Great Companies and Leaders Record Their Values and Stories

The following is adapted from The Rack We Built.

A company’s culture is set at the top and drips down like ice cream melting on a cone. The things that are important to the leaders become important to the troops. That’s why it’s so important for great leaders to keep their company’s core values fresh and alive. 

You don’t want to say to employees, “We already figured out our mission statement, so we never need to go over it again.” Values don’t work like that. They aren’t a one-and-done kind of situation. If you were to bring a new employee into that scenario, they would just feel like they’re getting a crash course on the company’s mission well after-the-fact. 

You want to live your core values and bring them up as often as you can. The best way to communicate your core values is through stories. It is the folklore of your company. Those stories bring your core values and culture to life in ways you never would have thought possible.  

Keep a Stockpile of Stories about Your Core Values

Each core value of a company operates like the Google algorithm. It’s always learning, adapting, and getting smarter. As your company grows, you will see employees do amazing and innovative things that reflect exciting interpretations of the core values. 

I believe that every company should keep a stockpile of stories for each core value. If someone doesn’t understand them, you can keep dishing out more stories until it clicks in their brain. Also, if you don’t have stories, then you need to create the ones that you would want to happen if the core values were lived out correctly. 

You need to write those stories down somewhere and keep them because these stories help the culture spread. These stories have to be so repeatable that your employees spread them amongst themselves. They are the stories that they tell at the water cooler, a cigarette break, or during lunchtime. If you can’t tell your core value in a simple story, then chances are, your core value is not being lived out or it’s a fake one. Either way, it’s bad. 

These stories bring meaning to each core value, and it is the stories that will be the best way to teach new employees how to behave. Stories will also be a good reminder for the employees that are already there but may have forgotten. 

Write It Down, Keep it Alive

A lot of companies believe so much in culture that they will create a role for someone to create it, fix it, or make sure it keeps going the way it should. While the intent is good, I think the tactic is wrong. Culture is everyone’s job.

Rather than assign one person to manage culture, you need to write down your values and the stories that illustrate them. Then, put them somewhere every single employee can access in any given moment—a blog post, a book, a PowerPoint, but it must exist somewhere.

Zappos was the first company that I saw take their culture so seriously that their CEO, Tony Hsieh wrote a book about it. In Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose, Hsieh shows how making culture a top priority led Zappos to success.

The founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, also wrote a great book titled, Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman. He talks about the experiences that shaped him, what led him to start Patagonia, and the principles that guide Patagonia’s company culture.  

So, what’s the point? Great companies and leaders record their values and stories. The even greater ones keep it alive and tend to it on an ongoing basis. 

Hire a Culture Scribe

Culture is everyone’s responsibility, but it also helps to have a designated person in charge of collecting stories for posterity. This is someone I call “the culture scribe.” 

If you are a small business, the CEO/founder is the keeper of the culture and writing these stories is critical. As your company grows and writing down stories goes beyond the CEO’s bandwidth, hire someone with journalist tendencies to be your culture scribe. 

Their first job is to get the story told and then search high and low throughout your organization to find stories that exemplify the culture and write about them. This person should report to your CEO—that’s how important it is. But never forget that the CEO is the chief champion for culture. If your company has amazing stories and your CEO never talks about them, no one else will either. They set the tone, always and forever. 

Listen to What Employees Say

A company’s culture starts at the top and drips down, like an ice cream cone, but the best leaders know how to listen to their employees and find out which sticky drips have the most staying power. If you took a transcript of every meeting, dumped it into a database, and pulled out the most commonly used words, what would you hear? Do they resemble the values you want for your company? Is it a healthy culture that encourages your employees to grow? 

A leader’s job is twofold: listen and provide stories that keep their core values top of mind for everyone in the organization. When you do that, your company will grow by leaps and bounds because everyone will have the same values and mindset, and you’ll all be on the same team. 

For more advice on communicating culture, you can find The Rack We Built on Amazon.

Lorenzo Gomez was one of the first one-hundred employees hired at Rackspace. During his nine years there, he served as a team leader and senior manager, pioneered the account manager/business development consultant split, and finished as a director of project management. As one of the leaders in creating San Antonio’s tech scene, Lorenzo deployed the principles he learned at Rackspace as CEO of Geekdom and chairman of the 80/20 Foundation. In addition to his work, Lorenzo has authored two Amazon bestsellers: The Cilantro Diaries in 2017 and Tafolla Toro in 2019.