Issue 17: How to Promote & Strengthen Company Values as a Chief of Staff
The "C" in CoS stands for culture. Company values are a key part of enforcing culture in any organization.
Welcome back, aspiring and current Chiefs of Staff!
This week's issue is brought to you by The Gathering Effect. The Gathering Effect is a culture and employee experience consultancy that helps business leaders boost motivation, performance, and engagement for the long term.
The Gathering Effect has worked with global organizations including Crowdstrike, LaunchDarkly, and Coinbase to build and strengthen their culture through Values refinement and activation, manager and leadership development, communication strategy, onboarding, offsite design and facilitation, and more.
Check out The Gathering Effect's Ultimate Checklist for Operationalizing Your Company Values and download a free values checklist.
*Interested in sponsoring a future issue of Ask a Chief of Staff, hit reply!
In this week’s issue, we’re featuring Lindsey Caplan, the Founder and Lead Consultant at The Gathering Effect.
What can you do as a Chief of Staff to promote and strengthen your company’s values?
According to recent research from LinkedIn, 85% of Gen Z professionals in the U.S. who work for a company with shared values say they frequently go above and beyond in their job. Moreover, almost 90% of people in the U.S. say working for a company committed to the values they believe in is important and 71% say this is true even in an uncertain economy. It’s clear that values are a huge factor in workplace happiness and motivation.
As a Chief of Staff, you play a crucial role in promoting and strengthening your company's values and culture. In today’s issue, we’ll be covering ✋🏼 ways a Chief of Staff can better uphold an organization’s culture and values:
1️⃣ Clearly define your company values: Take a look at any company’s values and chances are, you might see a lot of commonalities: “ownership,” “customer obsession,” “bias towards action.” But what do these phrases look like in practice?
Research professor and author Brené Brown found that only 10% of organizations operationalize their values into teachable and observable behaviors. Clear definitions and behaviors help employees know what's expected, encouraged, and rewarded in your organization. They drive productive decision-making and help companies move faster, together.
Without clear definitions, these words can mean something different to every employee, making alignment more challenging. Ensure that each of your values has:
A clear why: how does this value connect to your business strategy?
A set of 2-4 observable behaviors: for example, “We break big milestones into small pieces so we can learn and move faster”
Behaviors that are observable, measurable, and something every employee can do: not unlike SMART goals
Chiefs of Staff are uniquely positioned see how values are being embraced because of their ability to flip between seeing the organization at the 10,000 foot view and being in the weeds. This is an optimal opportunity for a Chief of Staff to create value by going on a listening tour to ask how employees are interpreting company values. You can then create a Values Playbook that clearly demonstrates how employees are putting them into practice. It’s a great chance to shoutout those who are embodying the values and have a gold standard for new employees to aspire and work towards.
2️⃣ Increase values awareness through education and clear communication: Value definition is often the part we spend the most amount of time on. There are countless workshops you can run with your team to establish and define values (EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE). But it's all too easy to forget or rush what's often the most important component: how we help employees act and behave in a consistent, values driven way to move our business forward. This starts with clear communication.
“Values confusion,” where there is not a clear, agreed upon definition of what values are and how they are put into practice, and its associated negative effects come from not clearly articulating what good looks like or what too much (and what an edge case) of a value is. For example, "What is good ownership in a meeting vs. too much ownership?" Ensure that your employee communication leaves little room for doubt about exactly what is expected in your organization. Every employee should be able to confidently agree with the following phrases:
We know what values are for
We know what our values are
We know what “good” looks like in each value
We know the edge cases of each value
Ensuring that “value communication” happens early and often will help employees embody these values from Day 1. You can incorporate value communication in the interview process, onboarding, and all hands cadences, just to name a few areas. Values can even be tied to stock, bonuses, and raises.
3️⃣ Drive personal connection to your values via specificity: This HBR article says it all too well: for values to be effective they need to mean something. Instead of keeping your company values compartmentalized from what your employees are passionate and excited by, find ways to tie in personal experience to work place values as well.
Encourage teammates to look internally at the values that they live and abide by and see how they might line up with your organization’s values. One particular example I like is Ness’ Core Values - take note at how there’s a top line value followed by a quick sentence that further clarifies and specifies the expected actions:
Interested candidates might see themselves reflected in these values. “Embrace Your Mythical Creature” may speak to those who have always felt as though their ways of approaching problems might be unconventional, but here, those perspectives are valued. If your values speak to your teammates personally, they’ll be much more likely to continue to embrace and embody those values in their day to days.
4️⃣ Create a values activation plan: It is said humans don’t resist change. They resist being changed. Change management, after all, is a core pillar of any Chief of Staff job description. The way we communicate change affects our employee’s motivation to join us in the change we seek.
Establish a “values activation” cadence that works for you and your team: whether it’s revisiting your values yearly, re-announcing them at all hands or QBRs, or gathering “values shown” stories from your employees, it’s important to keep in mind that activating your values is just like activating any other initiative at your company: it should be well timed and announced, have a timeline for action, have actionable next steps, and supported with follow through.
Culture Amp, a leader in employee engagement and experience, structured their value reactivation in 4 steps:
Run "Values in Action" workshops: they took each one of their core values (they have 3) and brought them to employees to discuss what the meaning, relevance, and mutuality of each of these values were.
Create a summary of the workshop outputs (including recordings of individual values stories) from four global locations and share them at their next company All-Hands.
Make the summaries and story recordings available to everyone at Culture Amp.
Use values summaries as the basis for the language teammates use both internally and externally.
Bring values into everyday behavior by showcasing examples of employees who were exemplifying these values through their actions and shouting them out consistently.
5️⃣ Reinforce values daily: Just as plants need certain conditions to thrive, values too need specialized environments to keep them upheld and strong. If your values are not embedded and reinforced in every part of your business, HR, and most of all your leadership practices, then your values are in danger of not being successful and sustaining.
Here’s a short list of places you can embed values reinforcement:
✅ Hiring practices and interview processes
✅ Onboarding
✅ Feedback, promotions, and performance reviews
✅ Communication practices (Town Halls, All Hands, QBRs, off sites, etc.)
✅ External communications (blog posts, newsletters, investor updates, etc.)
✅ Leadership and management training
✅ Leadership behavior
Strong values are an opportunity for employers to differentiate themselves and drive connections with their team. By properly activating your values, you can create a workplace culture that inspires and motivates your employees to do their best work.
Hope you’ve enjoyed the latest issue of this newsletter and we’re looking to you for future newsletter topics! If you have any questions around being a Chief of Staff, tactical takeaways that you can apply, or other curiosities about the Chief of Staff role, submit a question below and we’ll answer it in a future newsletter issue:
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Additional Chief of Staff Related Reads:
6 Things I’ve Learned As A Chief Of Staff
How to Improve Company Culture: A Step-by-Step Guide
Comms Strategy and Tactics for Startups
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👋🏼 Until the next issue,
Clara
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