Scaling Fast: Are Your Startup Values Surviving the Test of Time?

We’ve seen a number of entrepreneurs struggling with how to keep their values relevant. We hope some of our learning experiences below help other companies keep their soul as they scale.

One of the early defining traits of being a Myplaneteer was our core values. As we approached our 25th team member, we began forming them, working to capture the essence of what had made us successful to-date, and what we hoped would endure regardless of how the company evolved.

Our values were developed late into the night by the majority of the company, so we knew them well and held them in a shared esteem. We debated them and called them out to help guide our actions. In the end, we landed on five points to focus on:

• Innovation — Constantly question convention
• Collaboration — Be open, be honest, build trust
• Humanity — Focus on people, not policies
• Mastery — Ensure our work is extraordinary
• Focus — Do less, if it means doing it better

We used them as a foundation for everything.

From the work we did, to how we did it and who we were doing it with, they were our constant touchstones.

We assumed they were integrated, absorbed and understood by all team members as they were fundamental to our rapidly growing company. Imagine our surprise as we entered 2014 and noticed a strange trend: increasing uncertainty among Myplaneteers on how to live our values, and varying perceptions on what each value meant.

Shocked, we had to ask ourselves:

Was it time to regroup on our values? Had we missed something? Would we be able to scale our culture as we progressed — or would it all fall apart?

Much of the business literature we had read to-date declared that values should be timeless, should always hold true. We worried that we made a mistake and chose the wrong values. We worried that times changed and our values were no longer relevant. We worried that we lost our way and had begun hiring people who no longer valued the same things. We debated for quite a while on re-visiting the description of our values, but in the end decided that they were too important to let this uncertainty slide.

Culture is, after all, the bed-rock that your organization is built on.

Get it right and you fuel your growth with exceptional people. A culture that supports and promotes employee satisfaction, growth and engagement will draw talent to your door and keep it there. We had worked hard to set that cultural foundation through our values and we were determined not to lose it to complacency or confusion.

We set out on a six-month discovery process in an attempt to understand the challenge.

We gathered feedback from as many interested parties as we could. We canvassed staff, both during company-wide All Hands meetings and through a terrific tool called Know Your Company; we got more staff input through a monthly Morning Coffee where we openly discuss critical topics affecting the business; we looked back on how our values got us here through targeted huddles among our Directors and Founders; and through discussions with clients on what they valued, we heard how our values impact our public perception.

Through this process we came to a fortunate conclusion — and one that I have since seen other companies experience as they grow over time:

Our values are timeless, but how we articulate them to be relevant to our team may change over time.

We did 3 key things to re-discover our values and integrate understanding throughout the company. Here they are from a high-level perspective:

• We started by asking one critical question:
  In our best times, and in our worst times, have we been tempted to get rid of [X] value?
• We established a framework and integrated employee feedback into our values
• We shared, posted and integrated our values in every collaboration / group session we had.

Want to learn more about how we did it? We share the results of our questions, how/what framework we established and the steps we took to integrate this in our growing start-up — click here.