By Lorie Corcuera

Last year, Small Business BC’s annual INSPIRE 2015 event featured a panel interview with local founders and CEOs sharing their success and failure stories. The event featured keynote speaker Christine Day, CEO of Luvo Inc. (previously CEO at lululemon athletica) along with Arran Stephens, founder of Nature’s Path, Kate Ross-Leblanc, fo-founder of Saje Natural Wellness, Roger Hardy, co-founder of Shoes.com (also founder of Clearly Contacts), and Terry McBride, CEO of Yyoga and Nettwerk Music Group.

As different as their businesses are, each of them shared one similar element for success—core values. For each of these leaders, the resounding factor that supported their individual journeys and defined their companies’ success, was a declaration—and ongoing demonstration—of core values.

Defining Your Core
In Graham Kenny’s Harvard Business Review article “Your Company’s Purpose Is Not Its Vision, Mission or Values,” he defines core values as describing the “desired culture” or “behavioral compass.” Values communicate how the team and leaders within an organization or community behave, act and work together. Core values also define what matters most to an organization and therefore, provide clarity on how decisions are or will be made in the future.

On a personal level, core values are innate, though there are differing schools of thought on where they originate. Whether biologically shared by our parents or learned via upbringing and environment, our core values are often uncovered by a life changing experience—when we are put into a situation and are forced to ask life’s biggest questions.

Now translate this personal view of core values into a company or with a group of individuals, and core values define the heart of an organization and help to create a shared experience. Unfortunately, this scenario is less common than considered.

The Power of Core Values
According to the research of Modern Survey, a company that measures workforce intensity, only one in 150 employees who say their organization does not have a set of a values are “fully engaged.” The conclusion is that employee engagement is almost impossible without a set of organizational values.

Furthermore, while defining core values is the first step, living them is key. While meant to align an organization, half-efforts can instantly backfire and cause loss of trust. As much as values can be uplifting and empowering, when the team is not living or be lead by their values, these values lose their intrinsic value.

Undoubtedly, core values have the power to create a positive force within organizations, when the team believes in them. The key point on integrating core values is getting clear on the purpose of values, extracting genuine key principles and commitments from the leaders and team, identifying who and how this will impact, and developing a simple and effective system of accountability.

When Company Values Fail
Many have learned the hard way the impact of not including the team in the process of defining the company values—present company included.

I once served in a corporate HR leader role, and had the opportunity to be part of the leadership team that redefined the company core values, vision and mission. We hired an external business strategy consultant to help us with this endeavour and spent days choosing the right words and then crafting simple statements that resonated with the leaders.

While engaging the leaders seemed like an obvious first step, we failed to include the rest of the organization in the process until we had already finalized the values. As a result, there was no ownership or connection to the values.

How we defined the values led to another disconnect. Instead of meaningful discussion on what we believed was important to us individually, and tough questions around what made our team and organization unique, how we made decisions, and especially, why we were in our business to begin with—the leaders simply chose words from a list.

The missed opportunity for us was creating values that the leaders could actually live by. When one of our co-founders acted in a way that did not line up with our espoused company values, the team lost trust in the leadership and company altogether.

Three Culture Stories That Work
Fortunately, for every failure, there are multiple successes to inspire. Consider three local companies that are leading the way to creating value-based learning experiences.

CASE STUDY 1: Navarik Corp.
In 2013, Navarik Corp., a leading service provider in the commodity trading industry, had a new strategic vision and leadership team. With a new CEO at the helm, it was time to redefine core values, purpose (complementing the mission and vision) and leadership guiding principles to re-energize the team.

To better anchor their core values—BE TRUE, BE BRILLIANT, and MAKE IT HAPPEN—they integrated them at a company team retreat, breaking them three main learning sessions for an impactful one day session. BE TRUE launched the day with an intimate and fun Leaders Talk Show to bring leadership team up close and personal. The second learning workshop focused on BE BRILLIANT, drawing upon StrengthsFinder 2.0 to identify the team’s individual strengths; a masterminding session closed the day with a focus on on completing their individual goals to MAKE IT HAPPEN.

The key result of this values-based learning experience was a deeper connection with the leaders, stronger alignment within the team, and a better understanding of the core values and how it can support their strengths and company vision.

CASE STUDY 2: Clio (a.k.a. Themis Solutions Inc.)
In 2014, Clio, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company with a product specifically designed for solo practitioners and small-medium sized law firms, doubled in size from 70 to over 130 team members. As experienced by many companies growing over 100 people, it became challenging to keep everyone on the same path without a set of clearly defined core values, and while Clio had a sense of what mattered to them most, they had not declared their values in writing.

When they were ready to define their core values, they brought in an external consultant, did a company wide call to action for volunteers and created a Values Team comprised of 10 ambassadors of Clio, who they refer to as Clions. Once they developed clear value statements, the next step was to find ways to integrate their values into their day-to-day.

Christopher Yeh, manager of talent development at Clio explained, “The first action we took was to gather feedback from the team using an online survey. We asked questions that required our team to define what the company’s values meant to them individually and what current challenges they were experiencing as a team. We then compiled the feedback and linked the challenges with one of the core values.”

Before the end of 2015, #TeamClio decided it was time to bring their values to life. On their annual Team Day, they created Clio Ministries (mini-Values Teams) to empower the Clions to collaborate on tackling challenges within the organization. They then posted the online survey feedback on one of the main office walls and had the Clio Ministries choose a company value—along with its list of challenges to work on. Today, a total of 13 Clio Ministries hold bi-weekly stand-up meetings and post updates on their internal wiki to share learnings and celebrate wins.

The key result of this values-based learning experience was creating a more transparent and open culture, reinvigorating the company values through empowering the team to come up with the value-driven activities, and making the process more fun and team-oriented.

CASE STUDY 3: Saje Natural Wellness
Where there is true alignment, core values emerge quite naturally. At the INSPIRE event, Kate Ross LeBlanc, CEO and Co-Founder of Saje Natural Wellness stated, “Measuring culture is like measuring love.” Since its inception in 1993, the company has been experiencing exponential growth—with core values a part of their DNA.

“Our values of CELEBRATION, WELLNESS, GROWTH, and AWESOMENESS are woven in everything we do.” says Zuleika Sgro, director of people at Saje. To fully integrate these values into their organization, they hold morning check-ins where each team member across the entire organization shares two daily wellness and growth rocks (i.e. goals), celebrate big wins and failures, and recognize who is awesome on their team.

Their company vision is “global wellness” and their core values support this vision by aligning their team as well as their community. In their most recent e-newsletter, Saje also encouraged their community to #SpreadWellness and join them on creating daily wellness goals.

The key result of this values-based learning experience is creating daily interactive activities to hold their team accountable to living and leading their company values and making it part of their everyday conversations.

Bringing Your Culture to Life
In summary, successfully integrating core values to inspire a workplace culture requires three key actions:

• Establish buy in and support with all leaders and key influencers;
• Engage the whole organization to define your culture story; and
• Create simple and team inspired value-driven learning experiences.

Like any new habit, it takes consistency and commitment to make it stick. When it becomes the norm, the true value of shared core values transforms organizations from the inside out.

Lorie Corcuera is the co-founder and CEO at SPARK Creations & Company Inc., a training and development organization that inspires people and companies to create meaningful cultures and workplaces. (sparkcreationsinc.com)

(PeopleTalk Spring 2016)