How To Create Company Values in Small Business

 One question I hear a lot when talking with other entrepreneurs is how to build a team who thinks and acts like owners of the business.

The answer took me years to properly pinpoint because it's not immediately obvious. And even when I learned it, it was always something I thought I'd do some other time when I wasn't as busy.

Still to this day, I wish I started earlier because it's harder to change later. 

It starts by defining company values and linking expected behaviours to them.

When you’re a small business (30-50 people), it’s really easy to build a team that’s aligned and singing the same song because everyone cooperates and works closely together.

Building the right culture happens almost by accident. And when there’s a problem, the Owner is often close by to remedy it. 

As the owner, you’re still involved in daily operations, working alongside employees regularly. You also have a few Senior Leaders in the ranks who act as an extension of your leadership by openly solving problems, responding to customer feedback, discussing industry news, sharing past experiences and outlining future goals.

Communication is almost easy. But lurking in the not-too-distant future is a bumpy road if you’re not prepared.

As our team grew beyond 50 people, we began to recruit more Managers and Supervisors to help with the day-to-day operations.

My expectation was that they would communicate in the same language and instil company values in our new people. But often, their tone, delivery, timing, and experience meant they got haphazard results. 

As the business owner, this meant I was catapulted back into daily operations to mediate and remedy cultural problems.

Still, we pushed on with growth and hit 60, 70, and 80 people without consistently communicating core values and expected behaviours. 

Once we split our team across two sites, obvious cracks appeared and our culture began to deflate faster than a bike tyre over a bindi patch. 

Completely my fault. I hadn’t set our leaders up for success by giving them the rigid foundations of core values to build on.

So here’s one thing we did to start to craft our values and patch up the leaks in our culture:

1. Booked a room in a shared office space offsite (We used Wotso workspaces)

2. Set the agenda for a small group of senior leaders to discuss and agree on the type of culture we wanted to build.

3. Used a whiteboard and sticky notes to write words and sentences from everyone in the room around the key questions.

The three questions we asked ourselves:

1. What emotions do we want our customers to feel?

2. What behaviours will we reward in our team?

3. What behaviours will we punish?

Here’s what our first go looked like: 

Next, we used the negative behaviours and rewrote them as positives.

Then we grouped common behaviours under keywords to narrow it down to a handful that encompassed all notes on the board.

Those keywords became our first core values.

PRESS PAUSE

One you've done this, resist the urge to run out and stick huge decals on walls, print them on shirts and drink bottles, and publish them on your website.

I suggest you kick your new values around your organisation for 6-12 months and refine them quarterly. 

We did this and after 18 months of talking about them in meetings and using the words in conversation, they got so much better and more powerful.

Pro Tip: Don’t use generic terms like integrity, trust, honesty, passion, blah, blah… Yuck! They’ve been hammered to the point where they’ve lost their meaning. 

If you have those words now, try to write a sentence about what integrity means to you or your customer. Try to find a narrower, more meaningful definition of it to move away from generic sounding terms.

Crafting Values - To Do:
1. Revisit last week's newsletter about determining values from your funeral speech.

2. If you've never written values, start with the funeral speech yourself and then get others to do it solo. Then book a meeting room offsite and get your senior leadership team (or advisors) together to nut out what's important to your company.

3. Ask yourself the 3 key questions to capture meaningful core values and behaviours.

4. Slot them into your daily language for at least 6 months.

5. Refine quarterly.

 I hope this helps!

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