New Year, Updated Values
Every year, we take a look at our business plan through the framework presented in Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business by Gino Wickman. One of the exercises includes revisiting your values to make sure everyone on your team is aligned with your company’s vision. We strongly believe in the power of a clearly defined set of Core Values.
When our company evolved from Game Night San Diego to Grin Events in 2020, we chose five values to act as our guiding principles: Connection, Fun, Excellence, Balance, and Integrity. This year, we’re narrowing the list down to three that help focus our efforts even more.
The Values We Care About Most
When we pared down our list, we realized the values we left on the cutting room floor are still important – they’re just captured within the three we want to elevate as being most critical. Additionally, we were encouraged to create short, easy-to-remember phrases to represent our values rather than just individual words. So here’s where we landed:
- Connection is key
- It’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how
- Excellence is the expectation
Breaking Down Our Values
The reality is any member of our team could see those values and understand what they mean. Hopefully, this is true of our clients too, since we want our values to both guide our internal culture and also influence our external service.
Still, we want to clearly define them to leave no room for confusion.
1. Connection is key
We constantly beat the drum of Team Connection being the thing companies need instead of “team building.” Companies already have teams, but to maximize their effectiveness, employees need to feel connected to one another and to the company’s mission. We help with both through our specific philosophy on team building activities.
2. It’s fun to have fun, but you have to know how
That’s right – one of our values is a direct quote from The Cat in the Hat because it’s silly, reminds us of our childhoods, and embodies the sentiment we want to communicate perfectly. Most adults (and certainly most companies) simply don’t know how to gather a group of people to have fun, and even fewer recognize how critical this is. This is where we shine and have no qualms about claiming our expertise in this area. While there are lots of ways to connect your team, we use games as our primary vehicle and skillfully help you add fun to the mix of your culture levers.
Additionally, while The Cat in the Hat is all about having fun, the book introduces way too many ways to do so. We prefer a simplified approach, focusing on a few team building event types that we do really, really well (we call this the In-N-Out approach!). This leads us to our third value…
3. Excellence is the expectation
Unfortunately, the bar for team building activities in San Diego and virtual team building events has been set too low. We want to raise the roof, so to speak, on how team building exercises are executed, and therefore perceived. Again, focusing on doing a few activities at a high level allows us to ensure every event hits a home run for our clients.
We Can Help You Live Into Your Values
We can’t overemphasize the importance of fun and Harvard Business Review agrees, sharing that “fun has a positive impact on employee engagement, creativity, and retention.”
So, whether your company has “fun” as on its list of core values or not, we are here to help.
Simply contact us to get started!
