At some point in your career you may end up working for a company that was established a long time ago. You show up and on day 1 there’s a written process for everything and you function like a cog in the machine. Any question you have about how to do a task can be answered in some document somewhere. But if you ask anyone why a certain task is done that way, nobody can say. This is a company that’s lost touch with its values.

Is your company in touch with its values?

If you want to know if the company you work at is in touch with its values, it should be pretty easy to find out. Here’s a few questions you can ask

• Do you know what your company values are?
• Do you make decisions in uncertain environments based on company values?
• Do your teammates?
• Does your boss?
• Does senior leadership?

How do you set company values?

At our startup, we set company values very early on. We had a pile of sticky notes in the office where people could write values that defined our company or values we aspired to. It was just a free for all for a week. By the end we had around 30 potential company values. The senior leadership team took this list and whittled it down to 5 and presented them at the next company-wide meeting.

When choosing company values, make sure they actually align with what you want to achieve. A company value should be something you believe so strongly, you’d be willing to lose money on that decision. For example, if one of the company values is work-life balance, you wouldn’t have mandatory overtime to complete a project. As a leader, violating the company values could seriously erode trust with your direct reports, and also your customers.

Values exist to guide our decisions in the absence of process

Working in startups, you have to get uncomfortable with uncertainty. That’s probably true in any business, but I’ll stick with what I know. A few years ago a group of summer students were working on a big project. After a few days, they set up a meeting with our team to ask some questions. They walked us through the way they thought about the problem, the process they had built, and how they were measuring progress. After their presentation, one of the students said “…but we’re not always finding the answer we need. Are we doing this right?”

I said to the student “I’m sorry to say this, but you’re doing everything right.”

I think about that situation fairly often. There’s so many times we have to deal with uncertainty in new projects, and we don’t have a written process for something we’re just learning. So how do we make decisions?

Look to your company values for guidance. If your company values inclusion, make a decision that will have the least impact on marginalized populations. If your company values honesty and teamwork, have a discussion with your team to share ideas on how best to proceed. If your company values curiosity, ask questions and do more research. Of course, run your proposed decisions by your boss until you get a good sense of what they see as the right course of action, remember Active Commitment.