Case Study: Lextech

I didn’t wake up one day and decide to evangelize about Core Values. I have lived these ideas, both in my consulting business and in the companies I've owned and led.

You're here either because you want to know how to implement CoreVals in your business, or because you want to know why you should begin in the first place. Reviewing case studies that illustrate how CoreVals have helped other companies succeed can be one of the best ways for us to get on the same page.

Why Core Values

When my partner Alex Bratton and I started developing our Core Values at Lextech, we were anticipating a period of rapid growth given our strong position in the mobile app development space. As leaders of a growing company, we recognized the importance of having a defined culture to guide how we would lead, manage, hire and unhire team members. Having done this before with our other companies, Alex and I knew that Lextech already possessed a set of core values. We understood that once we put our CoreVals together with our stated behaviors, we would have a defined culture that would be our bedrock.

But we still needed to articulate these values before we could build our business around them. What excited us the most about the process was bringing our CoreVals alive in an environment where people could thrive, where they could be the best they could be and help us drive the business forward. When a diverse group of team members can forge a workplace where everyone follows the same compass and makes decisions on an agreed set of values, everyone is empowered. Everyone can make decisions without referring to a supervisor or manager, and no one can argue with the decision.

In our case, developing what would come to be known as "The Core" brought an element of fun, consistency, and team buy-in that went far beyond our expectations. Our CoreVals came to life, became a part of our personality, and established a set of common values for each individual, our team, and to all our stakeholders. Best of all, we experienced our core values being lived on a daily basis.

We were only 11 employees at that time, but the set of CoreVals we developed soon flourished throughout the organization, helping sustain Lextech through 6 years of growth and supporting an eventual team size of over 80.

So how does one determine the core values of an existing organization?

Discover - Discern - Describe - Design

Having seen it work before, we began by listing the characteristics of our best employees. Then we gathered our management team together and compiled these characteristics into a few sentences. We followed the session with a period of reflection, making sure that we could live with these stated values, that they accurately reflected our culture, and that they could be applied effectively.

The end result was a good first step. At 389 words, the set of statements felt a little wordy, but was descriptive enough that everyone could understand the true meaning. So we continued the discussion with the rest of the team. Fridays at Beer-thirty (4:30PM to the rest of the world) were set aside to play our weekly Pictionary game, so we already had a creative outlet to feed development of our CoreVals.

That Friday we hit the white board and wrote down some descriptive behaviors that supported our values. The session crackled with energy, with every voice heard and everyone feeling included. The trust we created let us put ourselves out there and toss every creative scrap onto the heap. After winnowing down the information to make our intentions clear to an uninformed reader, we added subheadings to describe what lay at the root of our values.

More sessions followed, with the team working to make our value statements more fun, to convey the them in less words, and make them catchy enough that we could easily refer to them. We found some key words that succinctly carried the right meaning, and eventually chipped those 389 words down to a 15 word summary:

Clients come first

Exude passion and energy

Deliver success

Work as a team

Grow

To make the CoreVals memorable, we brainstormed some ideas for unique characters based on each of our values, and then challenged our design "Dream Team" to lead our next weekly Pictionary event with some concepts. We were lucky to have an artist on staff who took our ideas to the next level.

Here you can see his initial designs for the characters Captain Client and Grow’n, who represented the values clients come first and grow.

Having summarized our Core Values in a few words and made them memorable with the imagery of characterizations, our next step was to add descriptions that would let us know when we were living our values. If we challenged a new hire to “deliver success” or “grow,” how else would they know what we meant?

Even after establishing values with clear descriptions, we couldn't just put them in a drawer and expect them to come alive. We wanted to make them easily accessible to everyone and make them present in everything we did. Remember those original sketches? They evolved into a band of super heroes we called “The Core.”

This poster was prominently displayed around our offices and was also adopted as the desktop or home screen on many of our computers. I loved that this was the first thing prospective clients saw on a Zoom call or GoToMeeting webinar. Before firing up the presentation, I often asked, “Are you seeing my screen okay?” so they knew exactly what to expect when working with Lextech.

Making CoreVals a part of the environment created the belief that helped us thrive as individuals, as a team, and as a company. We also lived the values every week in a very deliberate way at our Town Hall meetings. We invited Core Value nominations from the team and read them aloud at the beginning of each meeting, with one nominee selected for a prize every month. I even wore costumes based on our characters to these meetings. I am proud to say that the costumes were a gift from the team one Christmas.

Be sure to revisit the values - and their representations - periodically, to make sure they reflect the current iteration of the company. In recent years the Lextech design team wanted to update the look of "The Core" characters. The character Passionista started off quite scantily clad, and her look has been updated to make her appear more respectable. The Teamwork characters Tea & Wok transitioned from ninjas into chefs, making them feel more inclusive. You already know that leading a company is about the actions you take today, not the actions you took to start your business. So remember that to lead a culture you must live those values everyday.

Core Values in practice - What is a Culture Czar?

When my daughter, then 17, mentioned Passionista during a conversation, I asked her if she knew what Passionista's values were. “Passion and energy!” she said. Chloe never worked a day at Lextech, but when prompted, she was able to name all the characters and each of the values they represented. I know that most employees in most companies could not name their own company values that easily. My son, Sam, attended the original brainstorming sessions while working as an intern at Lextech, and has never forgotten the experience. He can name all the characters too.

When the leaders of your company bring your CoreVals alive and live them each day, it simplifies every internal and external conflict your employees will face. I still recall a tough decision one of our tech leads faced when a client asked for one last change to a project that had met all deliverables. Making the change would tip the project over the allotted amount of time by a couple of days. Should he go ahead? Decline? Or just pass the buck and let his Project Manager decide?

Instead his eyes were drawn to "The Core." Captain Client reminded him that Clients come first, and Danny Deliver urged him to Deliver Success. So he made the change, and asked his PM not to incur any additional costs to the client because the change made the final product better.

Without defined CoreVals, how much time would be wasted deliberating? Who else would need to be involved? Would a profit motivated decision mean saying 'No' to the client, or charging them more right at the end of the project? Because we scored candidates on values, our hires were far more often hits than misses. Our VP of Business Development was always a terrific representation of our CoreVals. So when he declined a job candidate because she wasn’t “Passionista enough,” we all immediately understood, and knew any Lextech team member would have made the same decision. During a video interview for another potential hire, I thought this person was going to jump out of the screen onto my desk, he had so much energy! Another easy decision made, and years later, that candidate remains a tour de force at the company.

One of the best benefits of implementing Core Values at your company is helping direct the focus of existing employees. In fact, the first day we introduced our CoreVals at Lextech, we knew we were on the right track when immediately following the meeting one of our team members met with us to resign. It was a much faster result than we expected but it showed how powerful they can be! We immediately realized that he was right – he was not a fit. He couldn’t work as a team and he did not buy into a culture of open, honest feedback – two of our core values. He knew it and he opted out. Barely an hour had passed and our newly inked core values had already begun to take root.

Wrap up

I hope you realize after reading this that it's not just talk. After introducing a set of Core Values at Lextech, we took specific actions and succeeded. Furthermore, these weren't my values, these were values we discovered as a team. Like you, I have individuals goals, but as I continue to share my experiences with you, I hope to help you understand that you and I are a team.

I believe that the more Culture Czars we can develop in our businesses, the more we can uplift our society as a whole. This is why I like to ask, "Are you leading a company, or leading a culture?" Because when individuals feel valued and love their work, we're developing a culture together, one where we all win.