Founder Handbook: Drive Employee Engagement Through Core Values

Defining your core values is more than a branding exercise—it’s a strategic discipline that shapes your company’s DNA. For professional services firms, where people are the product, clear and meaningful core values can boost employee engagement, operational excellence, and profitability.

Why Define Your Core Values?

Core values serve as a compass for your team, guiding decisions and fostering collaboration.

• Boost Engagement: Values humanize your company, connecting and motivating employees.
• Attract Talent: People drawn to your values are more likely to thrive and stay engaged.
• Create Consistency: In professional services, an engaged workforce delivers exceptional client outcomes.

How to Define Your Core Values

Creating core values isn’t easy, but with the right process, it becomes achievable and rewarding.

Ideation

Defining values alone is isolating. Collaborate with your leadership team for clarity and speed.

1. Focus on Clone-Worthy Colleagues: Identify the traits of colleagues you’d want to “clone”—not just your favorites.
2. Use the People Analyzer Framework: Borrowed from Traction by Gino Wickman, this method takes a data-driven approach to distill attributes into core values.
3. Leverage AI Tools (Cautiously): Tools like ChatGPT can help with wording but ensure the result reflects your culture authentically.
4. Keep It Simple: Aim for three to five values for clarity and recall.

Testing

Before finalizing, test your values to ensure they work in practice.

1. Checklist for Effectiveness:
   • Do they attract the right employees and repel the wrong ones?
   • Are they memorable and easy to understand?
   • Can they guide coaching, evaluations, and customer interactions?
   • Are they truly unique to your business?
2. Spot Check with the Team: Conduct a People Analyzer exercise with your leadership team to assess alignment. Use a “thumbs up, down, or sideways” roman vote for each value across team members.
3. Establish a Baseline: Develop a “minimum bar” for value alignment. This common language aids consistent feedback and hiring decisions.

Validation

Seek employee feedback to refine your values.

• Conduct Interviews: Choose employees who’ll provide honest input. Avoid simple “yes/no” questions; ask open-ended ones like:
  • How do these values make you feel?
  • Who embodies these values in our company?
  • Can you recall the values after a 20-minute conversation?

Communication and Rollout

Introduce your core values with intentionality and care.

1. Celebrate the Launch: Host an event (preferably in person) to unveil the values. Share personal stories or highlight behaviors that exemplify them.
2. Provide Context: Use examples or games (e.g., trivia) to make values relatable and memorable.
3. Demonstrate Commitment: Show how the values will inform hiring, coaching, and leadership decisions. Train managers and interviewers to incorporate them into daily practices.

Adoption and Maintenance

Core values need constant reinforcement to remain impactful.

1. Lead by Example: Use values to guide leadership decisions and encourage team accountability.
2. Embed Values in Culture:
   • Evaluate candidates during interviews based on alignment with values.
   • Recognize employees who embody the values during meetings or Slack shoutouts.
   • Tie values to performance reviews and compensation discussions.
3. Share Stories: Highlight examples where values influenced difficult decisions to reinforce their importance.

Modifying

Core values may evolve, but changes must be deliberate and thoughtful.

1. Assess Relevance: Regularly evaluate if the values still energize and align with your team.
2. Adopt Gradual Changes: Add new values only when clear patterns emerge. For instance, years after our initial rollout, we added “Curiosity” as a fourth value after noticing its significance among top performers.

What Next?

Once you’ve established your core values, consider extending them to your clients. For professional services firms, working with value-aligned clients fosters long-term success and positive energy in engagements.

Explore how principles—actionable steps tied to your values—can further operationalize your culture.

Getting Started

Operationalizing core values was one of the most impactful decisions we made at Integral. Here are some resources to help you get started:

• People Analyzer by EOS Worldwide
• Traction by Gino Wickman (the EOS book)
• Advantage by Patrick Lencioni
• Integral’s Core Values
• My Boutique podcast where Greg Alexander interviews me, and shares insights one how culture is a strategic differentiator. 
• Collective54: I often would discuss culture, core values, and being intentional about our talent and operations with fellow founders at Collective54. Follow the link to talk to one of their teammates to learn more.
• Netlfix’ culture deck
• Amazon’s leadership principles

If you’d like to discuss how core values can enhance engagement and culture in your organization, connect with me on LinkedIn.