Don’t let this happen to you…

“You’re a hypocrite” they said. “If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing”.

Here we go again. Our main company value was giving me hell.

One of six Classy company values.

It was 2016. Trump had just won office for the first time. I was the CEO of a 250-person software company for nonprofits (Classy, now part of GoFundMe).

I remember the day well. I was getting pressured to take a stand on the newly elected President.

This wasn’t unique at the time. CEOs across the country were sending company-wide emails consoling their teams.

But I refused. Not because I voted for Trump (I didn’t). But because we had both Democrats and Republicans on our team. Why alienate a large portion of our people?

The pushback came fast. In the days that followed I was weak, spineless… all that good stuff. Still, I sent no email. I took no stance.

This type of thing kept happening. Every major news story they’d turn to me and say:

“Where does Classy stand on this one, Scot?!?”

Hypocrite. If you stand for everything, you stand for nothing.

Uggggggg! But they were completely missing the point!

Then it hit me…

My own team didn’t understand the original intent of this value.

The founders didn’t create ‘Stand for Something’ to take a public stand on every issue. How could we? We hoped to have tens of thousands of nonprofits on the platform some day.

We chose this value to welcome lots of voices onto the platform (and into the company). Even wildly different beliefs. Classy was a place for every cause.

So why was this value, years later, being weaponized against us?

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Avoiding ‘Value Creep’

Values are clear in the early days. People learn them by watching the founding team. Through osmosis. They rarely need additional definition.

Here are all six of Classy’s values. The team knew these inside and out when we were small.

But as companies grow, each new person has less interaction with the founding core. This creates room for misinterpretation. Eventually, you might end up with a value that means something entirely different to a whole group of employees.

I call this value creep – a slight shifting over time until the value is unrecognizable.

If you’re not careful, value creep lets people justify behavior the founding team never imagined. This is what happened to us.

We had to do something. So, for the next couple of months we worked to get our values back on track.

1. First, we defined each of our six values, leaving nothing to chance;

2. Second, we ran employee focus groups to identify anything confusing or contradictory.

Here’s where we landed for the ‘Stand for Something’ value:

Each bullet is action-oriented and starts with “We”. This language shows people the behavioral guardrails. What will be rewarded, and what will not.

Then we integrated these definitions into:

• onboarding

• employee training

• promotions criteria

• performance mgmt.

• awards & recognition

• annual kick off & all-hands

• and more!

Our team started wearing our values like a badge of honor. Old and new employees together. The clarity was unifying!

Here’s the final draft of all six Classy values. Click below to see the Google doc, and you can make a copy of the template for your own organization.

So what’d we learn today?

If you don’t define your values, someone else will do it for you.

Be proactive. Set the cultural tone. Define your values.

If you want to go deeper, I wrote a full article about values here.

Till next time,

Never say die 🏴‍☠️

Scot

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