3 Tips To Scale and Grow Your Business (Part II): Core values

Core Values are integral to ensuring that as growth happens, the culture you’ve built at your business remains intact.

Core Values help your team by:

1. Creating clarity on how decisions get made
2. Indicating which behaviours are and are not acceptable
3. Providing alignment on recruiting new team members
4. Helping your leadership team identify rising stars

In Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, Core Values are identified as one of the factors that help companies make the leap from good to great performance.

After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years! That’s better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

Activity: The Mars Test (4 Hours)

Imagine…you are taking your company to a new planet. You can only bring your strongest team members to set it up.

Who would you take?

Identify the group as a small and strong sample of what embodies your company. This group are the people that ‘get it’.

Once you have your team built, have them work on the following questions for a half or full-day:

1. What core values do you bring to your work?
   • These are values you hold to be so fundamental that you would hold them regardless of whether or not they are rewarded.
2. How would you describe to your loved ones the core values you stand for?
3. If you awoke tomorrow morning with enough money to retire for the rest of your life, would you continue to hold on to these core values?
4. Would you want the organization to continue to hold these values, even if, at some point, one or more of them became a competitive disadvantage?
5. If you were to start a new organization tomorrow in a different line of work, what core values would you build into the new organization regardless of its activities?
6. Perhaps most importantly: Can you envision these values being as valid 100 years from now as they are today?

Heads up: This activity must have full support from senior leadership in your business. The results need to be taken into action once completed.

Use this worksheet resource for you and your team.

Here’s a video on creating mechanisms inside your company to bring your values to life:

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Rob is an action junkie at Intrigue. When he isn’t meeting with clients to create marketing campaigns to grow their business, he is meeting with Chuck Norris to find out how he became the king of action. Rob is part of the Young Professionals Network of Guelph and the Master Planning Steering Committee for the Guelph General Hospital. When Rob isn’t working, he works on finding new ways to catapult himself through the air.