Use a guiding principle
It’s just a guess, but you probably have taken some time at your
company to put together something you consider to be a values
statement or a mission statement — some ideas and practices that
you think define what your company is about.
But after you went through that process, did you ever make them
the foundation of what you were doing?
While many companies have things they think drive their company, most don’t use their values as a guiding principle for daily
interactions. At O’Melveny, the firm uses the values it wants to live
by to drive everything it does, from hiring to giving raises.
“All of our messaging and everything we do is guided by our values, we’re a value-driven firm, so whether it’s compensating partners, deciding who to call back from law school interviews to evaluating administrative assistants or marketing professionals, each
of us is evaluated in terms of excellence, leadership and citizenship. Almost all of our messaging is focused around our values and
that is a unifying theme,” Culvahouse says.
“(Values) are the guiding stars for everything we do, from compensation to performance rankings to admitting lateral partners,” Culvahouse says. “We passed on particular acquisitions because we
thought they were values challenged. If a partner is considered by
associates to be unreasonable and not a good colleague in terms of
working for, we will have a conversation with that partner and we
will coach him or her on how to be a more value-driven colleague.”
The idea is simple: If you have four core values that you want
your people to live by, do something today to show people that
those are important so everyone realizes you aren’t just floating
around big ideas — you’ve created a shared rallying point. For
example, O’Melveny makes community service an important
value, so the company regularly shares the good work that people
do in firmwide communication.
Another piece is celebrating your guiding principle. While most
leaders will happily share with you their company values, how
many of them have a process for celebrating them in a way that
encourages people to make them part of daily life? At O’Melveny,
values awards are given to those who exemplify the firm’s values.
“We give values awards every year to two partners, two associates in counsel and two members of our staff, so that binds us
together in ways that are unique,” Culvahouse says.
And to conjure up even more interest in the firm’s values, those
awards are not just handed out by senior leaders, there is a
process that allows anyone in the company to fill out a nomination
for someone else.
“Everyone in the firm, from the most senior partner to the most
junior paralegal hire in Shanghai, are encouraged to nominate their
colleagues to receive the firm values award, and we have several
thousand nominations every year,” Culvahouse says. “So I think
receiving the values award, which is not a big deal financially, it
might be a very nice watch or something like that, but people are
really touched and moved to get it. It reminds us of the glue that
binds us together, it reminds us what is special about our firm. As
we become much more geographically diverse and much larger,
practicing law, in many respects, with much greater intensity than
our forebearers, we don’t want to lose that part of our heritage.”
The celebration of your guiding principle also gives you a database for people that can help get others behind your company. At
O’Melveny, Culvahouse and other senior leaders rely on a values
committee to help push their efforts to get people on the same
page. They wanted this committee to be diverse in age and scope
so it would have more effectiveness, which would normally be a
hard vetting process with 2,200 people. But O’Melveny had little
difficulty, as the firm already had a group of values awards winners and incoming applications full of reasons to include potential award winners to help guide that decision-making process.
