First in a series describing how Groove defined its values and put them into practice.
Coming into 2010, the Groove leadership team made a decision to focus our annual strategic off-site around values. It made sense because we had recently completed a brand refresh, which gave us more clarity than ever around our brand identity and the direction of the business. We are very excited about our positioning statement:
Groove 11 is a brand experience agency with an unshakable belief in the power of meaningful, sustainable brand relationships. To develop these, we architect conversations that create unforgettable emotional experiences, inspiring audiences to feel, learn, do, or be. As trusted partners, we offer intelligent brand and cultural strategy, strong creative, a nurturing style, and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. We use these to design, execute, and cultivate relationships, ensuring that the essence, promise, and personality of the brand has real meaning and, through it, enormous business value.
As you can see, we are in the relationship business with a strong focus on people. Of course, I consider our people to be the most important assets of the agency. It is people who deliver the client experience and the work product; people who deliver our brand promise. And as we know from the brand work Groove does via our Brand Essentials™ practice, the clarity around our essence and core identity needs to translate from the written word to our day-to day-behavior.
This is where the strategic off-site focused on values comes in. In keeping with our Aaker-driven brand philosophy, we started with his definition of values: “Values are principles of beliefs that guide the organization’s work and staff’s behavior toward stakeholders to ensure that the brand is lived – to determine how we act. Values are the foundation for a way of being.”
From here, we immersed ourselves in the question of what principles and beliefs were in place at Groove 11. And, how does the current value set support the essence, mission and vision of our agency? We did this through an exercise in advance of our off-site in which everyone in the company identified two sets of values: First, those that guide behavior outside the office, and second, those the agency needed to live day-to-day in order to “be the brand.”
The thinking behind this approach comes from Ken Majer, a foremost authority on value-based leadership, who says, “You are the same person at home, at work, and at play. You take you—and your values—with you wherever you go.” Another of his pillars is: “The secret to building a winning team is helping team members discover their own set of values and helping them to act on them.”
Combined, these played a significant role in how we viewed – and view – the importance of understanding and valuing the individual, while designing a set of shared values for the organization. In other words, we made a conscious effort to tap into the personal as it can directly apply to, and be in support of, the brand identity work. With the brand already established, the art moving forward was in bubbling up and tying into the juice of each and every employee – their personal values that are the fabric of the organization’s values.
In the next blog I’ll be writing about the specifics of the methodology in gathering values data in advance of our off-site.