“If you don't stick to your values when they're being tested, they're not values: they're hobbies.” –Jon Stewart

First, here is NOBL’s philosophy on values:

• Values should define, for all employees, the attitudes and behaviors we seek to incentivize (and leverage in recruiting and team design) in the service of our goals as an organization.
• They should feel differentiated without being gimmicky or confusing. More is less. Values should be written to be remembered, which precludes long, dull lists.
• Reading them should help folks know which behaviors to adopt and reinforce (in service of achieving an organization's goals), as well as which behaviors to extinguish.
• Values alone cannot change behavior, culture cannot be copywritten into being; values are just one ingredient in the overall soup that shapes an organization’s culture. Values need support.
• Sadly, research shows that the norm is a set of values that are misaligned with the reality of the organization. So all organizations (yes, even us) have to remain vigilant to deviation and self-aware of our own behaviors.

Second, here’s how these values should be used:

• Hiring: Candidates should be asked to reflect on these values and provide clear examples of when they have acted accordingly
• Development: This values, and their behaviors, are a key component of our competency matrix and are used to evaluate whether someone is ready to formally progress
• Cultural management: At offsites and all-hands, we should take individual value statements and discuss topics like: what this value means to us as individuals, emblematic behaviors as individuals/teams/org, emblematic Bells, and what might we try to further reinforce the value
• Scaling: NOBL’s leadership should reflect on these values as an organization as we scale to ensure we’ve kept what’s sacred to us from being overly-diluted

And finally, here are our five values:

1) Serve Change

We promote our creed, “Change is possible, together.” Even in the face of discouraging odds and mounting skepticism, we adopt a growth mindset for our peers, our clients, and their people.