Establishing your company values is an extremely important exercise. Here are three considerations from my experience working with CEOs on this extremely important exercise:

1. Getting everyone involved.

It certainly takes less effort, time and other resources to sit down as a senior leadership team to come up with the values of your company. However,  involving all employees in this invaluable exercise can be extremely beneficial. The CEO can email everyone and ask them, we want to do this exercise, what are the values you want to identify with?

Asking everyone has the benefit that you create massive buy-in in the company. Everyone got asked, everyone contributed to forming the values, which means they will be willing to fight harder for those values.

You can reply, you can ask follow-up questions, and bring it up in 1-on-1’s with people. Yes, it will take longer and more effort (sometimes it can take a company a year to complete this exercise!!!) but  it’s definitely worth it! It’s a truly amazing opportunity to bring the whole team together, uplift the spirit, and boost motivation.

Once you collect everyone’s input, you can refine it, and organize it into themes. You may start with fifty values and cut them down to ten or seven in the end.

2. These have to be your values that distinguish you from other biotech companies. 

An important thing is for the values to be specific. Well, all biotech companies should be patient-centric, teamwork is always important, honesty (well, who wants to be dishonest?) but what is it specifically that makes let’s say ABC Therapeutics… ABC Therapeutics? What is ABC’s unique DNA? ABC has let’s say 100 employees today. The values are there already! ABC’s DNA has been formed; that’s why it would be worth asking everyone and putting ABC under the microscope to identify its unique cultural DNA… that no other biotech out there has!

So what you want ideally is someone Googling the ABC values and getting back… the ABC website! 🙂 You talk to an investor about your values and they go “Oh, you’re right… that’s soooo ABC!”

3. The values have to be actionable and they must mean the same thing to everyone.

HR often initiates this kind of exercise and I asked HR in the past… so what do you think the values should be? And I get answers like innovation, patient-centric, integrity, respect, honesty... These are all great but what does integrity mean? If we ask the 70 people at ABC, we will get a different definition of integrity… We do want to capture all that input.

For example, an example of integrity and honesty from my experience is … we are not going to sign a deal with pharma just to sign a deal and drive the share price up unless this is a clearly long-term thing to do for both us and the partner. We can say no to things and set clear expectations right from the start of the partnership, to create a win-win and protect both ourselves, the partner, and obviously, our vision and patients at the end of the day.

[2 and 3 above can help you craft your message accordingly when collecting input from everyone. For example, you can purposefully decide to not mention the word values in your message and just ask questions… Who are we as a company? What differentiates us from other biotech companies? What do we stand for? What are we never willing to do as a company? etc.]