Values Before Valuations
Craftsmanship from Slack to Ted Lasso to chocolate
Our founding team here at UpTempo met at Slack during its formidable years of growth. Slack has been known for its defined culture, with six core values (❤ Empathy, 💁🏻♂️ Courtesy, 🌻 Thriving, 🔨 Craftsmanship, 🙆🏽♀️ Playfulness, 🙌🏾 Solidarity) and its well-publicized mission (“to make work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive”) woven into myriad employee and customer experiences.
Your startup might have espoused values as well. But, what do they mean? Do your early employees understand them? Can they identify examples of those values in practice at work? Or is your company’s biggest priority about monetization, with your stated values merely serving as a thought exercise your Founding team did once upon a time?
When working with Founders, we have found it helpful to have their employees be part of the culture creation and amplification process. When a technology company filled with developers considers the build-out of a sales team, they often fear that their culture will change. With a great set of values and thoughtful sales leaders, that doesn’t have to be the case.
One helpful exercise is to have people identify examples of each value, both inside and outside of the company. I’ll give you two instances of craftsmanship (one of the Slack values listed above) that resonated with me lately:
Amaury Guichon, world-renown chocolate chef, shows step-by-step how he makes intricate creations like a working foosball table, a life-size shark, and a safe complete with a locking mechanism, all out of chocolate. The care he takes to perfect each nuance of his art is nothing short of amazing. Is your team taking pride in its work like Guichon does?
After last week’s Ted Lasso Series Finale (spoiler alert!) the Internet was frantically listing 25+ callbacks to prior episodes that the show’s writers brought into the storyline to highlight character development. Another team embedding multiple layers of craftsmanship (whether you liked the outcome of the episode or not).
Sometimes, these external examples of values (in this case, craftsmanship) can bolster internal conversations about your company’s proliferation of culture. If you believe in empathy, for example, can your employees point to examples of empathy both inside and outside your company that define the term? Will they recognize the next instance of empathy when it happens? More importantly, when they have multiple approaches they can take in their work, will they choose the empathetic one?
What are your startup’s stated values? How will you reinforce and strengthen them as you add a sales organization this year?
Check out this post and other resources like it directly on UpTempo’s website: https://www.uptempo.work/resources/values-before-valuations