10 Lessons In Defining Your Company Values

Creating a Culture through Explicit Values

Values are one of those things that can sound soft and squishy, especially in the context of a company. The reality – I have found - is actually quite the opposite. They form the most solid bedrock of any group or organization and really matter to the individuals.

About 3-years in, we had grown OpenX to more than 100 employees. During this growth, our values were clear. At least, they were clear in my head and I thought we were still small enough for them to be universally shared without much need for formal discussion or distribution. But in that past year we had more than doubled in headcount. One day several members of the team grabbed me and let me know they felt that the organic osmosis of values was no longer working well enough as we added more people at a faster rate.

Although disappointing to hear, this is something that every CEO of a rapidly growing business will have to deal with at some stage. Taking advantage of this opportunity to involve everyone in explicitly codifying our values, I began gathering everyone in the company in groups of 8-10 and talking about what we all wanted our company to be like and how we wanted to interact with each other and our customers. A key part of the process was for me to lead and facilitate the discussion but not to shape the conversation too much. Out of that we synthesized five clear and distinct values that spoke to the ethos we were trying to create.

Values have to be explained and socialized. We started with a special company meeting devoted to rolling out and discussing the new values. We also distributed them proactively, with every employee receiving their own copy of the values. Most importantly, however, we are working to constantly try to embed the values into how we act and make decisions. For example, one of the values was “Our Customers Define Us”. This is a reality every company faces, but to make it truly explicit helped us as we wrestled with questions like how we should complete our evolution from an open-source company to more of a SaaS provider. This specific value also helped us crystallize our approach to tough decisions about certain customers with mediocre traffic quality, an issue that faces all monetization providers in digital advertising. Having an explicit True North helped us make decisions that were financially tough in the short-term but enabled us build a better long-term business based on our core values.

Values need to be constantly reinforced. We do this in multiple ways. For example, one huge 30ft wall, one of the first things you see when you arrive in our new head office, has the five values emblazoned on it. We start every new employee training with the values. We give every employee has a one-pager with our vision, mission, strategy and values on their desk. And we recognize an employee every month – based on peer-voting – for their exemplification of the values.

In defining our values, here are a few of the lessons I learned:

1. Just like any other group of people, a company benefits from having clear values to define itself and guide behavior.
2. There comes a point in most organizations’ growth where tacit assumptions and shared, founding beliefs need to be made more formal and explicit.
3. The size threshold at which this is necessary can vary a bit depending how tight the team is. Factors like single or multi-location, breadth of disciplines, homogeneity vs. diversity of team, rate of change are all important to consider. But a good rule of thumb is between 50-100 people and in general err on the side of earlier vs. later.
4. Being explicit means writing the values down in memorable phrases. We tried to avoid generic words and phrases (like “integrity”) and use our own unique voice. This makes the values more relatable and reinforces whatever is unique about the culture.
5. The process is vital - involving everyone in the creation and codification of the values is really important. The CEO needs to lead but cannot dictate. The process also never ends. We are imperfect and there is always more we can do to make our values more top-of-mind and live by them even more deeply and effectively.
6. Reinforcement is huge – repeat, reward and recognize. As an example of recognition, our culture team now selects one value for each month and the company votes for one person who best characterizes that value.
7. Good, honed values can truly help make decisions. Especially the hardest decisions where numbers and analysis alone can’t give you the answer and you have think through more intangible factors.
8. Modeling behavior based on the value is crucial – especially by anyone in authority, starting with the CEO and the executive team. If the CEO doesn’t lead, the values will not stick.
9. Be ready to be BS-tested. On occasion employees should – and will - call you out based on the values. While a bit painful, this is really great because it means the values have really taken hold at the root level and are being used multi-directionally.
10. Values are a real and rich source of individual and organizational pride.

Taking the time to define values, breathe life into them, personally exemplify them and keep them fresh and essential is one of the most important things we can do to make our organizations thrive, whether they are companies, sports teams, classes, charities or volunteer groups.

I’m very interested in what lessons other people have learned about creating a strong set of values and culture and would love to hear about them.

Just in case you’re interested, our five values at OpenX are below. Each one is accompanied with some of the clarifying statements we have used to set them in context.

OpenX Values

We are one

- One team. No exceptions. We are a group of strong and diverse individuals unified by a clear common purpose.

Our customers define us

- We know our business flourishes or dies because of our customers.

OpenX is mine

- We are all owners of OpenX. We stake our personal and professional reputations on the excellence of our work.

We are an open book

- We are eager to teach and share what we know with others.

We evolve fast

- We take risks and confront failure openly. We recognize and repeat success aggressively. We actively seek out and provide constructive criticism. Defensiveness is for weaklings!