What are Core Values?

Recently, I had the opportunity to work within a company and to help them identify their core values and to create a mission statement.  To accomplish this task, we scheduled a total of 8, 1 hour meetings over a 30 day period.  The meeting was optional and 9 brave souls chose to be a part of the core values team.

The Setup

 As we kicked off the first meeting, one thing was super obvious, people had questions in their heads.  You may ask yourself... "What questions?" To answer that, here is a sampling of some of the questions that were asked:

• What are core values?
• Why do we care about values?
• Why are we talking about values?
• How is this discussion going to apply to the business?

My mistake was to let enthusiasm, assume people had a frame of reference around the topic.  During the first meeting, it was obvious that a discussion needed to take place about what core values are and why they are important.

Identifying Values

To address the issue, the group was asked permission to share stories, personal stories, but not too personal.  The exercise was guided by asking people to tell stories in one of three main categories:

• High five stories
• Low moment stories
• Hell no stories

As people shared stories, everyone listened intently.  At the end of each story, team members would practice verbalizing what they heard.  Not the details, but the overall messages that were being communicated.  People were encouraged to ask themselves... "What is important to this person? What recurring theme is being told in the story?"

To illustrate the process, one set of stories had the recurring theme of communication and professionalism.  The stories may have had different actors and the situations may have been different, but from a values stand point, communication and professionalism shined through.

Getting to the Core

The intersting thing was... when these values were not present, the person actually left an established professional service and went to find another service, never to return.  Let me state this again.

When communication and professionalism were not being honored, the customer left an established relationship to find another service.
That my friends, sounds like a core value.  When multiple stories circle around specific values and real actions are tied to the value, then you are on to something.  We can go through the motions of identifying values, we can click down on values (which we will discuss in future posts.) But when a value is not present or not being honored and a person takes an action, based on the lack of presence... that points to a core value. In my book, that's a valuable insight that can be applied in many different areas of an organization or company.

Wrapping Up

The process of identifying values can be great fun and very enlightening.  It can also be valuable to an organization or business to think about these topics, in order to get clear on the messages that are being sent into the world by its actions.

To wrap up this post, I will leave you with a few questions to consider:

• What are your core values?
• What are the core values of your business?
• What values are your customers looking for?
• What would it look like if your business/organization was clear on its core values?

If you can confidently answer these questions, your position in the market place may set you aside from the rest of the pack.

I hope you enjoyed this post.
Jer