This page is a work in progress, part of a multi-year effort to capture and share learnings, frameworks, tools, and processes to run organizations. See Running Organizations for more.

Values are deeply-held beliefs that we prioritize. Core values in an organization are the most deeply-held beliefs that the organization prioritizes.

The right amount of Core Values is anywhere between 3-7. Any more than that, and you've put your ability to operate by them in jeopardy. Any less than three Core Values, and you're underthinking what's important.

At an individual level, human values are at the core of our individuality as people and core to our process of making meaning in our lives. The traditional view of success and failure often comes down to what we do, and Core Values explain how we do it. At the end of life, I believe that how we did it matters more than what we did.

Core Values, the "how," explain how decisions will come to be in an organization. In a growing organization, Core Values empower everyone in the organization to confidently make decisions. When we get clear on the "how," everyone can make decisions confidently, organizations move more quickly, and people are free from micro-management.

Once you've established Core Values, they become a common rubric for how people's actions can be judged. Beyond making acceptable and unacceptable behaviors clear to everyone, they level the playing field. Just as management can use Core Values to hold staff accountable for doing things the right way, staff can call out the CEO and Leadership Team on its behaviors and decisions, too.

In small teams, having the founder(s) create a Core Values document helps guide early organizational culture as it eases decision-making and helps in hiring and firing decisions.

As the organization grows, those values come to shape the culture. But, every new hire shapes the culture as well. When you hit the ~ 20-30 employee mark, formalizing values really starts to matter, and the process becomes much more about listening than about enforcing.

The more mature the organization is, the more teamwork will be required in formulating Core Values. The founder and the leadership team are no longer in control of shaping - the organization has taken on a life of its own. Creating Core Values is a process of listening, advocating, and discovering.

You can't understand an organization's Core Values without understanding a single person's values. After all, organizations are collections of individuals. Understanding values is an inquiry process, not a creation process.

We all govern our lives by "rules" we've created or inherited along the way. Many of these rules are "below the surface." We operate by these below-the-surface rules often without knowing that that's what we're doing.

Dan Shipper breaks down how your rules are actually the way to understanding your values:

Tribal Leadership suggests asking open-ended questions, specifically "What are you proud of?" to get at what a person deems most important.

Brie Wolfson suggests journaling on your teachers, role models, mentors and villains and thinking about what they taught you to understand values.

Jim Collins uses a 45-minute meeting to work through Core Values. His full process is on his website here, but here's my summary of his process:

Assessing values against criteria is a great way to analyze whether a value just sounds nice or "seems right." Having individuals complete parts on their own helps avoid long, inefficient discussions.

Eliciting behaviors is a nice shortcut to getting to values. Scoring behaviors helps align a group without opening up an endless discussion.

In Managing For Happiness, Jurgen Appelo suggests a process in which the leadership team and the wider management group separately work on Core Values. He suggests using words from a pick list and using dot-voting to narrow the list.

Collecting stories will have other cultural value, and will get people contributing quickly. A big list of team values is so helpful, as sometimes it's hard to find the right words.

In The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, Patrick Lencioni details a process where the leadership team discusses employees who "best embody what is good about the firm."

This process is an easy way to get people to contribute quickly. It may be effective as an add-on to one of the other more detailed processes here.

Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, assembled a cross-functional group of a dozen employees to work on core values creation for the company.

CEO Tools 2.0 uses a group process and has values "compete" against one another in a tournament bracket.

Examples of that "tournament bracket" are here.

This is collaborative, and fun and can accommodate large groups in the creation of Core Values.

You can use phrases rather than just a single word to apply more detail to a given value. A complete phrase can also explain how that Core Value fits into your organizational context. You can use operating principles for the latter problem, but if you can give more clarity within the Value itself, why wouldn't you?

Values that parrot basic human decency aren't reliable guides for behavior in an organization. Words like "honesty" and "integrity" don't say a whole lot and therefore can't guide action. For specific behaviors, Operating Principles can help (we'll cover Operating Principles in the next section).

If you can't imagine operating by the inverse of the value, it's not a good Core Value. Taylor Pearson drives the point home in his article What Is Company Culture & Why Is Culture Important? by explaining that Enron's stated values were Respect, Integrity, Communication, and Excellence - wholly insufficient values for creating a healthy culture.

Surveying the entire staff sounds like a nice idea, but it's likely to be a waste of time. You have to balance the best of what the organization wants with what your Leadership Team will fully commit to. If Leaders don't commit 100% to live your Core Values, then they'll undermine your culture before you've committed those values to paper.

The critical challenge with core values is finding ways to keep them top-of-mind and to make them part of your day-to-day operations. core values should be present in every corner of your physical organization - the files you use, the software you log into, and the physical office space. They should also be highlighted on an ongoing basis as a part of your operating rhythm.

Have a graphic designer make them transmissible and available for many mediums. Find ways to integrate them into your core documentation:

One way to keep them in front of you is to plan to highlight one core value each month in your regular meetings, and train and reward on that value.

A value as simple as "autonomy" is chock-full of learnings; you could host a workshop on thinking independently, stages of adult development, etc. As you dive deep, you may find other ways to reinforce or turn that value into behavior and create operating principles to use going forward.

Getting values documented everywhere and highlighted in your operating rhythm is just the first step. Turning them into specific behaviors is how you truly integrate core values into the culture.

Build core values-related questions into each stage of your interview process. If your values are well-documented publicly, candidates should be familiar with them before they speak with you. Instead of asking directly about a person's values, craft behavioral questions to elicit responses that speak to your core values.

Ensure that your performance management system includes peer-based feedback on your core values.

Take the heat off of management by integrating core values into your peer recognition tools - Kudos, High-Fives, or otherwise. When your staff begins to celebrate and uphold your values for you, you've built a reinforcing loop.

You can also call out specific values-based peer recognition in weekly staff meetings.

Your core values are your heuristics for decision-making. Communicate in your decision-making documentation which core value you used in coming to a big decision.

You should also look for ways to tie new initiatives, new policies, and new products (and their announcements) back to your values.

You have to be willing to fire over core values. You have to be willing to be humbled by employees when you fail to live up to them.

Collect and tell stories about how your core values and how they played out in this past quarter or year in your Quarterly reviews and Annual reviews. You can use shorter stories in monthly or weekly meetings.

Core values should be revisited on a regular basis. Gathering feedback from employees using surveys or town hall meetings is a good step. Here are two ideas for revisiting and improving your core values over time:

There are tons of Google results for "human values," or "core values."