How To Build Core Values That Mean Something

The Dolly Parton approach to defining your culture

One of my favorite business quotes comes from an unlikely source: Dolly Parton.

Yes, that Dolly Parton. Here’s her quote:

“Find out who you are and then do it on purpose.”

First of all, if you’re looking for a recipe for living an authentic life… that’s it.

But that single sentence might also be the best advice there is for building a strong business, strategy, and culture.

Most businesses who decide to work on their culture overcomplicate things. They start by measuring eNPS and comparing their data to benchmarks, or assembling “culture committees” - handpicked (or volunteer) employees who discuss the company’s culture and attempt to wordsmith what working inside the business feels (or should feel) like.

But in my opinion, starting with measurement or big-group discussion is the wrong way to work on your culture. This kind of work has to be done by the CEO and their leadership team. And it has to begin by talking about what your best people are already doing.

How to Define Your Culture

The first step to building a strong culture is examining what’s already great about your team. Using Dolly’s words, you need to take stock of “who you are” right now when you’re at your best. And to do that, you need to talk about your best people, how they behave, and how that behavior positively impacts the business.

When we work with our portfolio’s leadership teams, we do this using an exercise our friends at The Table Group call “Rockstars and Misfits.” [1]

We start by asking the team to make a list of the best people in the organization. The high-performers. The culture carriers. The people that, if we could, we would happily clone. Then we break down what makes those people so great. We talk about why they stand out, how they approach their work, and how they treat their customers and teammates. We get specific about how they show up. And we write those qualities down.

Then, we ask the team to create a list of their Misfits. Misfits aren’t necessarily low performers. We’ve put plenty of people on the Misfit list who hit their quota, know their product, and always hit their deadlines. But the folks who end up on the Misfit list have something in common: they hold the team back. They create conflict. They frustrate. They’re complicators, not simplifiers.

Creating the Misfit list is the most interesting part of this work. Like writing a guide to working with you, it’s a trust-building exercise in disguise. The key here is asking people to open up. We don’t just ask leaders for people from their own teams. In fact, we encourage them to include names from other parts of the organization as they build the misfit list. This creates an opportunity for the team to demonstrate vulnerability and accountability by accepting feedback on their teams (and indirectly, about their leadership) in a safe, structured, mutually supportive setting. More importantly, the misfit list gives you a cultural dark side to consider. It creates some helpful honesty about what your team can look like when you’re at your worst. (Talking about that dark side might feel uncomfortable, it is the mark of a high-performing team. More on that here.)

As a final step, we synthesize the two lists, Rockstars and Misfits, into the team’s core values, which I define as “the qualities and behaviors that your very best people embody most of the time.”

That’s what core values should be. They’re not aspirational phrases that look or sound good. They’re not who you want to grow up to be someday. They are what you are already like when you’re at your best.

An example list of the “Rockstar and Misfits” qualities from a recent leadership offsite  (with actual  names removed on both sides of the page). The core values we aligned on are in the colored boxes.

Once the team has identified their core values, we immediately start to weave them into how the company makes its people decisions. A great starter checklist for “how to it on purpose” comes from Elad Gil’s fantastic High Growth Handbook:

1. “Have strong hiring filters in place. Explicitly filter for people with common values. You need to be careful that this does not act as a mechanism to inadvertently filter out diverse populations. You can have both a common sense of purpose and a diverse employee base at the same time.

2. Constantly emphasize values day-to-day. Repeat them until you are blue in the face. The second you are really sick of saying the same thing over and over, you will find people have started repeating it back to you.

3. Reward people based on performance as well as culture. People should be rewarded (with promotions, financially, etc.) for both productivity and for living the company’s values.

4. Get rid of bad culture fits quickly. Fire bad culture fits even faster than you fire low performers.”

Pretty practical, huh? All you have to do is figure out what your best people are like, and then recruit, remind, develop, and reward everybody else with those “rockstar” qualities in mind. That’s what doing it on purpose means. It’s simply making people decisions using the composite of your best people as the standard.

Final Thoughts

Working on your culture?

Good. Remember Dolly Parton’s advice.

First, find out who you are.

Then do it on purpose.

That’s how you build a culture worth working in  - and a company worth working for.

[1] For more on Rockstars and Misfits (and a start-to-finish summary of the leadership alignment approach I use with my portfolio companies), pick up The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. It’s one of my most-gifted books.