Building Your Foundation: Why Organizational Values Matter More Than You Think

Values aren't just inspirational words to display on office walls or website headers. When done right, they become the invisible architecture that supports everything from daily operations to strategic planning, from staff recruitment to partner relationships. They provide the clarity needed to navigate difficult decisions and the consistency that builds trust with whom you work.

But here's the challenge: identifying genuine organizational values—ones that truly reflect who you are rather than who you aspire to be—requires more than a brainstorming session. It demands honest reflection, inclusive dialogue, and a commitment to walking the talk once those values are defined.

In this post, we'll explore why organizational values are essential for any mission-driven organization, share a proven process for identifying values that actually reflect your culture, and walk you through our own journey of discovering and refining the values that guide our work. Whether you're a startup nonprofit still finding your identity or an established organization looking to clarify your foundation, this brief blog will help you start building values that work.

Why is it important for an organization to identify their values and state them publicly?

Values are crucial because they serve as the foundation for an organization’s identity, operations, and how it forms and manages relationships with staff and their partners, members, or clients.

An organization can use their values to:

• Provide direction and accountability - Values help guide strategic decisions by creating a framework for evaluating options against what the organization stands for.

• Shape organizational culture - Explicitly stated values, if consistently reinforced, can create shared expectations about workplace behavior and priorities.

• Aid in recruitment, retention, and employee alignment - Values help attract employees who align with the company's principles and keep them engaged when those values are consistently demonstrated.

• Inform stakeholder relationships - When values are visible to clients/partners/members/participants, they build trust and help other organizations understand what you stand for.

• Serve as a decision-making compass - Clear values provide guidance during difficult situations when the "right" decision isn't immediately obvious. Values help prioritize where to direct time, money and effort.

But values must be genuinely lived - you must walk the talk. Organizations that merely post values without embodying them risk being “performative” and can face greater criticism than those who never state their values to begin with.

What is the best process for an organization to identify their values?

An effective process for identifying organizational values combines thoughtful reflection, inclusive collaboration, and authentic alignment.

Here's a step-by-step approach: 

1. Start with leadership commitment - Ensure senior leaders understand the importance of this process and are willing to genuinely implement the resulting values. If leaders do not support organizational values, they are almost impossible to uphold.

2. Gather diverse perspectives - Include representatives from different departments, levels, tenures, and backgrounds to capture the full organizational experience. If you have a board of directors include them as well.

3. Facilitate reflection discussions using key questions:

   • What principles already guide our best decisions?

   • When are we most proud of our organization?

   • What behaviors do we consistently reward or celebrate?

   • What non-negotiable principles would we maintain even if they were costly?

4. Look for patterns in organizational stories - Examine successful moments as well as challenges that you have overcome to identify recurring themes.

5. Test for authenticity - For each potential value, honestly assess whether the organization currently demonstrates it and is willing to make decisions based on it. Look for examples and write them down. They will come in handy later when you operationalize your chosen values.

6. Prioritize and refine - Aim for 4-6 core values rather than an exhaustive list. Focus on those with the strongest consensus and organizational relevance.

7. Develop behavioral definitions - For each value, clearly articulate what it looks like in practice through specific behaviors and examples both within your organization and in your relationships with partners and clients.

8. Seek feedback - Test draft values with a wider group of colleagues before finalizing.

9. Plan for implementation - Determine how these values will be integrated into the systems, decisions, and daily operations of your organization. Here are a few ideas:

   • Incorporate into annual staff reviews a measure of the extent to which personnel embody the organization's values,

   • Integrate your values into strategic planning processes,

   • Post values at each person’s desk, walls of common meeting spaces, hallways, on your website and other public facing materials, and in the qualifications section of proposals.

SPS Values

Our organization defined our first set of values at our first company retreat in 2017. Our team at the time listed and voted on values that were written on a flip chart posted in a hallway of the house we had rented for the retreat. Every morning and evening, staff contributed their thoughts and ideas on the values, and we facilitated a consensus building conversation on the last day of our retreat to finalize the values and start putting them into practice.

Once back in the office, we developed a spreadsheet that included important information to help our team operationalize and truly LIVE our new company values. The spreadsheet included the name of the value, a formal textbook definition of the value, examples of how we applied the value in our working relationships with clients and partners (external), examples of how we applied the value as a team and through company structures and policies (internal), and a list of ways to ensure that our internal structures and practices support the operationalization of this value (this was key for holding ourselves accountable).

By 2023 it became clear that we wanted to revise our values and hone them to better reflect the way in which we do our work in communities. Through a series of discussions at company retreats and staff meetings, we reviewed our existing values and revised them into an exhaustive list of over a dozen values. However, it became clear that in our effort to be comprehensive there was overlap and redundancy. Heeding the accepted wisdom to maintain a limit of 4-6 core values, two senior members of our team re-examined our list, combined some values, and deleted others. We also recognized that including a short description of how we carried out the values was helpful both for us and for our partners. 

Below is our refined list of our values with a brief description of each - u

Our Values

Intentionality

We are thoughtful with our actions, words, and how we forge relationships and work in community with our clients and within our own team. We have a genuine commitment to understand and support one another.

Strengths-based

We focus on abilities, knowledge, capacities, and resources over deficits or things that are lacking.

Cultural humility

We hold a humble and respectful attitude toward those who have different lived experiences than our own. We push ourselves to challenge our cultural biases and identify our own privileges.

Learning Mindset

We approach challenges with genuine curiosity. We facilitate problem-solving and learning for our clients and our staff. We value bidirectional learning relationships with our clients.

Accountability

We understand that our actions are connected to others at all times, and we are responsible to the people, places, and relationships with which we work.

Equity

In our work we seek fair treatment, advancement, opportunity and access for all individuals while striving to identify and eliminate barriers that prevent the full participation of any members of society.

How we work

During our second revision of company values, our team realized that interspersed among our first list of values were actually principles more related to how we work. So we decided to separate values from practices, and included our practices in a separate list. These include:

We work as a team.

Our collaborative approach ensures each SPS staff team is diverse and skilled at the unique needs of each project, and promotes more cohesive team communication and operation in agencies we work with.

We uplift the work of our clients and partners.

We seek to extend their reach by promoting lessons learned and sharing pivotal events through social media and collaborative writing. We also promote networking to facilitate collaboration among groups.

We are authentic.

We encourage our staff and clients to bring their full selves to work spaces. We’re not all 100% all the time, and we value and celebrate our differences.

We are inclusive.

We actively include and value individuals and groups with diverse lived experiences, and work to foster a sense of belonging.

Conclusion

The process of generating, defining, and refining our SPS values was time-consuming and required the involvement of key leaders in our organization. It was worth it! Now we have updated values and a list of practices that defines and communicates what we stand for and what people get when they work with our company. Good luck on your values journey, it’s worth it!