What Are Your Company’s Core Values
and How They Impact Your Business
Hi! Kathryn here. This month we discuss how creating a set of company core values can help your business the road to success.
It may seem a bit “woo-woo”, but defining your company's core values is crucial for its success. Just as your personal core values (CV) serve as a North Star for your life, your business CVs serve as its guiding light.
Why? Because as you build your company you will be challenged…often… and knowing the line your business will not cross will help you and your team to navigate these sticky situations. As with your personal core values, you need to know the line you will not cross and what aspects of your business are not subject to negotiation no matter what happens.
Your business’ core values serve as a foundation that supports everything that you do- from who you hire to the type of work environment. It’s through your core values that you communicate to your staff, your customer and to your community a shared value system.
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This shared value system is very important, especially for startups, because in the early stages of building it’s impossible to provide stability around job descriptions or even business models. But you can provide stability around your core values.
The goal of the core values isn’t to create a restrictive set of rules that need to be followed religiously on a daily basis. Instead, core values are guideposts that lead to the alignment of shared goals over time.
Creating your business core values…
Creating a set of core values is a fairly straightforward process:
Start by listing all the actions, words, and attributes that are important to you or if you have a team, have each team member write down the actions, words, that they think define your company. For example, at Genius Guild, the first core value we created was to Be human. In practice, this means that at Genius Guild we trust each other. We celebrate each others’ wins and focus on growing together as a team. And we know that, as humans, there may be times when we can’t live up to our values. When that happens, we extend empathy and give each other the benefit of the doubt.
Take these actions, words and attributes and refine them into a set of principles for you to follow. I give a bit more detail in BTDT (8 pages!!!) on how to do this.
In next month’s newsletter, we’ll discuss how to use both your business and personal core values to define and communicate your business’ value proposition.
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