Towards the end of 2017 we spent some time as a leadership team working on our key values. We've been growing a lot as a business, taking on more engineers and engineering managers. Rapid growth can be a difficult thing to handle, so we decided that to continue to have a productive and aligned leadership team it would be a worthwhile exercise to agree our key values. It's also a useful tool for us during the hiring process, to make sure we're bringing in new employees who share our core values.
We see our values as sitting in the chain of mindset -> values -> principles -> practices (something you may be familiar with from Agile). It's from these values we'll be able to create our principles and practices and help create a certain mindset which permeates all our actions as a management team.
So here they are, our leadership values:
Curiosity
A strong desire to learn and acquire knowledge through experience
Action
Proactively effecting change
Collaboration
Working together
Clarity of Purpose
A compelling and clear reason for the direction and strategy of our work
Transparency
Not hiding or controlling information
Trust
We believe that others have the right intentions and do the job to the best of their ability
There's still work to be done to really embed our values but agreeing as a group what's most important to us has been a really useful exercise.