How do I work out what my business values are?

I understand that having a set of values for you business is important, but how do you actually work out what your values are?

Last week I wrote about how important it is for a business to have a set of values – to have the character of the business defined and articulated. But how do you actually do it?

The guru Jim Collins wrote at length about this, advocating the use of a “Mars Group”. Essentially he suggests that the management team imagine that they can send just seven people to Mars to recreate the best attributes of their business on that planet. Once the management team have decided who to send they get this group (the so-called Mars group) to set about articulating the values of the business; and it works because in all likelihood they are the very values that this group of individuals all embody.

This is all very well if you have a large mature business, but what if you are younger or smaller?

A small or young business tends to take its personality from its founders so an alternative is to look at what the values of the founders are. A neat way to do this is for the founder to reflect on six business successes and business failures over the last few years and ask: “Why did the business successes feel so good?” and “Why did the business failures feel so bad?” The answers will reveal themes that are at the core of the character of the founder and can then be reframed as values.

A couple of examples may help this make sense. I read a while ago that one of the values of Business Chicks is “Pragmatic not Dramatic” and that it came to the fore when the keynote speaker for a breakfast (attendance around 1,000 people) had to pull out at the very last minute.

In line with their value, Emma Isaacs and her team didn’t flap; they just calmly set about solving it. Now imagine that Business Chicks hadn’t already had that as one of their values but that the same issue had arisen and been solved in the same way. Emma could have reflected back on that time as one of the key successes and in answering, “Why did it feel good?” she would have said “Because we didn’t make it into a drama, we just got on and solved it.”

On the other hand failures are revealing too. Years ago when I was very green I remember being very short staffed and I hired someone who I wasn’t really sure about but at the time I thought that having anybody was better than nobody at all. How wrong I was! On reflection I chalked it up as a huge failure and resolved from then on only to ever hire the best.

One of the other reasons I so love this as a way of finding your values is that not only does it get you to the heart of what you really believe in, it helps you to articulate it in an every day voice which everyone can action. So instead of the ubiquitous “excellent customer service” you might get “delivering WOW”, and it’s then just a small step to flesh out what you mean by “wow”.

Of course, once you have your business values in place you have to make sure that everyone actually lives them, but I’ll save that for next week.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).