Company Values Update: Never a Better Time Than Now
Early 2020, I started working closely with our leadership team to articulate as an agency who we are, what we stand for and how we treat each other. We had experienced double-digit growth for several years in a row, and we needed to come back together as a team to recognize how the agency had evolved and to set the course for the future.
We started 2021 still in growth mode, and kicked it off by outlining our vision, mission and company values with the goal of inspiring and motivating our staff and connecting them more deeply to each other and to MX. Because as a leadership team, we feel strongly that our values should serve to guide behaviors internally and with the world at large.
I thought I would share some of our thinking here, with the knowledge that many organizations are facing internal challenges, and senior leaders are looking to reset and reengage their employees in the year ahead.
Actions & Accountability
Values guide how we behave; they’re not just words on a page. And yet we believe that values are inherent, and that articulating them doesn’t require creating something totally unexpected. Instead, we wanted to acknowledge the best existing behaviors within us, recognize them and use them to solidify our company culture at large. But of course, working on these values in the past year, a lot happened along the way — major perspective-shifting events such as the increasing repercussions of COVID-19, the political unrest surrounding the election, and the increased urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement. Regarding the latter, our agency knew we needed to make a commitment to be a part of the solution.
These events inspired us to bring new perspectives to our company values, not just tie new words to our familiar format. We decided to aim for values that really anchor us to what matters and drive behaviors that will keep us on an upward path indefinitely. Inspirational author and speaker Simon Sinek has written, “True values are how you act when you are at your natural best.” Act is the important word in that quote. Company values guide behaviors, and we want to ensure that we clarify the resulting behavior we are trying to create through each value. So, we’re recording our updated values each with a behavior to describe how to act, to make it actionable and to allow us to hold each other accountable.
Company Values: Organizational to Individual
As we reviewed these company values with our senior leadership team, agency directors, and a group of diverse and young talent within MX, they recognized how the values themselves cascade from organizational to individual.
At the highest level, we are an organization that prioritizes impact and innovation and communicates transparently. When it comes to talent, we recognize and embrace diversity and equal treatment. And in our daily interactions, we are committed to our teams, empathetic to each other and willing to embrace feedback.
Embedding our Values
Embedding and truly living company values within an organization doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey, and along the way, I know our values will evolve as we learn more about ourselves and each other. As a start, here are just a few ways we’re embedding our values within the agency:
- Creating an iterative, interactive company values page on our website designed to inform and inspire internal and external folks alike.
- Inviting all MX’ers to participate in creating and sharing visual representations of who we are and how we live our values, contributing photos that represent our values in action.
- Accepting year-round nominations of MX individuals and teams who are living our values, celebrated all year long with team lunches and happy hours.
- Integrating our values into our intranet, office, and digital experiences.
- Updating key employee development content such as our interview scorecards, performance reviews, our careers page and more.
- Welcoming new hires with welcome kits that include a values field guide.
As a company, we have always taken great pride in reinforcing our company values. This is something that is special about MX and a practice we especially want to double-down on while we are working remotely. We’re one of the best and fastest-growing B2B agencies in the country, and I have no doubt that with our renewed attention to our mission, vision and values, we’ll only continue to improve as this year moves forward. Just as important, this exercise also reminded me how extremely grateful I am to work alongside such an inspiring group of professionals.