The Value of Core Values

A Fundamental Role in Organizational Effectiveness

I recently facilitated a Teams & Talent Intensive focused on helping organizations engage employees. The session included teams from diverse area nonprofits—organizations of different sizes, missions and complexity. After a day of independent team discussion about workplace cultures and how to engage their unique employees, I was surprised to learn that every single group left the session with one common post-session to-do; they all chose to focus on their core values.

An organization’s core values are stated principles that guide how people work within the organization and the communities they serve. These values play a fundamental role in organizational effectiveness by:

• Serving as a unifier across your organization and an anchor to what’s truly important in your work.

• Providing a decision-making framework for big, strategic decisions and for small, day-to-day interactions that staff have with each other or their service population.

• Providing the basis for your workplace practices—directing how you hire, develop, reward and recognize employees.

• Inspiring staff by showcasing the best of who you are now—or setting an aspiration of who you want to be.

Your values will only be effective if they’re integrated into your organizational culture after taking the time to develop, talk about, and deeply understand them within your organization.

Owning Our Core Values

We’re taking our own advice at Mission Capital and spending six months rallying around our own organizational core values: collaboration, service excellence, trust, learning, innovation, and connectedness. Each month, the Mission Capital staff is focusing on one value. To better incorporate each value into our organization, we are dedicating:

• A portion of our monthly staff meeting to facilitated discussion on our “Value of the Month.”

• Time at departmental meetings to discuss how our individual teams live that value—this includes our leadership team discussing how they live each value individually and how they can encourage our staff to do the same.

• Resources to find unique ways to celebrate each value—like connecting over a staff holiday meal or spending the day volunteering together.

• A blog each month to celebrate and share with you the core values that make Mission Capital special.

We look forward to reflecting on our values and sharing our thoughts with you in the coming months!