c-c-c-ore values📎

Before I stepped into the world of employer branding, I thought core values were a joke. Most companies I had worked for touted meaningless adjectives that weren’t supported by much.

Community. Where? Innovation? Must’ve missed that memo. Diversity. Come again?

It was through a handful of business books and a former senior leader (hi Amy!) that I was able to reframe core values from corporate faux-pas to understanding their role in building a company culture and its ecosystem. In other words, core values are guidelines on how to act behind closed doors. When you’re making decisions on behalf of the team, what are the intentions and motivations?

I also needed to think about how to creatively present these values. Writing them down was a good start, but how do we share them effectively? That's where branding comes in.

For beehiiv, it was relatively easy. Instead of looking at aspirational values and goals, I focused on how we operate. It's also worth mentioning that we updated our core values twice during my time here.

The first time we created them, we used the Traction framework. Similar to OKRs, Traction is an operating system designed to strengthen your business by integrating practical tools and processes to help you set a clear vision and establish goals. As part of the vision-making process, we were asked to create our core values. As a leadership team, we collaborated and settled on five values, stemming from ownership, collaboration, and, my personal favorite, navigating ego. A year later, with the help of our Fractional Chief People Officer (hello, Jacky!), we did some rebranding, zhushing up our core values to be more like principles that were memorable and less like a check-list of what an employee should be.

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Our Core Values:

Bias towards action: Our first impulse is to act. We don’t get bogged down in unnecessary processes or bullsh**t. Perfection is the enemy of progress.

Ownership mentality: This company is ours. We go the extra mile because that’s what owners do. Every day, people step up to take on tasks outside of their responsibilities and do whatever it takes for us to succeed.

Building is in our DNA: We are obsessed with improving every aspect of our platform (and ourselves). Whether it’s our product, support, or partnerships, we never stop working to improve it.

We answer to our users: Nothing matters more than serving our users. If our users fail, we fail.

Ego comes second, but winning comes first: We put our egos aside to work collaboratively and build something special. It doesn't matter who's idea or who's vision, we're here to create the best outcome. We're here to win.

If you’d believe it, the first reiteration of these values were actually phrases that I pulled from Tyler’s newsletter, Big Desk Energy. I didn’t tell Tyler that they were his, and, to no one’s surprise, he loved them. But, with the help of our Creative Director, Blake, he shaped that BDE energy into something far more SFW with some spice.

I'm really happy with where we landed on these. Across people operations programming, you'll find that everything we do is aligned with these core values. When we talk about performance, these values are part of the conversation. I introduce these values in the first session, and they re-emerge throughout your time here. They have meaning and feel congruent to who we are as a company. As a People Ops person, it becomes a great anchor to build programming around that feels authentic.

So, to recap:

Core values can mean more than fluffy words – they can be guidelines and anchors to build your company around
If you need inspiration, copy and paste phrases from your boss’ newsletter then have the creative director rewrite them