The Better Compass
Sometime in the early 2010s, I was filling out a grant application for the local Friendship Circle I was running when I encountered a question asking for our organization’s core values. I remember being annoyed because the question seemed so disconnected from the actual problem in front of me. We had programs to run and needed money. What we did not appear to need was a collection of generic words describing how virtuous we were. There was no ChatGPT to manufacture an answer, so I simply wrote something, submitted the application, and mostly forgot about the concept.
My next serious encounter with core values came nearly ten years later, when we began implementing EOS. This time we went through a structured exercise, identified qualities we admired, refined the language, and arrived at a set of values that seemed to describe our organization. We used them in meetings and hiring and performance conversations. Yet even then, they still felt somewhat artificial to me, perhaps even like a sophisticated management mechanism: leadership defines the approved personality of the organization and invokes it when it works in our favor.
It was only after spending much more time exploring my own leadership that I began to understand what core values are actually for. Their primary purpose is not to describe an organization or improve its branding. Core values are a decision-making system. More specifically, they are the mechanism that allows an operator to become a leader and an organization to grow without losing the identity and relationships that gave the work meaning in the first place.
Running on Instincts
The instincts that are your best friend when you are getting an operation up and running can become your worst enemy when you attempt to scale it.
The instincts that are your best friend when you are getting an operation up and running can become your worst enemy when you attempt to scale it.
In the beginning, an organization is often an extension of the person who founded it. The founder sees a need and responds. He does not require elaborate systems because he is the system. He knows which details matter, which promises must be kept, which people need special attention, and when the normal rules should be ignored.
That internal compass is extraordinarily powerful. Because the work is personal, the founder can invest himself in it at a level that would be difficult to reproduce through a job description. He works late, absorbs tasks for which there is no budget, pushes through exhaustion, and accepts risks that a more established organization would avoid. This is particularly true in Shlichus, The personal nature of the work is often the source of its success.
The problem is that this internal compass is not a single, coherent force. It is a collection of values, preferences, fears, insecurities, habits, loyalties, and emotional attachments. When the organization is small, the distinction between them matters less because they all push in roughly the same direction: work harder and keep things moving. It is only as the organization grows that these forces begin to conflict.
At that point, the leader is no longer choosing between good and bad. He is choosing between good and good. He may need to choose between remaining personally available to everyone and creating the time required to build the institution. He may need to choose between preserving a meaningful program and redirecting its resources toward something with greater impact. He may need to choose between loyalty to an early employee and responsibility for the future of the organization. He may need to invest in infrastructure that feels expensive and produces no immediate visible result.
The operator’s instinct is to preserve all of it. Every priority became important for a reason, and every one is connected to some part of his identity. He therefore attempts to expand without contracting, to create a new strategy while preserving every old initiative, and delegate responsibility while retaining final control. He may announce priorities and make plans, but gradually the old responsibilities creep back. The delegated decision returns for approval. The program that was supposed to end survives another year. The new hire waits for direction because acting independently still feels unsafe. This is the operator’s ceiling, and it explains why organizational growth is so often experienced not merely as an operational challenge, but as a personal crisis. The organization is asking the founder to surrender the very instincts, attachments, and ways of operating that made its existence possible.
The Better Compass
Core values provide a way through this impasse. Of all the forces operating inside a person, core values are the ones most closely tied to his deepest identity. We all have them whether or not we have named them. They may remain invisible when nothing important is at stake, but they reveal themselves when they are tested. When a genuine value is threatened, people can tolerate extraordinary discomfort and cost in order to protect it.
This is what separates values from preferences. A preference tells me what I would like to preserve. A fear tells me what I would like to avoid. A core value tells me what must remain true, even when preserving it requires surrendering something else that is also good.
A core value tells me what must remain true, even when preserving it requires surrendering something else that is also good.
Once values are properly identified, they create a hierarchy among the competing forces influencing a decision. Instead of asking which option is safest, cheapest, or least disruptive, the leader can ask which option most faithfully expresses what the organization exists to embody. That does not make decisions easy, but it makes them coherent.
Core values do more than help a founder move beyond his own limitations; they are also what make growth possible.
You Cannot Do It Alone
You cannot scale an organization alone. At some point, other people must own meaningful parts of the work and make decisions without constantly returning to the founder for direction.
In the absence of a shared language, every function naturally optimizes for the metric closest to it. The teacher prioritizes the classroom. The program director prioritizes turnout. The fundraiser prioritizes donors. None of these are inherently wrong, but left alone, they gradually reduce the organization to the one language every department can understand: the transaction.
Was the service delivered? Was the event held? Was the donation processed? Did the client renew? Did the number increase? Because the transaction is measurable and universally legible, the organization begins engineering itself around producing more transactions and removing friction from the process.
For some, that may be sufficient. If the identity behind the transaction is irrelevant and the relationship between the parties is incidental, the organization can scale by making the exchange more efficient. But this does not describe Shlichus. A Chabad House is not simply a distribution mechanism for shiurim, holiday events, and religious services. The identity of the organization matters, the intention behind the service matters, and the quality of the relationship matters. If the programs grow while those things disappear, the operation may have scaled, but the Shlichus has not.
My go-to example for this is the American grocery store. The generic supermarket (Publix, Ralphs, Kroger…) is an effective transactional system. The customer enters, finds groceries, pays, and leaves. It mostly works, but it’s also why you can spend ten minutes pacing through aisles under flat fluorescent light looking for someone to tell you where the rice is. It’s why almost all the checkout lanes are closed, and why you so often end up waiting in line to scan your own groceries.
Take Trader Joe’s on the other hand. The experience there couldn’t be more different. Employees are everywhere in the store and always eager to help a customer. Cashiers are abundant and regularly attempt to strike up conversations. There is a degree of personality in the environment that makes the store feel less like a retail operation and more like hospitality.
A few years ago, I became curious enough to ask a Trader Joe’s manager why, consistently and across all locations, their employees are always so pleasant. He told me that it began with hiring. “We hire for personality,” he said. “That means we don’t necessarily get the person who stocks shelves fastest or unloads a truck most efficiently.” They were selecting the person most likely to create the experience the company wanted customers to have. This is one of the strategic tradeoffs they make in order to preserve their values in their stores. The company is still trying to sell groceries profitably, but the transaction is clearly not the only value in the system.
This is what it looks like for values to become infrastructure. They are not merely written on a wall or mentioned during onboarding. They resolve conflicts. When speed and pleasantness compete, they help determine which one wins. When labor efficiency and customer experience collide, they indicate which cost the company is willing to absorb.
Until a value can resolve a conflict, it is not yet functioning as a value. It is an aspiration. A real value tells us which good thing wins, which cost we are willing to bear, and which imperfection we are prepared to tolerate.
This is how the two problems of growing an organization converge. Core values give the founder a standard more reliable than his immediate preferences and fears, allowing him to move beyond the instincts that created the operator's ceiling. At the same time, they give everyone else in the organization a common language for making decisions independently without losing the institution's identity in the process.
The founder no longer has to transmit himself through constant involvement. He can transmit the institution’s identity through clarity. Ultimately, learning to operate from core values is the foundation that allows the operator to become a leader.
It surprised me to discover that building and scaling an organization is really an exercise in self-discovery and self-refinement. There is no way around it. Eventually, every operator reaches his ceiling, and moving forward requires him to dig deep, identify the values that sit at the core of his identity, and learn to lead from that place.
Moving forward requires him to dig deep, identify the values that sit at the core of his identity, and learn to lead from that place.
Without that clarity, growth either stagnates or gradually reduces the organization to something more transactional, generic, and lifeless. With it, growth can radiate the identity that made the organization far beyond the founder himself.