Company Values

I know what you are thinking. The last thing I am thinking about is our company culture. If it doesn’t bring in revenue or cut our burn, should we be focusing on it? Our culture right now has to be to work our asses off. In an early stage venture, you lack defined parameters for company behavior—including your own behavior. It is like driving on a road without a speed limit, stop lights or lane lines. Left to its own devices, or lacking the appropriate attention, you are actually enabling a corporate culture with negative undertones and a tolerance for unacceptable behavior. If you fail to set down your core values, you not only bear that risk, but you are not taking advantage of something that can create a competitive advantage.

“Set core values that are non-negotiable!” 

The best companies develop core values that impact their company culture, brand, and business strategies, making them quite unique. Most entrepreneurs adopt the perspective that culture is a luxury rather than a critical foundational element of a strong company. Regardless of your stage, you must set core values that are non-negotiable. When your organization lacks guardrails and guidelines, which most early stage ventures do, you need to construct boundaries to guide behavior.

Your Values Must Be Real

Take a look at this list of corporate values: Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence. They sound pretty good, don’t they? Strong, concise, meaningful. Maybe they even resemble your own company’s values, the ones you spent so much time writing, debating, and revising. If so, you should be nervous. These are the corporate values of Enron, as stated in the company’s 2000 annual report, and as events have shown, they’re not meaningful; they’re meaningless.

Most values statements are bland, toothless, or just plain dishonest. And far from being harmless, they’re often highly destructive. Empty values create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility. Values can set a company apart from the competition by clarifying its identity and serving as a rallying point for employees. But coming up with strong values—and sticking to them—requires real guts. If you’re not willing to accept the pain real values incur, don’t bother going to the trouble of formulating a values statement.

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