Mission Matters

A well‐developed, clearly articulated and inspiring mission will:

• Give employees something bigger and more meaningful to work toward, which has a proven positive impact on results.²
• Let customers connect with you on a deeper level.
• Support long‐term decision‐making, aligning everyone with a clear common goal.

An inspiring and well‐defined mission, in isolation, doesn't make for an engaged company culture, but when you stack up your values, mission, operating processes and employer brand, you're starting to build the narrative and the story of your organization.

One way you can do it is to write your company's obituary—think about how you would want your company to be remembered. Thinking about the end goal and how you want people to remember the business can help you define the behaviors that will get you there.

Designing or Changing Values

Depending on your situation and what you want to accomplish, you can (and should) design values in different ways. Consider carefully what you're trying to achieve, since values are powerful when they're correctly implemented.

Your values define your organization, so they should be unique to you and set you apart from others. One of the biggest criticisms employees have about company values is when they are seen as bland and like every other company.

With that in mind, let's look at three very different examples.

Slack, the team messaging company, is a fast growing startup. It was founded by four people who'd worked together for over a decade, giving them the confidence to write the values they wanted in their business right from the start and to design a culture around those.

Based in Silicon Valley, Slack is at the center of the world's greatest war for engineering talent. In an effort to attract the right people, the company focused on creating values that were very different from other tech companies. The company is unique in showing a love for what it calls “useless liberal arts degrees” and it designed soft, emotional values to stand out.

“We didn't want the same values as everyone else—you know, ‘Integrity, Respect,’ stuff like that. I think they should be a given. Everyone has those. We wanted to really think about what was special at Slack, what was unique, what was just us.”

—Stewart Butterfield, Founder & CEO at Slack

The result is a set of six values that, uniquely, are expressed as three sentences.

Slack shows authenticity by delivering these values through its product: Every time a user logs in, they see an inspirational quote from Brené Brown, a researcher and storyteller who focuses on shame and vulnerability.

Up the coast at Amazon in Seattle, 14 leadership principles take the place of corporate values. This itself makes a statement that it is leaders and leadership that Amazon values above all else.

Each of the principles is evaluated carefully in Amazon's leadership recruitment process. Every candidate must be able to provide a detailed example that shows how they have lived each principle. If a single principle cannot be demonstrated or is not seen as being important to the candidate, the candidate is rejected, regardless of skills, experience or anything else. Amazon recruits and promotes exclusively on these leadership principles, making them absolutely core to the company.

Over at Netflix, values show behaviors the company wants from all of its staff. Nine company values helped power a unique culture through eight years of growth and evolution from a DVD mailing business to the world's leading video streaming platform, and now a content creator with original programming. Netflix added a 10th value, “inclusion,” in 2017, reflecting the company's new global customer base.

Founder Reed Hastings worked with Chief Talent Officer Patty McCord over 14 years to develop a unique culture that would give talented people more freedom and responsibility than they'd get at other organizations. Hastings and McCord envisaged an organization where, as the business grew and became more complex, they would hire better and better people into high‐performing teams. They would resist the urge to bring in the safety of process and instead would give more and more freedom with accountability.

The cost of this was paying top‐of‐market salaries and having a zero‐tolerance attitude toward “adequate performance.” While neighboring startups focused on quirky perks and fancy offices, the line “Adequate performance gets a generous severance package” became a marker of the Netflix resolve to be better.

Each of these companies took a different approach to designing and implementing their values. They all have different business strategies, different workforces and completely different cultures, so it's right that they took an approach unique to them. Like fingerprints, unique to each of us, no two companies should have the same values, since they're the most powerful and authentic when they're one‐of‐a‐kind.

In a crowded market for employees and customers, you must focus on why you are different, so think about what makes you special on an emotional level. Even if it means that some people will love those aspects and some will hate them, be brave enough to make them special and unique for yourself and your workforce.

Embedding Values is the Real Hard Work

All three of these companies are successful at least in part because they chose the values and mission that were distinct for them, and enacted those and made them real through all other parts of the Engagement Bridge^TM. That's key. If you fail to get your company to live the values through everyday actions, you'll join the ranks of the thousands of corporations that write one thing on the wall and then go do the opposite.⁴

Typical of companies with this sort of inauthentic culture is the continued employment of people who fail to live the values but are kept on because they hit their short‐term performance targets. This is what's behind the “No brilliant jerks” policy that Netflix and other rebels have. The problem with brilliant jerks is that while they are performing personally, they're destroying the engagement and performance of the team around them, which everyone can see. The advice is clear: Always fire brilliant jerks.

“It only takes one asshole to destroy an entire team. Act quickly and remove any bad seeds no matter how good they are at writing software.

—Joe Stump, Tech Leader, Investor and ex‐Lead Architect at Digg.com

Key Outcomes Rebels Strive For

The best companies know the positive impact that purpose, mission and values can have on their organizations and they strive for the following.

Key Rebel Behaviors

The best companies weave a strong code into their culture with meaningful PMV integrated across their business. They have inspirational and aspirational PMV that staff can get behind. Key ways they make this happen include:

1. Communicate continually

   Rebels never stop communicating. They find new and different ways to tell stories from different perspectives and in different formats. Their values are not just a poster on the wall; they run programs like value of the month, they prioritize in induction and they consistently look to share real‐life stories where their values have been lived.

2. Implement without reservation

   Rebels unreservedly hire, promote, reward and fire according to their PMV. They don't waver from this and don't tolerate even high‐performing people who fail to live the values.

3. Refresh cautiously

   Rebels walk a fine line of allowing values to mature gently, keeping consistency so they can be embedded, while also updating them when necessary because context or situations change. They treat their values with respect, but know that cultures are alive and need progression.

4. Reward and recognize

   Rebels link their values deeply into employee recognition programs, ensuring there are tangible monetary and non‐monetary incentives for living the values.

Making a Start

Develop a Story or Model to Bring Your Values to Life    Finding a way that your values connect together can be a helpful way of explaining them and making them memorable.

At RG, we used a rocketship metaphor. The drawing and the story explains how our values link together to support our North Star value of “Delight your customers” that connects to our mission: “Let's make the world a better place to work.” You can hear the story in a special video at rg.co/rocketship.

Situation

Causeway Technologies, the world's leading supplier of software for the built environment, was ready to take the business to the next phase of its journey. To help achieve this, Causeway decided to “get the house in order” as Fiona Buchanan,⁵ EVP Human Resources, says, which started with revisiting its vision and values.

The team embarked on an exercise to review and refresh their values, partnering with employees throughout. These efforts were backed by the company's new CEO, Colin Smith, who says, “It would be easy for me to come along and tell employees what the vision and values might be, but that doesn't get engagement, which I value above all. I wanted to get as many people as possible to contribute.”

The result of this partnership has been a new vision and values that will truly drive and fuel the business for growth. Employees have said they've felt listened to and, as a result, are fully embracing them. Although they've just been rolled out, Buchanan has said they've already had a positive impact on engagement.

Play

There were two phases in the development of Causeway's new vision and values. The first had the executive team work together to create different versions/examples to share with employees. This helped with the second phase: conducting employee workshops to give employees a starting point for discussions. Buchanan says they were impressed with the outputs from workshops, since employees brought in a variety of fresh perspectives, viewpoints and themes. It also meant that employees embraced the new values, because they felt they'd had a role in developing them. Their new values are:

Causeway next created a video using employee feedback and opinions drawn directly from the vision and values employee workshops. “The purpose was to illustrate the diversity of views, and remind staff how they contributed to the end result,” says Buchanan. Watch the video at rg.co/causeway,

But the journey doesn't end here; in fact, it's just begun, according to Buchanan. Employees are now conducting workshops with teams, discussing what the new values mean to them and what they need to do to truly live and breathe them. This, along with everything else that's been done, will help Causeway and its aligned and engaged workforce go forward on the next step of their journey.

Situation

When Australian telecoms company Vocus Communications went through a merger and increased its workforce 10‐fold, the company realized it needed to define a new identity by updating company values to ones that worked for all employees, regardless of which business they came from. It also opened up the opportunity to create new values that “tied people together,” according to Denise Hanlon,⁶ Head of Human Resources.

Play

The result were four shiny new company values—ones that are both creative and honest. They were intended to bring people together, but also to be “practical, irreverent, a little bit cheeky—just like us,” says Hanlon.

To create the values, “we took what was held dearly from each of the merged companies and put it into words,” says Hanlon. “People were asked, ‘What is most important to you?’ ‘Why did you join Vocus?’ and ‘What makes us different from the other telcos?’ In the end, they represent what Vocus has been and what it wants to be.” The new values are:

They've been widely accepted throughout the organization, with employees proudly sharing them on social media. They've also created a common language for employees, one that's used as they work together across the new teams. An example is the value of not being a “d!@khead,” which gives employees a commonly acceptable word for calling each other out when they're not behaving according to the values. “We've created values that are more than words; they have their own energy, they are a call to action. They make a massive difference to the way we treat our customers and our employees. In a company created from many other companies over time, they are our True North,” says Hanlon.

Situation

In the summer of 2008, Bruce Poon Tip,⁷ founder of G Adventures, made the decision that if he was going to stay with the company and lead it to the next level, it needed a “cultural revolution.” “I had to go back to the very beginning and figure out where we stood. I wanted to harness this all together,” said says Poon Tip. He brought employees from around the world to a series of meetings, and set out to document the company's new set of core values.

“Many companies have documented their core values, but the employees don't pay any attention. The document sits in a drawer somewhere, or the list is too long to remember,” says Poon Tip. The company wanted core values that would transcend cultures and be easy enough to understand, “no matter whether you were a cook on a truck for us in Africa or a horse stableman in Mongolia.”

Play

The group agreed on five new values, consisting of only a few words:

They next set out to bring them to life. One way was by getting employees talking about them, integrating them into how employees think and act. An example is its annual company‐wide values‐based video competition, where employees make short movies about what the values mean to them. The videos are not only hilarious, outrageous and clever, but they get employees talking about and working together to bring meaning to the words. Go to rg.co/gadventures to see them.

Another key part of its strategy is to use values to guide decisions. An example is a business decision about the company's policy on customer deposits. Standard practice in the travel industry, and a way that travel companies make money, is for companies to keep the customer's deposit if the customer cancels a trip. A group of G Adventures employees asked whether that was taking advantage of people's misfortune, pointing out that it went against the value of “doing the right thing.”

Poon Tip and the team decided the employees were right, and came up with the revolutionary idea of a lifetime deposit, meaning a customer doesn't lose a deposit but can apply it toward a new trip, give it to someone else or donate it to G Adventure's charity. This is a great example of values clearly showing both customers and employees who they are, helping employees and the business get to the next level.

Situation

LinkedIn wanted to create a program that gave employees time to “focus on themselves, the company and the world,” says Nina McQueen,⁸ VP Global Benefits & Employee Experience. In 2010, they put a program in place called Investment Day or “InDay” for short. To meet the needs of the company's growing workforce, which McQueen described as “lean, driven, quickly spreading and out of breath,” InDay was intended to energize teams, giving them a day each month to invest in themselves and their community.

Over the years, as the company grew to more than 8,000 in 30 cities around the world, InDay, like many programs in a high‐growth environment, became less visible and effective. Many new employees didn't fully understand what InDay meant or how it should be used. This had to change; the program had to be refreshed.

Play

In 2014, LinkedIn did just that, re‐energizing and relaunching this important and meaningful tradition. To do this, the team went back to basics by rebranding and restructuring it, creating renewed excitement and engagement with the program. The new program had a new look and feel, with monthly themes to provide something employees could unite around and “reveal the essence of who we are as a company,” says McQueen. Themes included giving back, relationships, learning, wellness and play.

The team also leveraged others, using fellow employees to help create energy and engagement with the program. Executives now play an active role in sponsoring monthly themes and participating in events alongside employees, and LinkedIn's 250‐strong culture champions from around the globe help execute events locally.

Finally, to ensure new hires understand the program, LinkedIn hired a storyteller to create a video to tell the story of InDay's origin and purpose through interviews with employees. All of these actions have paid off, re‐energizing and turning InDay back into one of the company's most treasured and appreciated traditions.

Situation

CarTrawler, the world's leading B2B travel technology platform, had values any company would be proud of. They were far from ordinary; in fact, they encapsulated the key attributes that made the company special. However, as the company grew, moving from being an infant to a teenager, as Gillian French,⁹ Chief People Officer, explained, the company realized a change was needed to “grow up” and support the emerging business.

“We asked ourselves, are our values serving us well, or do they need to change to be able to handle our further growth?” says French. The decision was made to change them, launching the values alongside newly created purpose and mission statements to send a message about the new stage of the business's “life.”

Play

In January 2017, the five new values were launched to replace the original four that had valiantly served the company's rapid growth until that point. They're united through the acronym HOPES, which is apt, given CarTrawler's forward‐thinking attitude.

CarTrawler has shown the importance of balancing what makes you special at the start with what will support you as you continue to grow. The company values have truly evolved, and have helped and will continue to help the company as it moves not only from infant to teenager but from teenager to adult.

Situation

Discovery Communications, the broadcaster behind the Discovery Channel, TLC and Animal Planet channels, is dedicated not only to entertaining but inspiring, harnessing the power of its brands and businesses, and offering employees opportunities to give back to the world. With this in mind, the team decided to develop a range of global programs so the workforce, no matter where they were in the world, could do just that—give back. The programs had to reflect the diversity of the workforce and of their interests. “Not everyone wants to pull weeds in the park for hours—we want to offer opportunities so everyone can find something to match their individual passion,” says Tammy Shea, Group VP, Corporate Communications and LifeWorks & Inclusion.

Play

The Discovery team developed three different but connected programs.

Situation

Southwest Airlines has a meaningful and yet simple purpose: to “connect people to what's important in their lives through friendly, reliable, low‐cost air travel.” This purpose is not just a slogan posted at headquarters, but a guidepost for employees on what overall success looks like for Southwest. To support this purpose, Southwest developed a set of values that provides employees with specific expectations on how they should interact with customers and each other.

Southwest is not unique in creating a set of expectations, but what sets the company apart is that it has created a multi‐level approach, further defining expectations as employees progress upward through the organization. By setting specific expectations at leadership levels, it believes the company better supports employees, who in turn better support customers . . . thus providing a terrific customer experience. And it must be working—year after year, the airline has won multiple awards in customer satisfaction and as a top employer in the US.

Play

Southwest's multi‐level approach includes these three levels:

1. “Living the Southwest Way”—Expectations for All Employees

   Includes Warrior Spirit, Servant's Heart and Fun‐LUVing Attitude. Warrior Spirit is about working hard and striving to be the best. Servant's Heart is about respecting each other and following the Golden Rule. Fun‐LUVing Attitude is about having fun and being a passionate team player.

2. Expectations for All Leaders

   Employees promoted into leadership are expected to demonstrate three additional expectations. Develop People is just what it says—focusing on knowing, serving and growing the people on your team. Build Great Teams is about building trust and cultivating an inclusive environment. Thinking Strategically requires leaders to see beyond today and plan into the future.

3. Additional Expectations for All Senior Leaders

   Leaders who step into senior leadership roles have three additional expectations. Demonstrate Capacity focuses leaders on delegation and prioritization. Communicate Effectively is important for casting a compelling vision and communicating openly and often. Be Knowledgeable requires leaders to be ever learning and self‐aware.

Southwest Airlines takes leadership and its leadership values seriously. The team believes that strong leaders are the support network for employees who perform well and ultimately win customers. For this reason, they hire leaders by evaluating against these values; build training for leadership courses using them; and even use them to measure annual performance, with 75% of appraisals based on Living the Southwest Way and only 25% on achieving work objectives.

“Having values applicable to each level within Southwest helps us keep things simple, such as how we hire, develop and grow talent. Specific expectations for leaders lets them know that how they lead is just as important as the business results they are achieving. Leadership is critical to supporting employees, and we want leaders at all levels to take that seriously,” says Bonnie Endicott,¹⁰ Director, People.

Situation

Interface, a world leader in modular flooring, is a company led by a strong and meaningful mission, one that truly makes a difference. Named Mission Zero^TM, it's the company's promise to eliminate any negative impact the company has on the environment by 2020. According to Katy Owen, Chief Human Resources Officer, “We entered the sustainability world long before it had a name, at a time when there were no paths to follow. Through passion and innovation, we've designed our own solutions, layer by layer.”

In 1994, Interface's founder and CEO Ray Anderson, an “avowed capitalist,” challenged the company to adopt its zero footprint vision. His challenge was sparked by a personal epiphany, prompted by a customer's question, “What is Interface doing for the environment?” By setting a bold vision, followed by creating a plan to achieve it and not wavering from it, Interface empowered its employees and demonstrated that optimism can lead to action and change. When Anderson died in 2011, though, the company “went into mourning,” says Owen. “He was an inspirational leader, the heart and soul of the company. It was almost like we'd lost our voice.”

Enter a new leadership team in 2015, and a decision to help the company find its voice with a new set of values. To start, the team went on what Owen describes as an “archeological dig,” getting out their “brush” to carefully uncover the truths of what got the company to where it was, and determine what was necessary to help move forward. “As we were closing in on our 2020 mission, we needed to take the next step, creating loyalty and engagement to help us achieve this important goal,” Owen says.

Play

In partnership with its 3,500 employees from around the world, Interface uncovered the “genuine truths” that evolved into its five new mission‐led values. The partnership and collaboration with employees was critical, since the values needed to come from within, hearing directly from employees what made the company great and what would make them personally committed to the mission. Interface's new values are:

Having new values, however, wasn't enough to ensure the mission would be achieved, so Owen and then‐COO, now current CEO, Jay Gould went on a four‐month road trip, conducting meetings to share the values and engage in two‐way communication and activities to help employees truly understand them, translating them into aspirational actions and behaviors.

Feedback on the values has been phenomenal. Employees have commented that “it feels like us,” which confirms that the dig and the design have been successful. At the same time, it's been an eye‐opener for some tenured employees to get re‐energized with renewed focus after realizing that their values‐led behavior had been slipping in the lost voice of the company. This will help Interface get to 2020, and go beyond a zero footprint to create a climate fit for life.