How to Create Team Values that Drive Performance
How well your team works together and delivers underlies your success as a leader. Here's how to use Values conversations as a way to improve performance and cohesion.
👋 Hi! I'm Yue. Chief Product Officer turned Career Coach. My personal mission is to help women and minorities in mid-level roles break through to the C-suite. Each week I tackle topics like building presence and power, navigating conflicts and escalations, and charting your path to promotion.
For many companies today, especially in technology, the most valuable asset is human capital — the people. The competitive edge is who is at the company and how they work together. Culture, more than skillset, seniority, or years of experience, is the distinguishing characteristic of a high-performing team. It’s been said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. This holds regardless of team size, function, or industry.
Therefore, as a leader, one of the biggest determinants of your success is your team’s culture and values. Whether you are a PM leading a 10-person pod of engineers / PMs / designers, a VP managing managers and directors, or a CEO running an entire organization, creating and maintaining a high-performance culture is critical to your success as a leader.
But how to build and evolve culture?
Values Underpin Culture
Culture is defined as “the ideas, customs, and social behavior of a particular people or society.” When you want to change something about how your team collaborates, how quickly they deliver, or the quality of the work, you are looking to change the culture. But culture is such a fluffy thing — how do you wrap your arms around it and make it more concrete? One of the best ways I’ve found is by setting values. Here’s why.
Values set principles and standards for a group of people. They clearly define what is important for the group. When a group of people clearly understand what is important and what the standards are, they naturally adjust their mindset and behavior to align.
If your team values Craft, you will have many design reviews making a pixel-perfect product (e.g. Instagram). If your team values frugality, you’ll get repurposed doors for a desk (e.g. Amazon). If your team values “a star in every role”, the focus will be on performance, not years at the company or title (e.g. Netflix).
Values are a tangible, practical articulation of culture — one that you can wrap your arms around, talk about, and adopt into daily work. Whether you’re leading a small team, a 100+ person organization, or a 10,000+ person company, the way to create and instill a shared set of values is similar.
How to Run a Values Exercise
Okay, so you think you might need some values. Where to start? Depending on your seniority and role, you might be thinking about team values, function values (e.g. design values or product values), or company values. It doesn’t matter at what level, the process is mostly the same.
Step 1: Understand your current values
First, do some first-person research on current values. If there is a set of values in place, start there. If not, it’s okay to start from scratch. Grab coffee with some critical people on the team and seek to understand:
How would you describe how we work? What’s important to consider? When it gets close to deadlines, what types of work get priority? Why do you think this is?
How does your team do prioritization? Who’s making the decision and how? Are they using data or research or highest title? What do you think of this approach? How do you wish it may be different?
What are some aspects of work or ways of work you wish the team prioritized more? Higher quality? Higher sense of urgency? More direct conversations?
Step 2: Make wish lists
Here’s the fun part. Make a list of all the values you wish your team embodied. Ask your team members to do the same. You can also make list of values you don’t want to embody — this is particularly power for those looking to change culture.
For inspiration, check out these examples (you’ll notice that engineering teams are kinda good at this).
Product Values at Fuzzy (based on Instagram’s internal product values)
Step 3: Do a Values Brainstorming Session
After you’ve got your list, get a Values brainstorm session together. Send out a Values Brainstorming Board on your favorite whiteboarding tool (e.g. Miro, Figjam) to collect ideas in advance. Do some grouping into themes before the session, then hop on a live session to discuss what came up top of mind, why people gravitate towards certain ones, what we don’t want to be, and more. It’s important to set expectations that this is a brainstorming conversation where shooting down ideas and opinions will not be tolerated. Close the session with a poll sync & async: What are your top 3 and why?
If you’re in a large organization, or if it turns out that people have a lot of say on the top, consider repeating the exercise a few times or extending the time. The conversation and dialogue at the early stages are critical to the adoption of the new values down the line. You start with getting buy-in for the final product now. Anyone can put a set of words on paper — the power of the exercise is in getting it ingrained and adopted by those that you work with.
Step 4: Get it down to 3 core values
Aim to cut down the list to 3 core values (and you’ll probably end up with 5 to 6). This is the hard part. Do you want to be fast and high quality? collaborative and direct? Is it more important to prioritize accountability or collaboration values?
Making choices based on what is right for your team, organization or company at the time is where leadership comes in. Many data oriented leaders find this part very difficult — because it is subjective and requires good judgment. Based on the people you have on the team, the market conditions your company is in, and the type of work to be done, the values that works best vary.
Fortunately, when you look at the top companies, you find common themes in the values they uphold. These serve as good starting points for what you may want to prioritize for your list:
Accountability: These values speak to ownership and working within or outside of job descriptions or levels of authority. Should they feel comfortable or even encouraged to pursue an idea or perspective regardless of title or role (and risk stepping on toes)?
Examples: Fix problems, even when they’re not yours (Asana); Be a Cereal Entrepreneur (Airbnb); Never say “that’s not my job.” (Amazon); Own it (Thumbtack)
Prioritization: These values describe how the team agrees on what’s important to work on. Are you data-driven? research and customer first? revenue first? These values are often used to counter strong implicit forces in the organization or market (e.g. strong focus on revenue or profitability)
Examples: Articulate your mental model (Asana); Always start with a real-world need (Fuzzy); Lead with Purpose (Thumbtack); Customer Obsession: start with the customer and work backwards (Amazon)
Collaboration Style: This speaks to how people work. They are often used to promote certain behavior from leaders and counterbalance the natural human inclination to simply follow authority.
Examples: Trust is earned not given (Amazon); People over Process (Netflix); Disagree and Commit (Amazon, Meta, Google); Say what you mean ( Thumbtack); Don’t use tests as an excuse to not finish thinking (Fuzzy)
How We Build: This value talks about how the team works. Do you prioritize detail? speed? simplificity?
Examples: Strive for Simplicity (Asana); Move Fast & Break Things (Facebook); Bias for Action (Amazon); Do a few things extremely well (Fuzzy, and many many startups); Sweat the details (Instagram); Our metrics are not our goals (Fuzzy)
Impact: This value is fairly common in technology companies looking to encourage risk-taking, again to counterbalance the natural inclination to primarily work on more known ideas.
Examples: Uncomfortably Exciting (Netflix); Think Big (Amazon);
Belonging: This value is important for employees to feel a sense of belonging. It is particularly important to call out for places where there’s in-fighting, passive-aggressive behavior, or blaming of others.
Examples: Build Communities of Interest (Spotify); Be a Host: open, caring, and encouraging (Airbnb); Choose teamwork: help each other achieve more (Thumbtack).
Your company’s unique culture: Finally, don’t forget to consider what makes your team or company special and is a competitive advantage that you want to hold on to. This is often a “secret ingredient” to your success.
Examples: Follow our community's lead (Instagram); Feel Free to Be Playful (Spotify); Frugality (Amazon); Be better, not just different (Fuzzy)
You’ll notice that even when you look at themes, there are more than 3. The powerful part of this exercise is the prioritization. As a leader, it’s difficult to expect your team to do 10 things really well at the same time (yes, Do A Few Things Well a value I always propose for my teams). And so, you’ll need to choose — what are the aspects of working that you think will make the most positive impact or most desperately need to be changed?
Step 5: Get Feedback
Once you have a draft of values, it’s time to socialize them across the team, organization, or company. Don’t wait till you think it’s perfect — it never will be. There will always be disagreement or someone who wants to see something higher. The critical aspect of adoption is that people feel like their opinions are heard, and they see the logic and reasoning behind the ones that were chosen.
Plan on this taking at least a few weeks. Share the values as you have them and get feedback. Ask your critical and influential teammates, peers, and leaders: what do you think? which ones resonate most with you? What would you change and why? Then, follow up with the final list and explain the logic of the final list. Why are these the most important values? What are you hoping to accomplish? What are you concerned about? Telling the full story gives powerful context and helps it stick in people’s minds.
Step 6: Adoption
Once you have a finalized set, it’s time to copy-edit and make the pithy. Coming up with memorable phases is important for adoption, and an easy-to-find infographic helps too. Get help from Chat-GPT, your friend the copywriter, and your brand team (if you have one!). You’ll see from above that most larger companies proudly showcase their values on the careers or culture page and talk about them in podcasts, interviews, etc.
Get adoption from the leaders and executives first. The more senior the executive, the better. Ask them to use the specific phrases of their favorite ones in their everyday speech. If this is a company-level effort, have each C-level executive be accountable for talking about and role-modeling 1 (or 2) of them.
Then, scale. Set up lunch & learns and all-hands sessions, get some SWAG with the values, and put up posters around the office or your team seating area. Have individuals write them down on post-its and stick them to their monitors. Plan a fun scavenger hunt related to the values. Create #hashtags and use them as a framework for giving praise and sharing accomplishments. Use it yourself in conversations — regularly refer back to them when making decisions or difficult choices.
Step 7: Revisit and Iterate
Remember that values can and should evolve over time. A startup that is trying to survive will have a different set of values from a large mature company. A team that is tasked with a new product launch will need different values from a team that’s trying to turnaround an existing declining business. Revisiting the values at least annually is a good cadence to keep them fresh, relevant, and top-of-mind. Even if the final list remains the same, going through the exercise allows for important dialogue around why these are the values and what they mean, for people to re-remember what they are, and for fun, celebratory moments and maybe some new SWAG.
That’s all folks. See you next week at 3:14pm!
Yue
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