How Open Sky Group Identified Core Values
At Open Sky Group, we publish our core values on our Career page, so our employment candidates can see them. We review them during every quarterly company meeting, use them in our employee evaluation process and to help with hiring decisions. Our people routinely embrace these core values and often those values come up during discussions to help guide us to a resolution. At Open Sky Group we take these so seriously because they truly resonate with our corporate culture. This likely has something to do with the way we created them.
How did we create our Core Values?
Open Sky Group’s core values were created by asking each member of our leadership team and senior management to pick one or two people they felt exemplified the ideal Open Sky Group employee. Then we talked as a group about each person and the qualities we admired and wanted to replicate. From that discussion we ended up with 62 qualities that we loved in our people. Needless to say, we could not publish a list with 62 items on it, so we put the list away and let it rest a few days. It was tempting to try to muscle through this all in one day – it was really important to step away from it so that we could come back with fresh eyes.
The next time we pulled out the list we divided each of those 62 qualities into groups by like qualities and realized each group could be summarized in one word. From that exercise, seven emerged:
If you have not identified your company’s core values, try this exercise in your next leadership team meeting. It really works! We got the idea from the book by Gino Wickman, “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business.”
