📖 This article is part 2 of wider series on “How to build a winning startup culture” – you can check-out earlier instalments here.
At some point, you’ll feel pressure to declare your company’s core values or write a culture statement. How and when you do this matters. A common mistake is rushing into value definitions that sound good but aren’t actually lived.
Mark Chahwan, CEO and co-founder of fintech Sarwa, deliberately held off on formalising values at first because he and his co-founder felt that doing it too early would ring hollow:
“We didn’t jump on it… we felt like it would be not genuine enough if we define it so proactively. So I think we did that almost two years after the foundation of Sarwa”.
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Only once the company had some real experience did they gather the team for an offsite to brainstorm the values that truly reflected their culture. “We waited a while… we defined it [later]”, Mark says, because they wanted those values to emerge from how the team already worked, rather than aspirational clichés.
The result was a set of guiding principles that everyone could believe in and use.
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