Springbach’s Got a Strong Core!
Every month the Springbach team has a health and well-being challenge to help us be at our best. This last month was a daily plank challenge. While our abdominal muscles are in peak form these days, this got me thinking of Springbach’s core, our core values. As a small, but rapidly growing company, we rely on our core values to keep us centered on why we began this journey in the first place and to be sure we always remain true to the ideals we started with. To do that, we need to keep them top-of-mind, ensuring they are not just words on a website but a living, breathing part of our culture. Here’s how we do it.
We drafted them as a team.
We drafted our core values for the first time as a team at our in-person offsite in 2019 and revisited them at the offsite in 2021. We looked around the table at the amazing people we had the privilege to work with and realized we needed to bottle this! We knew it was important to define what made this collection of people great so we could keep the magic going.
We discuss them weekly.
We start our weekly Springbach Sync meetings with this icebreaker: “Tell a story about how you exhibited our core values this week.” Or, we’ll pick a specific core value to focus on that week and ask the team to share a story about that specific core value in the next meeting. It not only keeps the values top-of-mind, but it also gives good insight into a person’s project work. We also make it a safe place to say "I don't have any stories to share this week." (Being honest and transparent is one of our values.)
We keep them visible.
Yes, they’re on our website, and our wiki, but since we ask this question often, the team has them posted on their desk, too. They want to be prepared!
We use them when hiring.
When interviewing potential team members, we have specific questions that elicit whether the candidate holds these values, too. This ensures that new team members align with our culture from day one.
We use them when evaluating.
We took a page from Gene Wickman’s book, Traction, where he describes the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). We use EOS’s People Analyzer™ to evaluate our teams performance against the core values. For each value, the person receives a score according to the following scale:
“+” = Exhibited our core value most of the time
“+/-” = Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t exhibit this core value
“-” = Didn’t exhibit the core value most of the time
The result is then compared to our bar. Our bar is 3 pluses, 2 pluses/minuses, and never a minus.
At Springbach, our core values are not just words but a way of life. They are the heartbeat of our company, ensuring that we stay true to who we are and where we want to go. Check out our core values and think of us when you’re ready for a fun challenge!
