As entrepreneurs, we often tend to focus so deeply on the product or service and leave the company values as a checklist item to complete later.
Values are the heart of your organization. They guide what you stand for. They support your mission and vision. They shape your culture and how your team shows up.
At League of Innovators, we believe that our values are what keeps us grounded as we serve our community of young entrepreneurs and encourage the same in our startups. After 3 years of dreaming, building, and executing we decided to revisit our values and evaluate whether they were still feeling authentic, relevant, and aligned to our core work.
As with any values process that has meaning, redefining our values was a full team effort-- a process that can be applied to your startup whether you’re just starting to build out your values or wanting to renew them!
Step 1: Checking in and finding alignment
In order to make this process a full team effort right from the start, begin by gathering your entire team (or leadership team depending on the organization size) and take time to identify what makes working there so great. Having an open and honest conversation about your company's purpose and everyone’s personal values first will allow everyone to feel more connected and inspired.
To get started at LOI, we checked in with the team as part of a culture survey to understand how connected each team member felt to the mission, vision and values with an opportunity to provide open feedback. We already sensed that our values needed to be reworked and the survey acted as an opportunity to validate this, get the team onboard and be part of the process right from the start. Some of the questions we asked in the survey included:
- I feel connected to LOI’s mission, vision and values (1-10 scale)
- I know LOI’s values (not verbatim but I could name at least some of them) (1-10 scale)
- I’m proud to work for LOI (1-10 scale)
- My day to day work inspires me (1-10 scale)
- My personal values feel aligned with the work I’m doing at LOI (1-10 scale)
The survey results showed us clearly that while the team felt connected to LOI, most of us were unable to communicate what our values were - and so, began the work! While finding alignment came in the form of a survey followed by a discussion for us, this can show up in different ways for you. This step was crucial for us and will allow you to start the process with more clarity and alignment on what needs to be achieved.
Step 2: Brainstorming and letting all the ideas flow
Once there’s alignment among the team, your next step is to create dialogue focused on everyone’s experiences and how it's connected to potential core values you embody. We recommend setting up a workshop where your team can start collaborating and co-designing values. These core values are traits that guide everything your company does, therefore it is critical you facilitate an engaging and open conversation that allows everyone’s ideas to be heard.
At LOI, we set up a 60 minute workshop with the team that provided space for us to talk about spoken and unspoken values, how we show up everything we do whether that’s hiring or programming, what opportunities we see and more. Here is a rundown of the questions we used. Depending on how large your team is and how you want to set them up, you can also use these questions as a pre-session worksheet to get your team members in the right mindset.
The first session was focused on making sure everyone’s voice was heard and putting everything down on paper AKA our virtual whiteboard which looked intense by the end! During this session, we also recommend deciding how you ideally want your values to feel and support your work. For us that included having core values that are inspiring, pushing us to excellence, unified across the organization and keeping our team culture in mind. Most company values feel predictable, but with enough reflection, you can create something that is unique and powerful in your own way.
Step 3: Filtering and narrowing down
You’ll likely end the brainstorming session with many ideas, so remember to recognize with the team that creating or renewing your values is going to be a process that can’t be rushed! We recommend giving everyone some time to settle after the initial brainstorm and reconvening after 1-2 weeks for your next workshop where you focus on categorizing everything that showed up in the previous session and filtering it to display your top values.
For our workshop, we were doing everything virtually and leveraged breakout rooms to make sure each voice was heard and then returned to the main room to share what showed up. Depending on the size of your team and how different each group's top values are, we recommend creating space for each group to share their why, challenge each other and even debate ideas. During this process, you may begin to organically form your collective values.
Through all the discussion amongst our team, we had around 10 values in total and began sorting through those. We further categorized them and agreed on our top 6 by asking the following questions:
- What does this value mean to us?
- What does it look like in action at LOI?
- How will it change our everyday behaviour, relationships or our interactions?
Because many company values feel formulaic, spending more time in this workshop to discuss how the brainstormed values are currently embodied within the company and whether they came naturally to you will allow you to create values that are more genuine and thoughtful. At the end of this workshop, we nominated two of us (our culture champions!) to take the top 6 values we listed and start creating descriptions based on all the discussion we had as a team. This may be top 3 or 5 values for you and is an opportunity to really understand and self-reflect on whether you embody all the values listed and how they are upheld within your team.
Step 4: Defining your values
As you start to gain more clarity and energy on what your values are, get ready for a deeper dialogue to discuss how they show up in action. For this step, work through different ways to express your values in words and make them intriguing and memorable. Allow this process to be lively, go through several iterations and don’t be afraid of some friendly debate!
For our team discussion, we began by reading out each value we had brainstormed and the drafted definitions to make sure it still felt aligned and gave the team space to recommend changes. We co-created the descriptions for each value and went through each word to make sure it felt aligned and engaging to read. We also spent some more time during this session discussing how we felt these values were already showing up in our work, where they can be put into practice more and how we can make decisions with our values in mind.
After this three month process and countless drafts, we felt ready to reveal our values, which you can view here or check out our whiteboard version below after our final meeting! Taking all our ideas and finalizing our values definitely felt like a big win, so be sure to celebrate once you get to this point!
Step 5: Putting your values into practice
As you can guess, the work doesn’t end here! Given these values guide everything you do, how will you come together to make sure they are being put into practice and reinforce them? This means making space for more frequent dialogue to discuss how you are putting them into practice whether that’s making sure you’re sharing them with your external community or facilitating team conversations on how they are helping you move forward in your work.
To make sure the work didn’t end after refreshing our values at LOI, we had a discussion as part of our weekly team meeting to discuss how these values will show up for us, which consisted of the following to start:
- Creating a values based matrix to help make decisions when we discuss new opportunities, programs, partnerships, etc.
- Including values as part of the recruitment and onboarding process for staff members and volunteers through the application, interview, and orientation.
- Showcasing our values on our partnership packages, event decks, program orientations to make sure our community is familiar with what we stand for.
- Incorporating value-based conversations in our team check-ins where a team member every month has an opportunity to share what value showed up for them and how.
- Starting a values-focused campaign on our digital channels to showcase what LOI stands for, how our community is living our values and how you can build your own values too (cue this blog ;))
Our values guide everything we do, and are key to how we attract and retain amazing entrepreneurs, partners, employees, advisors… the list goes on. Lastly, keep in mind that your values are a living and evolving document. Continue to check in with your team and community to make sure they feel aligned, create more ideas on how you can bring them to life and keep them top of mind as you drive impact. If you find this five-step process useful, be sure to share your experience and values with us and how they are elevating your culture!
