Environments Of Autonomy

It’s easy to become a bit cynical about company values posters and artwork, to regard them with disdain as if they’d just arrived in a Build-Your-Own-Unicorn starter kit; stylish corporate typography with which to affect your faux-ironic-post-industrial workspace and colourful posters that bark out instructions like Own it!, Lean in! or Deliver!

Before Xero, I’d only ever worked in established businesses, where I probably acquired a small measure of eye-rolling cynicism towards things like values posters and mission statements. In those mature contexts, my bearish assumption was that only management teams who had truly lost their way would seek refuge in a values programme like it was some pointless corporate herbal remedy or therapeutic medicine.

All this may be true, but I'll never forget what my time at Xero taught me about the importance of company values when done right.

If implementing a values programme may well be remedial for established companies, they’re stone-cold essential in startup and high-growth contexts because they play a critical role as a cultural and organisational preservative.

Alongside your killer idea, finding capital and talent to run the business, then embedding purpose and values into the heart of your culture from the outset is the essential fourth leg of the stool your future success will one day rest upon.

But despite this, I’m struck by the fact that occasionally I’ll speak with startup founders and find that while they have established values for their business, they don’t systematically drive them as hard as they could. And so, instead of forming the scaffolding around which your future organisation and its culture will grow, their values slowly fade into the background and literally revert to being wallpaper.

The sooner you start banging on about your values, the better — and don’t wait for things to start going awry or fall apart.

Second, values also guide and inform decision-making since they serve as an easily accessible ready-reckoner and an explicit framework within which decisions can be made at speed and without requiring your team to constantly refer up the org chart for guidance or approval every step of the way.

Early on, I had the good fortune to cross paths with James Kerr, whose book Legacy is an excellent window into what makes high-performing teams tick. After hosting a couple of small dinners with James as a speaker, I could listen to him talk all day long about what he’s learned about high-performing teams. Whether it’s about New Zealand’s All Blacks, with whom he spent several months at close quarters observing their team culture and rituals, or other high-performing teams like the US Navy Seals - his insights are outstanding.

James talks about high-performing environments in this short clip where every team member is empowered to lead and make decisions.

Clearly defining your purpose and your values and taking time to reinforce them at every opportunity provides your team with a single, unambiguous direction of travel and the means to evaluate and make decisions for themselves inside an agreed framework and set of principles. Seriously, if you haven’t read Legacy, do so now.

However, it doesn’t just start and end with fancy posters on walls. Ensuring your purpose and values remain fresh and front-of-mind for everyone is a constant and often tiring responsibility as a leader.

• I would sometimes worry about ‘Values Fatigue’ if it felt like I was constantly talking about or referring to them too much. Nobody likes repeating themselves constantly, so you may naturally grow concerned that other people will bore or tire of you doing it, too, and the tendency may be to let it slide. Don’t do that! If you’re sick of hearing yourself talking about your purpose and values or don’t think they’re providing you with any particular benefit, it’s worth remembering that just like all good management communications, reiterating your values is mostly for everyone else’s benefit, not yours. Plus, you’re probably adding new people to the business all the time, and therefore your latest recruits weren’t around to hear you talking about your company values the first 134 times.

• To bring our values to life, we ran a Values Award programme which invited team members to provide feedback to their peers whenever someone really nailed something. We created stacks of postcards that were themed on each of our five values and left small post boxes around the office. When someone meaningfully demonstrated one of our values in action, such as going above the call of duty to fix a customer issue, their colleagues had the opportunity to write them a thank-you note on a postcard, citing the value they embodied and which they would then mail internally. Then, at a monthly all-hands, we’d award a small prize to whoever had garnered the most values postcards. We’d then circulate all the postcards across the team so that, even if you didn’t win first prize, you’d still get a boost of gratitude from your fellow team members. Creating a culture of ongoing feedback was also a great byproduct of this.

• Values posters and artwork not only add a bit of colour and serve as ambient reinforcement for the team, but they demonstrate to the outside world (e.g. customers, investors, press) that a) you have values, b) what they are and c) you think they’re virtuous enough to plaster them everywhere. They are also great conversation starters with outsiders.

• First on Yammer and then Slack, our values eventually infiltrated everyday talk and chatter. People would naturally drop them into sentences in discussion threads or refer to them by their #hashtag name. This helped them cement them as part of our everyday cultural vocabulary, even in face-to-face meetings and gatherings.

• Once a month, I’d sit down for an hour with all our new hires and talk about our values, where they came from, and what they meant. The idea of spending a whole hour talking about just five words might seem like an indulgence that I couldn’t afford and one I could have easily chosen to delegate to one of my senior team. Again, don’t do that! As a leader, don’t forget that you set the tone; you probably define and embody your culture more than anyone else in the business (or at least you ought to). So, the minute you decide you’re too busy or important to talk to new hires about your purpose and values, you may be on a slippery slope.