Value pillars, cultural tenets, corporate principles … Can we get back to running the company already?
“What’s our North Star?”
“What’s our mission?”
“What’s our vision?”
🤮 This emoji is the perfect articulation of how I felt every time someone brought this up to me. For many years, I hated discussing company vision, cultural principles, or corporate mission statements. It was like every HR person read the same book and was now spouting the importance of perfectly articulating a vision or a mission. Not to mention that when those things ever got on paper the corporate copyright gods shaved every ounce of genuineness out of them.
About two years ago, though, I started thinking about this differently. I realized that if the people around me didn’t understand the cultural expectations and norms of our business that they would never know what was expected of them. If you travel to a new country, you’re probably going to want to read about the cultural norms there – dress, language, getting on and off public transportation, tipping.
And every year, hundreds of new employees started at ZoomInfo and we needed them to understand who we are, what we stand for, what we expect, what’s okay and what’s not.
I’ve done this well in my personal life. I want to be surrounded by people who share my same values — they have high personal integrity, they care about putting their family first, they have high professional integrity, they are ambitious — they want to make the biggest possible impact in whatever they do.
So I asked myself: Why do I not care about this for ZoomInfo? Why do our cultural principles suck?
It wasn’t always this way. In 2015, back when we were a much smaller company, I wrote down our cultural principles – our manifesto — and I loved them. But reading what they had become in 2023, I hated them. No one knew them. The geniuses in corporate copywriting had ruined them and I hadn’t done anything about it.
I remember having lunch with a senior private equity investor and he was telling me about a company that they had just taken private – “they just lost their way. At the end the Founder in an all hands said “I don’t even know what our cultural values are anymore. What a mess, right Henry?”
Oof. I felt very small.
If you’re a founder, executive, or anyone leading a significant number of people, and if you also think corporate mission statements are boring, I think my story can help change your mind.
Me and my co-founder, Kirk Brown, in the early days.
Company Culture Drives Success
First of all, it’s important to recognize that corporate culture is a key factor in your bottom-line success. The polling organization Gallup, which has been surveying workers who change jobs for years, has found that engagement and culture are by far the biggest reasons people leave companies. In fact, they’re more than twice as important as pay and benefits.
So, what’s the difference between corporate values that inspire and ones that fade into the background? There has to be a personal connection.
For basically my entire adult life, I’ve had one job: running ZoomInfo, a company I co-founded in law school. Making ZoomInfo successful has been the reason I lose sleep, get up early, and push myself to give absolutely everything I have.
I want every employee to share the passion that I have as the founder.
The first time I felt a true sense of shared purpose was long before I ever set foot in a corporate office. It was my freshman year of high school basketball.
My high school team had a mediocre history, with one standout year in the 1970s that produced two NBA players. Even though the varsity team that year wasn’t looking strong, the coach dedicated a full hour each day during summer practice to talking about the program’s history and how special it was to be a Crescenta Valley Falcon.
He talked about how storied in history our program was. How respected we were across southern California. We heard stories about how our best players used to dribble a basketball in between classes because they were so committed to improvement. Stories of a big game where the team rallied to beat team after team that they shouldn’t have beaten because they believed.
It gave me a real sense of pride about the team I played for. I remember walking into other gyms thinking that they’d look at us and think “Oh DAYUMM! That’s Crescenta Valley, the most storied basketball team in southern California.”
In reality, no one knew those stories. The other 16- and 17-year-olds didn’t know a single thing about the two NBA players or how they dribbled in the halls. But these were stories that were ingrained in me, that told me I was a part of something bigger, and they gave me a sense of pride in the team I played on. I never wanted to be on the wrong side of the history of Crescenta Valley Basketball.
And for the team that meant we fought for every loose ball, every rebound, we gave 110% on every single play. We would win the games we were supposed to win, we’d win every game that would look like a toss-up on paper, and because we believed, we’d win some of the games we shouldn’t have ever won.
And then I realized that that’s the way I wanted people to feel about ZoomInfo — and that the only way to really get them to feel that way was to do the same thing that my basketball team did. I had to make sure that people understood who we were and what we stood for.
Shifting ZoomInfo’s Corporate Identity
In corporate America, companies use terms like vision, mission, or cultural principles to define who they are. But too often, these are written by someone who is disconnected from the founding vision, and worse, they’re usually derivative of some other company’s vision and mission.
That’s how ZoomInfo’s values looked until a little over a year ago. If I went across our teams and asked them to tell me what our previous principles were, I’d be lucky if they could name one. That’s a problem.
At the end of the day I wanted two big things. I wanted people to know who we were and what we stood for. I wanted them to have a whisper in their ears when no one was looking that said “this is what you do when you work at ZoomInfo, this is who you are.” And I wanted them to know that their colleagues knew what we stood for, too.
I needed every person to know exactly what I expected from a ZoomInfo employee so they could hold themselves and each other accountable. That way, if someone wasn’t showing up for the team, everyone had the same expectations and vocabulary to help each other improve.
The Five Values That Define ZoomInfo
So I sat down and wrote our new values. I wrote them myself, with no steering committee, in my own words.
We Are Relentless: When we deliver value to clients; when we compete; when we run into difficult problems. We will outpace and outcompete our competition. We are smart, clever, and resourceful in everything we do. Competing with us for the same customers will be a daunting experience.
We Are Experts: Winning for our customers requires that we understand them deeply. Winning for our business requires us to be experts in our domain areas. Great companies solve complex and costly problems for their customers — you can’t do this without being an expert in your customers’ day-to-day workflow. We will demand this level of customer and business expertise from everyone at the company.
We Are Innovators: Innovating is who we are, it is how we have gotten here. But not just with our product and how we define what GTM means for the future. We innovate to be leaner and more efficient in the way we operate, we will find ways to drive outcomes no one thought were possible — from marketing and lead generation to legal, finance, and procurement. Through innovation, we will set a new standard for how great companies operate with discipline.
We Are Entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs hustle, move fast, take ownership. They have autonomy and make decisions. They are opinionated and they don’t hide behind process for protection. They lead with a strong point of view. They are accountable. They do not operate in fear. They are resilient. They are resourceful. They look for solutions when others make excuses. We will entrust, and expect, our leadership and our teams to operate as entrepreneurs.
We Are a Team: We can’t win if we act like a random assortment of siloed groups. We are one team, working together to win. We collaborate and lean in to help each other.
Making It Stick: Bringing Our Values to Life
I felt good about the values I’d defined, but I knew that without action, they’d just be words on paper. I wanted there to be no question in anyone’s mind what our values looked like in practice.
I asked myself, “If someone came into ZoomInfo with no preparation, what would they hear that would make them believe we are relentless, experts, entrepreneurs, innovators, and a team? And, just as importantly, what would they not hear?”
I wrote down exactly what they would and wouldn’t hear, and shared it with the whole organization as well. Then I made sure those values were everywhere. They went up on every in-office monitor, and I now open every All Hands by talking about one of our values. Here’s an example:
The result? Our team knows these principles now. We’re living them.
And my favorite anecdote happened on a recent podcast where a tangential competitor’s VP of marketing literally cited them after hearing me talk about them in an interview — it stuck for someone who doesn’t even work for us.
For me, that’s the marker of success. It’s why I’ll never look at company values as a boring side effect of corporate sameness ever again, and you shouldn’t either.
Some Final Advice
Founders and CEOs: if you’re struggling with this topic, here are the three most important things to keep in mind.
- Don’t let someone who hasn’t been there since the beginning define who you are and what you stand for as a company. That is YOUR job.
- Don’t be afraid to use your own voice. Resist the temptation to water down your values with corporate-speak.
- Commit to your values. Building culture happens when everyone knows, understands, and can articulate what sort of company you are. Repetition and constant reinforcement are mandatory.
Every founder knows what these are. You should not be afraid of writing down what you think the qualities of successful people at your company are made of.