Hot off the heels from our annual Leadership Retreat and one thing has become abundantly apparent – values drive team relationships.
This isn’t new. I’ve even blogged about it recently. What was new (for me) was (1) the importance of simplicity in identifying those values and (2) in clarifying those values as a team.
Long story short, here’s what we finalized (as a group) as the core values for the Actionable Books team:
1. Create Something Exceptional.
2. Be Real.
3. Have Fun.
And that’s it. The great thing is that even for me – man of the goldfish memory (“Hey look, a castle!”) – these are memorable. These are anchored in real stories, and can be benchmarked against. (Are we being real? Are we having fun doing it?).
I think there can be a lot of pressure to make company values larger than life, or full of business jargon. For us, simplicity is a powerful path. The retreat ended only a few hours ago, and I’m already hearing people talk about how to make the next sales meeting exceptional. How to product a weekly digest that embodies the sense of realism and fun that we aspire to. And that feels pretty good.
Good looking group, eh?
