Your values should make you do things

Most companies have values. Some are thoughtful. Some are generic. Some are printed six feet tall on an office wall next to a ficus that has seen things. The better question is what happens because of them.

If curiosity is one of your values, where does curiosity actually get room to operate? If you value generosity, what becomes more generous? If you claim to be brave, what have you done lately that required any?

A value should leave evidence.

It might change what gets rewarded, what employees are trusted to do, how customers are treated, what the company protects when things get uncomfortable, or what gets an immediate no. Sometimes the evidence is considerably more fun than a policy manual.

One of Canva’s values is “Set crazy big goals and make them happen.” Every quarter, teams set a “big goal worthy of celebration.” They mean the celebration part. Canva has released doves for a product launch, staged a mini La Tomatina when it launched in Spanish, painted a mural in 100 languages, put everybody in black turtlenecks for the iPhone app and held a drone race for Android.

There’s method in the weirdness. Canva founder Melanie Perkins has described the idea as “celebrate what you want to replicate.” They want people working together toward ambitious goals, so accomplishing one becomes culturally memorable. Achievement doesn’t disappear into the next deadline. Everybody stops and notices.

Possibly while throwing tomatoes.

Atlassian has values including “Play, as a team,” “Be the change you seek,” and the admirably direct “Don’t #@!% the customer.”

It also has ShipIt, a 24-hour hackathon that has been part of the company for roughly two decades. Employees can use the time to chase an idea, fix an irritation, grab people from other teams and make something that ordinary work hasn’t made room for. ShipIt projects have produced internal improvements and ideas that eventually became actual Atlassian products.

That’s one of the ways values become culture. They create permission. People learn not only what the organization admires, but what they are genuinely allowed to do.

Southwest has spent years building “Fun-LUVing Attitude” into its employee culture. Its current values include some unusually useful instructions such as “Don’t take yourself too seriously,” “Don’t be a jerk,” and “Don’t make the easy hard.”

Historically, employees have been encouraged to bring that personality into the customer experience too. Gate agents have used games, dance-offs, giveaways, paper airplane contests and other small acts of airport absurdity to make waiting around a little less miserable.

The customer doesn’t need to know that “Fun-LUVing Attitude” appears in Southwest’s employee promise because they meet an employee who acts like a person.

Which is considerably more convincing.

As Mailchimp grew during its independent-company era, it faced a problem a lot of founder-led and fast-growing companies eventually encounter: some of the qualities that made the company itself were living largely in the people who had been there long enough to understand them.

Mailchimp described “weirdness” as part of its culture. So the company started asking a surprisingly serious question: How do we scale our weirdness?

One answer was Mailchimp University, a leadership-development program built around Mailchimp’s actual culture rather than a generic management curriculum. They built infrastructure around something they didn’t want growth to erase. Because if a quality is genuinely important to an organization’s identity, eventually somebody has to figure out how it survives employee No. 750.

Founder telepathy has a notoriously poor enterprise implementation.

REI gives us a less silly example and maybe an even clearer one. The outdoor co-op says that time outside matters. In 2015, it closed its stores on Black Friday and paid employees to spend the day outside instead. It later made the practice permanent.

That choice gives the belief weight. REI is willing to organize a real business decision around it.

And that’s another useful test for a value: Does it survive inconvenience?

“Operationalizing values” sounds like a phrase invented shortly before someone schedules a mandatory 90-minute meeting about it. The actual idea is simpler. Take a value your organization claims to hold and ask what it causes. What do we do differently because of this? What do we encourage? What do we protect? What do we celebrate? What do we refuse? What should an employee or customer experience that would make this belief visible without anybody having to point to the values page?

The answers might become a ritual, a hiring practice, a customer experience, a decision rule, a budget choice, protected time or the occasional company-sanctioned tomato fight.

This is part of the thinking behind the Center model. Identity is what is true about an organization. Culture is where those truths start affecting behavior. Expression is how the rest of us experience them. Center is the work of making sure those aren’t three separate stories.

People rarely experience your values as words. They experience what your organization does because those words are true. And if nothing changes because a value exists, it might be worth asking whether you have a value yet.

Or just a very nice sentence.