Bringing Your Core Values to Life through Company Culture
Bringing Your Core Values to Life through Company Culture
When it comes to creating buy-in for your core values, consistency is everything. To avoid your values and purpose simply becoming wall art, you are going to need a strong plan for follow through. Intention, effort, and investment will be required. Below are some ways you can bring this work to life and infuse it into your culture.
Lead by example. When it comes to your values, if you toss them aside when they are inconvenient to uphold, your people will do the same. Get yourself a coach to hold you accountable to your values, especially when it is most difficult. The investment will pay off in spades as your people see you slow down and make the hard choices required to hold true to your values. Over time you’ll see them follow suit, exponentially creating significant impact.
Celebrate the attempts, not just the successes. Your goal is to create a culture where your people take risks living your values in service of your purpose. If you only celebrate the successes, you actually create fear of trying. Instead, celebrate the attempts, regardless of the outcomes.
Rely on your ambassadors. The people on your team who chose each word are the inherent ambassadors of each value. They know what it is to live the value they chose. Put them in charge of training others in how to live that value. You can also rely on them to highlight who is making attempts at living that value, because they will easily recognize those attempts.
Share the stories. Use multiple mediums to share the stories of people attempting the values and living the purpose. Only by seeing others around them taking risks, will people become comfortable taking those risks themselves.
Turn your values and purpose into art. Your employees all learn in different ways. Artistic representations of your values and purpose and what they mean to people at the company can be emotionally invigorating, memorable, and conversation worthy. When they are particularly impactful, consider infusing them to into your marketing.
Let your purpose and values continue to evolve. Your organizational growth and what you learn from challenges will continue to impact how you are meant to serve the world. And while your purpose might remain relatively unchanged, your articulation of your purpose will likely deepen. Honor that you are a living, breathing organism, especially as your people become more activated. Don't miss out on the additional value being created by assuming you have checked this work off your list and can move on. Living your values and purpose is a lifestyle. Commit and live it and you will reap the rewards.