Pick the party, then pick the dress: A guide to writing corporate values

Last month, Fullstory launched our new Winning Ways. 

There's lots of research out there about why corporate values matter and there are plenty of great examples of well designed, pithy values you can find on the Internet.

But who wrote them? How did they come to be?

For those of you founders, execs, HR and comms teams who are considering writing (or re-writing) your company's values, I offer some insights into my two experiences. Each process was distinct, tailored to match the moment.

Take a look and let me know what you think. What other information would you want to know if you were about to embark on an effort to write (or rewrite) your corporate values?

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One of my most favorite aphorisms I learned in my time at Google was: Pick the party, then pick the dress.

It spoke to me deeply as someone who loves to accessorize. But I also gravitated to the idea that – before you figure out how to show up, you’ve got to know what you’re trying to accomplish. 

Fast forward to the most recent chapter of my career. In my seven years at Fullstory, I lived through the creation of two sets of company values. The processes involved in creating these words were so different. And yet, each approach was uniquely suited to support the objectives and the times. Two different dresses for two different parties.

Here, I share a little about the two moments and the corresponding playbooks we used.

Some backstory

Fullstory has long been intentional with language. In fact, one of the things that attracted me to the company seven years ago was that the founders had put together a set of Watch Words. Empathy, Clarity, and Bionics to codify what we aspired for the product to be. As an incoming people person, I loved that they also provided guidance for how we were to work. 

Those words became part of the ether. Regularly, I would hear things like How do we bionicize that process? Does that approach lead with empathy for the customer? Fullstorians were proud of the identity that came from these words and used them freely and often.

In the ensuing years, we would lean on the importance of language in our culture – two more times. First, in 2020 when we launched our Operating Principles. Then, more recently, in 2024 when we launched our Winning Ways.

Party #1: Cohere during hypergrowth with Operating Principles

In early 2020 as this SaaS company headed for hyper-growth, we introduced a new set of language: Operating Principles. While the Watchwords described who we were, the 7 Operating Principles were intended to explain how we’d work. They were action-oriented, and all wrapped up in a beautiful track metaphor.

We intended to lean on this language as the number of employees would double and then double again. And we did! But what we didn’t foresee was how important this would prove to be as a primarily Atlanta-based company became fully remote during a global pandemic. Our Operating Principles provided a common set of language that helped us learn new ways of working together, especially as we grew in numbers and locations.

Party #2: Set up for new direction with Winning Ways

Four years later, the words that had once been so resonant and so defining didn’t feel that way anymore. Much had changed– the economic climate, the category, and even us.

At last month’s Mid-Year Meet-Up, Fullstory announced a pretty exciting vision for the road ahead. We brought our entire distributed workforce together for 3 days to connect with each other and with the new direction of the company. And it’s there that we rolled out our new Winning Ways.  This new set of language was meant to better capture who we needed to be – and who we aspired to be – to realize the opportunity in this next phase.

Parties picked. Now to the dresses. 

I could tell you about the words themselves, but perhaps(?) more interesting is what we were trying to accomplish at each juncture and the supporting processes that got us to our new language. 

Dress #1: Codify the best of Fullstorians

We wanted to move quickly as a company, and on the cusp of a hiring-spree, we knew we’d need to integrate and ramp our new teammates through clear norms. We would identify, name and codify the best of who Fullstorians already were to determine our Operating Principles. 

For example:

• Our founding engineering team laid the groundwork for thoughtful, intentional decision-making; We named Go Purposefully to propagate those behaviors. 
• Our newly-minted Sales organization embodied a bias-to-action that we captured through Move with Urgency. 
• Our history of writing post-mortems after incidents or challenges created a culture of learning from our mistakes and moving on. This was codified with Recover Quickly. 

How did we identify these attributes? 

Through extensive surveys and focus groups and 1:1 interviews with employees; more than 50% of the employees provided input into this process. Upon collection of this wide data set, we aggregated themes and synthesized into a set of 7 norms. These patterns had been working for us so far, so as growth plans accelerated, we’d build our organization around them. The process was collaborative, inclusive, and data-driven – just like Fullstorians.

Dress #2: Prepare for a new chapter

In 2024, we needed a shift in mindset and orientation. Our old language wasn’t going to drive the outcomes required in this new phase. We had just brought in multiple new executives to help us navigate this next chapter - forming an exec team that was a true mix of “newcomers” and “oldtimers”. We needed to identify: what were we going to take with us, what were we going to leave behind, and what would we introduce to support our forward-looking charge. That wouldn’t be through surveys and focus groups; instead, here’s how we did it:

• Intentionally small circles. Those involved in the Winning Ways needed to be closely tied to the formulation of our new company strategy. This group needed to understand the charge in order to name aspirational behaviors necessary to get us there. So we worked with two separate but overlapping circles: a) our exec team and b) a small brain trust across the People and Marketing teams.
• Our reconstituted exec team identified where we shined and where we got in our own way. At an exec offsite, we conducted an exercise that involved sticky notes and white boards. Each exec named 3-5 things we did well and 3-5 “anti-patterns” – patterns of behavior that were counterproductive to what we needed to be true. There were some really clear themes that emerged. Then, we tried to flip the negative into a positive in order to reverse the anti-pattern into an aspirational call-to-action. So, for example, an anti-pattern like "can be too timid, or incremental” turned into "Be brave".
• I pulled a good deal of research around what high performing teams do. Adam Grant’s Hidden Potential was the source that resonated most.
• Our CEO and brain trust started wordsmithing. We married the research, the best of our current attributes and the anti/anti-patterns. We drafted short pithy phrases and shared them back to our executive team. That’s where things got interesting! We learned how those words could be interpreted and misinterpreted. Then, we drafted clarifying sentiments in the supporting text. This part was the messiest, but was likely the most critical. We ended with a mix of words: some drew upon our roots, some were anti-anti-patterns and others were rooted in high-performing team research.
• We launched: We announced these new words at the same time as we shared our company’s vision for this next chapter. And now we're in the process of integrating these into our systems (e.g., performance mngt, hiring). This is where the rubber meets the road and we can reinforce norms systematically– ensuring they are more than words on the website.

Our Winning Ways- and the process we used to get there- reflect what was required to cultivate language that will propagate norms for a new chapter at Fullstory. But the real fun part now, involves making it stick. Look forward to sharing more. Watch this space. 👀

In the end, there’s no single way to create corporate values. My suggestion is to consider what you’re trying to accomplish with your goals and let the process follow. Hopefully, these two case studies provide some inspiration.