We recently joined our friends at TINYpulse for a webinar on how to use company values to drive success. During the presentation, TINYpulse’s head of marketing shared a “Mission to Mars” exercise to help if you’re struggling with how to write core values.
How to Write Core Values in 4 Steps
Mission to Mars exercise: If you could only take 10 people to Mars, who would you pick and why?
- List who you would take and why. These don’t necessarily need to be your best friends. Think about the people that would help you get to Mars — the problem solvers, the resourceful ones and the creative innovators.
- List who you wouldn’t want on your mission and why. List a few people you find less than stellar and describe the characteristics that made them hard to work with or why they wouldn’t make good partners on your mission.
- Brainstorm values and compare. Using your “why” list, brainstorm how these qualities could translate into values that you think work for your company. Do your values make the people you like working with thrive? Do they help weed out the folks you don’t enjoy working with? To have a solid company values list, your answer needs to be “yes” to both.
- Repeat. Keep repeating the exercise until your company values list comes together. Ask your leadership team to do the same and compare the similarities and differences between the qualities you see on your lists.
Once you have your list, the next step is to integrate your company core values into your everyday practices. Learn how we do that at Limeade in the 30-minute webinar below or in our recap blog post.
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