easier to work with and offer more profitable opportunities. In fact, it’s been said that profit is the applause you get for doing right by taking care of people.
- Boost acquisition success. Because they operate in a similar space and with a value-driven purpose, core values alignment can improve your acquisition experience and the overall success of the endeavor.
Core values drive employee satisfaction, employee retention, customer and vendor loyalty, as well as organizational performance and business growth.
Tutorial: how to identify your company core values
At Mighty Block, we are using the EOS methodology. Having a clear set of Core Values is the first step in establishing your organization’s Vision. Core Values identify who you are as a company, and offer guidelines and principles that help you run your business.
Establishing your business’s Core Values is not just a matter of sitting down with a piece of paper for a 15 minute brainstorming session. Defining your company’s core values is not a staff team project.
EOS recommends a more systematic approach, which involves a series of four steps taken during an offsite meeting with your key management team. Core Values steer the direction of your company, so they should not be complicated.
Step 1 — Introduction to Core Values
We selected the group which had more than six months in the company because we needed to capture the attributes that they thought were very important from their teammates. We did a brief intro to EOS and explained why the Core Values were important for the company and to preserve the culture
Step 2 — Identify attributes
We asked each participant to think of the 3 team members that they would like to clone. Those people that they love to work and interact with.
Step 3 — Keep, Kill, Combine
Once every participant submits his/her list of people and the attributes that makes them great, the Integrator must kill the ones that are not “Core Value material”, or are just attributes of the person that are not common in other people. Also the Integrator must combine duplicate or similar attributes and keep the ones that have the most potential. The result is a short list of up to 10 core values.
Step 4 — Polish the candidate list
The short list of attributes must be polished with a clear and descriptive language.
It really helps during this step, to use actual examples to describe the Core Values using the same words as the ones provided by the team.
Step 5 — Communication
Finally, they must be presented to all the team. We presented the core values at the office. I highly recommend this approach, maybe in the town hall or on a special occasion with many members gathered in the same space.
A real example
What you can see below, is the end result of the exercise we did at Mighty Block. This was done 100% online but we presented the list to the team while we were physically at the office.
How to embed the core values into the day to day?
Once the core values are identified, it’s crucial to embed them into the day to day of the company. It can’t be a poster at the office that nobody notices.
We now use the Core Values to recruit, to evaluate ourselves and to decide if somebody must leave the team. Core Values are at the heart of all of our processes.
After going through the exercise of identifying the core values of the company, it became clear to me that the team values people who are a combination of talent, humbleness and serving other team members.
Another important pillar that was present throughout the exercise was the education piece. All the team members are hungry for knowledge and learning, because we are immersed in a very innovative and nascent space, which is Web3. Nobody has experience, regulators are still learning, the active user base is still small and the infrastructure is being built, just like in 1998.
I’m glad that the eight core values really reflect situations we’ve lived through. With our set of core values, we can now refer to them with words and quickly align our thinking. For example, when recruiting, it’s now easy to say “This candidate does not have a white belt attitude” and know exactly what the other person is talking about.
People analyzer
Finally, the core values will be the input to another great EOS tool which is the People Analyzer. To make sure that everyone in the team is following the core values, we must compare their behavior towards them:
If you are interested in learning more about EOS, you can find the rest of the articles I wrote in the EOS collection.
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