SEO Hacker has grown to 50 people. It is a milestone and a testament on how we continue to provide powerful, ethical and effective SEO Services in the Philippines. I used to know each and everyone in the team on a personal level. Now I do not.
With this growth, I think it is time to change the core values yet again. It is tough as it feels like I am abandoning some very important pieces as I put some of our core values in the back burner.
Thankfully I have discovered that there are 3 kinds of values aside from your core values because of Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Advantage.
Note: If you are not familiar with SEO Hacker’s current core values, you can read about them here.
Accidental Values
These are values that your organization just forms over time. It could be good, it could be bad. One thing it is not, is it is not intentional and therefore must be reconsidered if we will embrace it or consciously change or reject it.
Permission-to-Play Values
These are values that are the bare minimum in order to be part of your team or to play in your industry. These are things like integrity, honesty, respect for peers, and so on. I am considering placing two of our core values in this category.
Aspirational Values
These are values that are fantastic for your organization but are not yet being practiced by the majority of the people in your organization. A lot of core values of multitude of companies fall under this. Two of our values now fall under this and I am creating one more value that falls under this.
With this new learning, I realize that values that are really core to our current team that majority of us have embraced and practiced are:
Grit, Respect for Work and Empathy
Integrity and Beyond Technology is going to be put in the Permission-to-Play values
Experimentation is going to be in the Aspirational values as only a handful of people in the team truly practice and exhuberate this value consistently.
As for the new values I’m going to put in the aspirational category, I am trying to improve and craft it now. I am also strategizing on how it will be embraced by the team as a whole.
Very exciting.
It’s also sobering to think that core values are not forever. As your organization grows, it will have different requirements and it will sprout different challenges as well.
You must address these and ensure your team have the right mindset, culture and behavior in order to thrive as you scale up.
