Core Values: Why They’re So Important and How to Determine Yours

It’s time to establish hiring processes that help you understand who you want and why you want them. Do they have both the skillset and personality required to be a good fit for not only the job, but for your team?

Determining if an individual is going to be a good personality fit for your team is one of the trickiest aspects of hiring. The question you should ask yourself is how do I create a great culture in my firm?

The first step: determining your core values.

Why Your Business Needs Core Values

Your core values should support every decision you make in your business. When you use them consistently to hire, fire, and reward those you work with it drives the culture of your business. There is always a culture in your business – whether you intentionally create it or not.

Take our client, Joe, for example. His firm wasn’t producing the results he’d expected so we did some investigating for him. Brook interviewed every single employee and asked about the culture of the firm. Joe said the culture was about respect and high work product and camaraderie and integrity. His employees after first saying there was no culture, revealed that it was a work environment of fear, competition, and individualism. This was the exact opposite of what Joe thought it was!

It came to light that Joe wasn’t living the company’s core values he’d shared, as evidenced by the day he threw a chair at an employee and then later became so frustrated that he threw his laptop on the ground and stomped on it until it broke. He wasn’t demonstrating the culture he wanted. So instead, a toxic culture grew organically.

Core values define your company. You should talk about them often, use them in hiring and firing decisions, include them in every employee evaluation, and model them as managers and reward them within the team. Core values help create a culture where you like your staff and they stay with your team for a long time because they’re excited to come to work each day.

How to Determine Your Core Values

Jim Collins invented this great exercise called the mission to Mars and Vern Harnish of Scaling Up has really perfected it. Grab a pen and paper, we’re sharing the version of this exercise we’ve adapted for our clients:

Objective: You’re creating a new team on Mars and want them to exhibit the best of your firm.

Your Task: Create your team by writing down the people you want to take with you. List out these individuals and beside their names, write why you want to take them. You don’t have to take everybody and you don’t have to take a full person – you can take only the “good stuff” from someone and leave troublesome traits behind.

Many of our clients don’t have teams that are big enough or they don’t have ideal employees. So if you feel like you don’t have enough people on your list, write down some more people you used to work with, people that you’ve been on committees with, or even your friends or your spouse.

Once you have a number of names, and a number of attributes, the reasons why you want to take them start looking for similar attributes within this group. Five to seven of these attributes are going to start showing up consistently. These are the beginning of your core values.

Next, transform these adjectives into action phrases. Write two to three descriptive sentences, and then have a story or two that illustrates these values.

Core values aren’t the only way to grow your business. We’ve pulled together 4 simple steps to greater profits in our FREE video course. Access it below!