Post X of the [ALIGNED] series: a blog series to help entrepreneurs create an aligned company and an aligned life.

By Mike Brcic,
Chief Explorer, Wayfinders

This is post 10 of the [ALIGNED] series, with tips, tools and wisdom to help you build an Aligned Company (resilient, self-managing, and purpose-driven) and Aligned Life (lived in line with your values, purpose and ideals).

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Guiding Principles: Lighthouses In The Fog

NOTE 1: I recommend you read the previous post, Get Vivid: Create Your Company Vision, first - if you haven’t yet done so. Or start with the Table of Contents to get some background on the [ALIGNED] series.

NOTE 2: The events described below happened during the tumultuous years of 2017 and 2018, when I was running my former company, Sacred Rides, a global adventure company operating high-end mountain bike adventures around the world. I sold that company in Feb. 2019 in order to focus my time on Wayfinders.

Spring 2018

With our Vivid Vision complete, I turned to another key aspect of our business foundation: our company’s core values.

We’d had these in place for years, since outlining them in 2014 with my previous sales director, but they hadn’t made a meaningful contribution to the company. Like many company’s core values, they made for nice wall decoration and little else. 

I wanted our core values to form the essence of the company, to dictate how the company and its staff acted; to be the foundation on which the company grew and operated. 

I revisited our core values, dusting them off from a seldom-used folder on my hard drive. As I read through the 8 core values, some resonated deeply and some… didn’t. 

The development of our core values had been a team exercise and as I reflected on them, I realized that asking for my team’s input had been misguided; this was my company and I needed it to reflect my values, and mine only. In my efforts to be a nice and accommodating employer, I’d allowed my employees in to a key part of the company that shouldn’t have been open to them. 

My team would come and go (indeed, the sales director who had contributed to the first iteration was already gone), but as long as I remained the owner the company should and would reflect my values. If those values resonated with my staff then I had the right team in place; if they didn’t - and members of the team disagreed or didn’t respect those values - then they weren’t right for the company. 

3 of the 8 core values we’d written didn’t feel resonant to me; I scrapped them and added 3 new ones that reflected the type of company I wanted to lead, such as “Be 100% accountable.”

The term core value itself didn’t feel resonant to me. Core value is a term that’s been bandied about the business world for decades, yet most company’s core values didn’t really seem to reflect the company’s true core (Exhibit A: Exxon’s core values of ‘Operational integrity’ and ‘Safety and security’).

I wanted our values to be visible to the world, and to guide everyday decision making.

To that end, I renamed them our Guiding Principles. I wanted them to be prominent and part of our regular team discussions and, most importantly, I wanted my staff to use them as a beacon when they were faced with important decisions.

With our new Guiding Principles in hand, I wanted to ensure that they didn’t sit on a wall and gather dust, especially since we had no walls to put them on (we were a fully-remote team by then). I wanted them to become an integral part of how we operate, and to shape the company I wanted us to become. 

I posted our new GPs in our One Page Strategic Plan (more on that in a later article - subscribe now to get notified when I release new posts).

We incorporated our GPs into our weekly huddles and our 2-week sprints: every 2 weeks we chose a new Guiding Principle to focus on, and I would encourage the team to put that principle into action. We then devoted 10 minutes of every weekly huddle to discussing and reviewing that principle.

For example, if we focused on our ’Take Risks’ principle, I would encourage the team to keep that principle in mind when making decisions over the coming 2 weeks, and we would then check in during our huddles: “Tell me about some risks you took this week.”

In my one-on-one meetings with the core team members, I would remind them frequently of our Guiding Principles. Often they would bring decisions to me, either ones that they had made or were wrestling with. I told them to use our GPS as a framework, and let them know that as long as they operated within our GPs they could do no wrong; a failure would simply be an opportunity for learning and as long as they didn’t betray our GPs then a failure was not really a failure. 

For instance, one of our GPs, as outlined above, was ‘Make decisions that make sense 100 years from now.’

I wanted our team to think long term - really long term - when making decisions, and not to sacrifice the long term health and sustainability of the company, or the communities we operate in, for short term gain. So if a staff member told me they had to, for instance, spend some money because it was a good decision in the long run, I would be OK with that, even if it hurt us in the short term.

Bit by bit, and week by week, as our Guiding Principles formed a part of our regular conversations, they became an integral part of how we operated, and they helped me feel good about the company we were building. Even though the walls often seemed to be crumbling around us, I knew the foundation was solid. 

And that walls can be rebuilt.

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PRESCRIPTION: GUIDING PRINCIPLES

Below are some guidelines for writing/developing great (and hence useful) Guiding Principles. Whether you’re developing your Guiding Principles for the first time, or revising and editing your existing ones, here are a few key things to keep in mind:

1. Keep them short: just a few words or a sentence. Resist the temptation to write an essay about each Guiding Principle, this will only serve to reduce their effectiveness. Take the time to distill the essence of each Guiding Principle to a few, powerful words. 

2. What do you believe in? Try framing your Guiding Principles as a belief statement by starting with ‘We believe…’, such as ‘We believe that the software industry needs more diversity.’  You can leave your statement as is or you can reframe it, such as ‘Workplace diversity is critical to success.’ 

3. Aim for 3 to 6 Guiding Principles, no more: More than 6 just gets tedious and confusing.

4. Take a Stand: Your Guiding Principles should reflect your core beliefs. They should be a little risky and should be written in a way that will cause some people to disagree, or even take outright offence. This is the way to write powerful Guiding Principles - now they are principles that guide actual behaviour.

For instance, one of Sacred Rides’ GPs was ’Take risks and avoid the status quo’. I wanted my team to take chances and avoid playing it safe; some people disagree that this is a smart way to live life, but these are not the people I wanted working for me. 

So, for the example given above in #2, ‘Workplace diversity is critical to success’ is more powerful than a statement such as ‘Workplace diversity matters.’ The former establishes diversity as a critical element and holds you accountable, whereas the latter statement is more of a ‘diversity is nice’ statement that you may or may not live up to (if you’re saying it’s critical, however, then your staff and stakeholders will hold you to it). 

Once you’ve written your Guiding Principles, let them sit for a few days. Come back to them and reread them. Do they still resonate? Is there something that doesn’t feel quite right? If needed, edit your Guiding Principles: rewrite them so the language resonates with you; take ones out that don’t feel right; add new ones that may have come to you in the previous few days.

Once you’ve arrived at a set of GPs that feel right (and they should feel really right), share them with your staff. You can ask them for their feedback, but don’t change them based on what they say – these are your Guiding Principles and they reflect the company you want to create.

Let them know that you expect the GPs to guide their behaviour and that they should use the Principles when confronted with decisions.

Here are some ideas for making your GPs come alive:

1. Post them around your office. We created a poster for each Guiding Principle, with a beautiful photo in the background from one of our trips. If you work remotely and use a tool like Slack to stay connected, post (or have a staff member post) a different GP at the start of each day or week.

2. Choose a GP to focus on during each two-week Execution sprint (more on that in a later post). Set aside 10 minutes during your weekly huddle to talk about that GP, what it means to each person, and how each person incorporated that into their work over the previous two weeks. Ask them for specifics on how they used GPs when confronted with decisions.

3. Post them prominently on your website and promotional materials. People love to do business with companies whose values align with their own.

4.     Do a staff GP assessment every quarter. Here’s that that looks like:
For each team member (or your core team if you have a large staff), rank them on how well they lived each of the GPs. At Sacred Rides we did a simple +, -, +/- assessment: we took turns putting staff members in the ‘hot seat’, and each staff member ranked them on how well they exemplified each GP.

If they did a great job of living and exemplifying that GP, then they got a +. If they did a poor job, they got a -. If they did a passing job they got a +/-. Then we totalled up the scores, with 1 for each +, -1 for each – given, and 0 for each +/- (sort of like a Net Promoter Score).

Each staff member will then get a total score for each GP, which gives them powerful feedback on how they show up at work and how well they’re living the company values. For instance, if one of your GPs is ‘Take Risks’ (or something to that effect), and they are scoring low, then you may want to have a conversation with them about how they can adopt a more risk-taking approach at work (if this is indeed an important value to you). If they consistently score low on 1 or more GPs then you need to consider if they’re a good fit for the company.

NOTE: the idea of staff ranking each other is generally a foreign and uncomfortable concept for most people at first. This exercise, however, can be quite powerful and it’s not nearly as uncomfortable as you might think. Over time your staff will likely embrace it and possibly even enjoy it.

If you have staff who don’t like the idea of being assessed on how well they live your Guiding Principles, you may want to consider if they’re a good fit for your company: if they’re uncomfortable with the exercise it’s probably because they don’t score well, and if they don’t score well then they are, as mentioned, a bad fit for your company. Keeping them on board out of loyalty or because you’re afraid to let people go will only bring your company down.

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