All successful businesses start with a vision, right?

Working with core values is a central concept of DBT that can be easily transferred to the corporate world. Establishing strong core values from Day One provides many advantages for a company, such as clarity in decision-making, educating potential customers, recruiting and retaining a competitive workforce, and ensuring quality products and services. These values shape the company’s culture, reflecting to employees and clients alike its true essence — the principles, beliefs, and philosophies that guide its operations.

Because they impact everything from the design of your product to the hiring of new employees, core values are your building blocks for future success. Having a clear idea of what is important to you and your business is the key to identifying goals and establishing a direction for growth. Core values also help leaders and employees alike figure out which tasks to prioritize and how to go about completing them efficiently. Even when times are tough, acting in accordance with personal and corporate values can sustain the company’s integrity and promote employee loyalty.

So, which core values resonate with your company?

Do you promote diversity amongst staff? Are you a stickler for time management? How important are accountability and responsibility? What does “integrity” look like to you? Do your workers crave credit for their achievements? How much priority do you place on the interpersonal relationships between employees and managers? Is self-direction important? What about innovation, balance, creativity, empowerment, commitment, and safety?

Choose the values that feel deeply meaningful to you and the vision you have for your business. Holding these in mind and finding workers who resonate with those same values will increase the likelihood of long-term success -- if an employee just isn’t vibing with the company’s philosophy, that’s a red flag that they aren’t a true fit! Opening and continuing a dialogue in the workplace about what values you are upholding will help unite staff with a common goal, inject new energy and motivation into current projects, inspire new directions, and even weed out the naysayers who may cause trouble down the road. Hopefully, the core values you identify will hold strong one hundred years into the future!

If you haven’t already, take the time to identify your core values and those of your company. It’s a DBT exercise with flavors of existentialism that may be the key in building a lasting enterprise.

Written by Krystyl Wright , LCSW

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