Defining your Company Values

“Find the right person for your company, and put them into the right role” – Great advice – hopefully, you’ve come across it before.

Unsurprisingly, many companies have problems putting that into practice.

There are a few methods we’ll talk about to find the right people and put them in the right roles – this method today is about your company values.


Company values – what matters to your company?

Maybe you’ve heard about defining company values, maybe you have a (mostly forgotten) Mission Statement. Very few companies actually implement these correctly.

Your company values should be:

  • Easy to understand
  • Honest
  • Respected
  • Genuinely believed in by your team


How to Define your Company Values

  1. Get your leadership team together for an afternoon.
  2. Ask each leader to independently list team members who best reflect what your company stands for.
  3. For each of those team members, have leaders write down the personality traits that make them such a good fit.
  4. Put all the traits on a board.
    • Keep – Prioritise the most meaningful
    • Kill -Discard anything vague or unimpactful
    • Combine – Group similar ones
  5. Keep refining the list until you’ve got your top 3–5 traits.

These will be your true company values – the ones your team likely already lives by.