Core values are a collection of vital guiding principles that determine the foundation for your company culture. If you don’t already have core values in place for your company, the Evolved Enterprise book shares great examples of these and the Evolved Business Blueprint has a detailed step by step process to successfully create these for your organization.

More Than Just a Wall Plaque

Many companies though – from startups to large organization with thousands of employees – have theoretically great values that sit on the literal or proverbial wall, but do little to influence the day to day operations of the organization.

Yes, core values are outward facing phrases that illustrate what your culture stands for, and can help you recruit aligned team members and customers. Beyond that though, they can be some of your greatest operational and management tools.

Core Values for Empowered Growth

Once you have core values in place, you can actively use them to operate your organization and optimize for your team’s empowered growth. With this approach, your core values guide your team’s day to day decisions, relationships and behavior – and provide your leadership team with an empowering coaching framework for your team’s performance.

Regardless of how great your team is, even your best “A players” will make mistakes, and you’ll find it essential to give feedback for improvement. Feedback can be an uncomfortable, confrontational process, where people get defensive and take things personally… or you can take a value driven approach to maximize results and minimize personal tension, using core values as your management tools.

When someone makes a mistake, identify a core value that, if it were fully embraced would help avoid that mistake in the future. Then inquire, “Do you feel this situation is a full expression of this core value?” – oftentimes, this inquiry alone will be enough to drop defenses and inspire a level of personal reflection to learn from the situation and empower your team member with a healthy perspective for the future to navigate similar challenges.

For example, one of our core values in Vision Tech Team is “Own It! Be responsible and reliable.” When someone points blame to another team member, or a client, for a particular issue, I often give the reflection and inquiry “Do you feel this is an example of Owning It?” which almost immediately shifts to a more empowering perspective.

If your core values are truly principles that you would hire and fire on, they are also principles for constant reflection of how your team is actually showing up. In theory, if you have the right core values and your team is actually living to them, you have a great organization. In practice, once you have the right core values in place, it takes coaching, leadership and constant feedback to fully express and embody these values. Every time you use a core value to give feedback, you not only take personal pressure off of yourself and other managers, you also align your team members more deeply with the foundation you set for your company culture in the first place.

Evolving Your Values Through Active Reflection

Finally, actively using your core values for feedback will empower the evolution of your company’s value system through real-world practice and active reflection, improving the essence and expression of these values to be more reflective of how you’d like your organization to show up in the marketplace.

For example, we’ve operated Vision Tech Team for over two years with the core value of Very Fast Response Times – a value we held in high esteem, as the standard client experience of design agencies and freelancers in our industry is to be left in the dark on progress and frustratingly slow response times from vendors. As we’ve evolved our organization and consistently used this value to coach our people, we’ve realized it’s made us really great at being reactive and fighting fires, rather than being proactive.

Through reflection on how this value and expectation has consistently impacted our organization, we’ve flipped it on its head to be “Vision First: be proactive and begin with the end in mind.” While we still believe in responding quickly to our team members and clients, we now have a more forward focus with our overall culture and systems and a much greater confidence in our company’s future (not to mention less stress for each team member). This shift didn’t come from theory, it came from actively using our core values to manage our team and processes and reflecting on what that practice was teaching us.

Where to Next?

For examples of other business who have successfully implemented these strategies be sure to check out the Evolved Enterprise book, and for a step by step guide to replicate their success in your own business check out Evolved Business Blueprint.

The Reflection Ritual is a simple system that solves one of the greatest challenges evolved business leaders experience today: providing consistent, structured, and meaningful feedback to support their team’s growth in alignment with the company vision and core values.

Imagine having a simple tool that allows for systematic check-ins, coaching, and feedback across your entire organization, whether you have a single employee or a team of hundreds…

This tool was born out of need as my company and team started to grow, and I wanted to continue coaching my team members but didn’t have the bandwidth (or the skills) to do so effectively and consistently as we expanded.

When we first started our agency Vision Tech Team with about half a dozen people, my partner James Guldan and I were actively doing one on one meetings with each team member every other week, checking in on how they were doing, offering coaching for growth, and getting feedback on how we were doing as a company and what we could improve.

As we grew, it became increasingly difficult to scale and track these conversations.

When we did briefly canceled the meetings for a while to free up our schedules, we quickly noticed we had less of a pulse on our business and less connection to our team members, especially as we grew. So we innovated and designed a simple and scalable system that allows a similar process to take place with a lot less time commitment for everyone (including each team member), improved accountability, and increased self-reflection.

Every two weeks, right before payroll, each team member fills out a form answering specific questions that inspire insights, feedback, self-reflection, and an opportunity to ask for support.

We started doing this right before payroll to keep everyone accountable to filling it out consistently, and at first told people “if you don’t fill this out on time, you don’t get paid on time” – and we actually stuck to that.

It built the muscle of growth and consistency for our team and reflected just how important growth is to our organization (we applied this for ourselves as ownership too, and we wouldn’t get paid our salaries until we filled this out. As entrepreneurs we often break the rules but force a standard on our team members that we don’t meet ourselves – we believe in leading by example instead.)

Here’s the exact template we use:
As you apply this in your organization, you can modify the questions to reflection what’s most important to your company.

On a scale of 1 – 10, what is your current stress level at work?

On a scale of 1 – 10, what is your current happiness level at work?

What would increase your happiness at work?

What have you learned over the last two weeks (in relation to your learning track or otherwise)?

What have been your biggest challenges over the last two weeks?

What have been your biggest accomplishments over the last two weeks? How are these accomplishments reflective of at least one of our core values?

What do you intend to learn over the next two weeks?

When we first started this process, my co-founder and I would give direct feedback to each team member. As we grew, we put managers in charge of their own departments. Our Design Director replies to all designers, our CTO replies to our developers, James and I reply to the managers and to each other. This makes the system more scalable and improves the leadership and coaching abilities of our management team.

The Reflection Ritual addresses one of the biggest challenges many organizations face: leaders don’t give consistent feedback to their teams outside of quarterly reviews (at best), so most employees don’t know where they stand, and entrepreneurs (especially those who aren’t great managers, which includes a lot of us) don’t know how to give consistent feedback without being confrontational, often until it’s too late.

This process also helps to keep a pulse on our organization. We flag any high stress levels or low happiness levels, or other concerns to discuss in coaching conversations. We gain insights of where we can improve our culture and support structures, so that our initiatives are based on actual data and feedback from our team.

When we do one on one or group coaching and mentoring meetings with our team members, we often source many of our topics from these Reflection Ritual answers, giving us a foundation for our inquiries and bringing us closer to solutions.

Beyond the interaction, answering these questions alone encourages increased self-reflection – like a journaling process, where the questions themselves inspire solutions, and they can look back back on their own answers over time to track their personal evolution within your company.

As you apply this to evolving your own team, please comment below with your results!

Side note: Dmitriy (along with Yanik Silver) will also be teaching the Evolved Startup Live Classes, sharing his all of his expertise in recruiting, training and retaining a great team to bring your mission to the marketplace. It’s all part of the Evolved Business Blueprint and sparking 10,000 ideas to change the world.