Virtues are the signal we send out to prospective customers, partners, employees, and most importantly ourselves.
We have all interacted with companies that exhibit schizophrenia when we compare their virtues to their actions. Sadly, this sometimes happens in our own companies.
When starting out, don’t go to the ‘values page’ of the biggest brand you admire, copy and paste them as your own and try to brainwash/hypnotize your team into embodying them as their own.
Set your virtues as a hypothesis. Then implement systems and make iterations whenever your hypothesis is proven wrong.
So what are virtues anyway?
- How you make an impact.
- The markets you choose.
- The customers you choose.
- The products and services you build to serve them.
- The way you operate and execute.
- The way you deal with unrehearsed problematic situations.
- The way you reward and punish each other.
- The way you win and the way that you fail.
Virtues are the things you do plus the things you believe and the adjustments and corrections you make whenever a mismatch is detected.
Defining virtues for startups
- How you desire to deal with ownership.
- How you negotiate speed versus excellence.
- Is the customer always right? If not, do you have to tell them? If they are then who takes the blame? Does blame need to be assigned?
- Do you value questions over answers? Identifying problems over presenting solutions? Or both.
- How do you deal with the polite fool vs the rude genius?
- Do you reward outcomes or effort?
Assess these in practice and iterate the virtue or implement systems to avoid future deviations as you observe them.