The value of values

Now that 50 Degrees is a proper grown-up company (and by that, I mean that Andy Bowie now has a sensible business partner in Emily Bagley-Duncan, who has explained to him that a bit of structure isn’t necessarily a bad thing), we’ve started having regular meetings of the ‘management team’. We’re not grown up enough for me not to put that term in inverted commas, however. Small steps!

At our first meeting a few weeks ago (alongside patting ourselves on the back for a pretty impressive year) the subject turned to where we wanted 50 Degrees to be in 5 years’ time. This question was more about the type of work we want to be doing, and how we should go about doing it, rather than then turnover, targets and all that sort of thing.

The subject of values was raised. And, fairly enough, one of the team asked if we knew what our values were. This was slightly embarrassing for me as, despite being the person who had committed them to paper about 12-months ago, I couldn’t describe them all fully. Nor could anyone else!

This raised (what I thought was) an interesting question. 

Does it matter if employees know exactly what their company’s values are?

I rather hastily brought up our values on the 50 Degrees website, and we had a look to see whether the way we worked was accurately described by our values, regardless of whether we knew exactly what they were.

Here they are by the way (for those who can’t be bothered with the click through):

Challenge                                         Quality                                               Collegiate

Creativity                                          Success                                             Fun

We agreed that, yes, our values absolutely do describe the way that we work… and the way that we want to continue to work. It seems that our behaviours shape our values and not the other way round. 

Personally, I didn’t see it as a problem that we were unable to recite the values by rote. It’s probably about as useful as printing them out on a poster and putting them up on everyone’s office wall. And then everyone ignoring them. Something I suspect most people have experienced at one employer or another.

That said, like with most things, there’s obviously a balance to be struck. Because when we looked at our values it became clear that some could be jeopardised by our current rate of growth. More projects, more people, more clients shouldn’t mean that we compromise on our values. And we won’t.  

So, if there is a conclusion to this, it’s that getting in the right people and doing the right things is much more important than being able to recite a set of values (like children learning their times tables). But knowing what they are can be helpful (particularly if you wrote them)! 

John Ashworth 
Managing Consultant