While your company values should be core to who you are, it's important to take time to revisit them every couple of years. What happens internally (and externally) can influence how you need to refresh and evolve your values to better reflect who you are and what you stand for today.

At Brilliant Ink, it’s been an eventful and introspective several months here. We celebrated 10 years in business, launched our new (and oh so awesome!) brand, and most recently, kicked the tires on our values to see what, if anything, had changed as our team evolved over the years.

If you're in the same boat, here are 3 steps you can take to refresh your core values:

1. brainstorm what you value

Armed with post-it notes and ideas, our team put time on the clock and began writing down what we value – as professionals, as a team, as people. Once the writing stopped, we grouped our notes into themes and discovered that yes, it was indeed time to refresh our values.

While the sentiment behind the themes wasn’t drastically different, there was a newfound frankness that wasn’t there before. The words were simple, honest, and refreshing.  

2. identify behaviors that support your values

As a next step, we activated a core working team to take the values from themes to final form, and assign behaviors to help us live our values every day.

As the incredibly wise Brené Brown said, “If you’re not going to take the time to translate values from ideals to behaviors—if you’re not going to teach people the skills they need to show up in a way that’s aligned with those values and then create a culture in which you hold one another accountable for staying aligned with the values—it’s better not to profess any values at all. They become a joke. A cat poster. Total BS.”

‍Preach, Brené.

Companies that assign values but don’t help their employees understand how to put those values into practice are doing their culture a giant disservice. When specific behaviors are connected to company values, employees can easily understand what’s expected, encouraged and rewarded.

For the company’s sake, it provides a road map for ongoing performance management, offers guidance for determining culture add when hiring, and lends to productive and consistent decision-making across the business.  

3. socialize and gut-check your values

With our core working team driving the process, we iterated, solicited input from the entire team, and landed on values and behaviors that felt true to us. They illustrate what we believe and how we operate – with each other, our clients and ourselves.  

LOOKING TO CREATE OR REFRESH YOUR COMPANY VALUES?

Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead site is a great place to start the process and we have some additional blogs and resources on this topic. If you need additional support with leading working sessions, interviewing your employees and crafting your values, we're here to help!

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