Build Core Values that Drive Impact

This article is drawn from our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 05. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. The conversation has been edited for brevity and readability.
 

Executive directors and board members who have teamwork, values, and integrity posters on the wall in the office are realizing that this isn't working. This isn't serving anybody. And yet there is a culture that social impact leaders are trying to build in their organizations in order to advance their impact.

We do core value work with our clients all the time. The process — even determining what your value should be — can be quite fruitful. But how do you actually then take those values and have them influence people's behavior within the organization and improve your mission and improve the experience that supporters, funders, and the public has with your organization? 

To build a healthy, sustainable business or social impact organization, there are a certain set of values that you need to uphold. This is both really important and really difficult to do, but we have five suggestions that'll help you build core values that actually work.

Let’s take a look.

1. Your Values Have to be Easy to Remember and Not Lame to Repeat

What do we mean by that? 

• Each value is one or two words.
• Their descriptions are short and meaningful.
• They are something that somebody would actually say in their day-to-day life. 

Of course, these core values are going to be super dependent on the organization itself — where in the country or where in the world you're located. The culture where you are located is really going to factor into this, but no matter what, a value needs to be something that's not super lame to say out loud. 

Example:

At a science-based nonprofit, science underpins a lot of their work. Let’s call one of their values Find Out. It's something that you could actually say to a colleague in the course of a conversation.  Person 1, “I had this question about how one of our processes works.” Person 2, “Okay, let's Find Out about that.” So that term becomes something that’s repeated in the office — which helps reinforce the value itself.

There can be a challenge to this approach. An organization might lean on a strategy like, ‘Let's find the three Rs’ or something like that.’ And then people use these single words. Frankly, we’re sometimes guilty of this in the cultural values that we've created for Cosmic. If you asked one of us to recite them, we probably wouldn't get them all. But there’s one that’s easy to remember though — Kaizen. It's a distinct word and we don't feel lame saying it because it's kind of a cool word. And it's got an interesting origin to it and story behind it. Kaizen means continuous improvement. 

The trap that we've seen with single word values is that while they are easy to remember, people use generic words that don't really mean all that much — or they've been used to mean so many different things in different organizations. They basically become ubiquitous. Empathy, for example — which is literally one of the values that we live. But how does that actually influence our culture at Cosmic? How does a social impact leader navigate that tension between easy to remember, not lame to repeat, but still meaningful?

Finding that balance is no more of a challenge than finding the right language for a good piece of content. A lot of it is listening to the real language that's used within your team or amongst your constituents and your customers. 

If you’re using Empathy as one of your values, it’s almost guaranteed that there's another word for empathy in your organization that people actually are saying — but they're not using the word empathy. So if you can figure out what that word or phrase is, then that's a great way to incorporate it into your core values.

2. Back these Values with Specific Behaviors

What does that actually look like? 

You could do this on a one-to-five scale. From the example above, you could literally Find Out what a five out of five on Find Out actually looks like when you show up to work. You walk in the front door or log onto your computer for the morning to determine what you’re doing that day. What is the behavior that demonstrates that I'm living this Find Out value? And you also determine what a one out of five looks like when you fail to Find Out? Document these things and share them with your team. Then you can demonstrate what you mean when you talk about Find Out behaviors. Ask your team what excellence looks like in their day-to-day job as it relates to Find Out.

As a starting point, you can make it something that's general for the whole team. For example, for the Find Out value, one of the underlying behaviors for that value is talk to your customers or talk to your constituents; talk to your stakeholder group. If you’re a CEO or ED, think about your donors. How many times are you talking to donors and running ideas by them? How does this apply to volunteers? These are different stakeholders. If you're talking to those people with this value in mind, that's probably a good sign that you're trying to Find Out.

3. Evaluate Regularly

We’re not fans of annual reviews. In fact, we hold quarterly check-ins with our team and individual team members. That’s a good time to take a look at our values and have conversations about them. 

Continuing our example from above, you might determine that a team member is around a three or four on the Find Out value. Talk to them about how they could take this up to a five based on their job. It really isn't about the number. It isn't about a GPA on how many values they're getting a five on. It's more about the conversation. The takeaway here is that we are constantly talking to each other about these values.

Here’s a different approach. We help our clients define and craft their brand values. We don't go as far as to actually help them figure out how to embody them as an organization — how to actually operationalize them within their team. That's outside of the purview of our work and our contracts. But it's important. We are a value driven organization and we've crafted our values and recrafted them over the years. And the exercise of crafting them is helpful. It's a thoughtful process. It's a fun way to get people involved. But we don’t continuously evaluate our team against these values in a rigid way. It's just done intuitively. And while this works for us, we could be better embodying these values in our culture if we were a little more thoughtful around doing that.

There’s a balance. You don't want values that get written in stone and stay on the wall for 10 years, right? There’s a good chance that any social impact organization has changed in that time — or the problem that they're trying to solve has changed. So these core values can be fluid and can change. So be willing to adapt. Question the impact that you're trying to have. What’s the need right now? How do we show up in order to continue to advance? How do our values help us create the best team we can? 

Brand values and team values are the same thing. As an agency that helps organizations stand out in the attention economy, we think of them as brand values. CEOs and ED likely think of them as team values or organizational values, but they're the same.

4. When Done Excellently, They’re Driving Impact

It’s important for a social impact organization’s authenticity and to be able to stand in front of their donors and audience and say that they are practicing their values in their work. These aren’t arbitrary values just about team building and about culture. These are actually values that shape the effectiveness of the organization and drive the impact forward. So, your values need to be clearly linked to the impact that you are attempting to have. 

5. Use Your Values When Hiring

As a creative agency, we don’t typically advise clients around hiring other than what the makeup of their brand and marketing team might look like. But we understand that you can make this part of your hiring process. For example, to get at your values when hiring people, you might put interviewees in a position where they have to demonstrate their capacity to live these values. Put them in real life scenarios where these values are going to be tested. Making this part of the hiring process can help you use your values to build your culture moving forward — not just with the people that you have now. 

If you’re an ED or CEO, think about how your brand values make their way to your team and what that looks like in people's day-to-day jobs. Social impact leaders should think about how they’re getting their brands values to permeate everything that they do. It's a necessary ingredient to making a brand really tick. We have a set of values and a culture that we've built over 15 years at Cosmic. And we think about them when hiring so that we can continue to have an organization that operates from our values.

A Strategy for Infusing Brand values into Your Organization

Once you’ve worked with your team to determine your values, focus on one per year. Really dive deep on this one thing. This can be really successful. Pick one value — as a team — that you’re all going to hold yourselves accountable to improving in some way. 

If you have a collection of values, you don't get the opportunity to fully live those different values. Focusing on one gives everyone a chance to figure out how to embody them in their specific role.

Two Big Takeaways

Your organization’s values need to be actionable. Perhaps something that you can actually score people on or have discussions around at the very least. You need to give people the opportunity to fully play around with these values and see how they influence their day-to-day. 

Values need to be more than posters on the wall that are little more than window dressing. Your brand values should actually shape the behaviors and actions of your organization and your team members. That’s how they can actually work to create a culture of excellence and drive your impact.