Building Our Values Together: What It Took to Get Here

What we did not share, at least not in much detail, is how we got there. I want to fix that now, because the process mattered as much as the outcome, and I think it says something about how I hope this organization will operate going forward.

Starting with listening, not a whiteboard

When I sat down with our leadership Team to talk about values, the temptation was obvious: get a room of senior people together, draft something that sounds right and move on. I did not want to do that. Values that come from the top down tend to read that way too. People can tell the difference between a value someone actually lives and a value someone wrote for them.

So, we started differently. Over several weeks, I had conversations with employees across the entire organization, from operations and guest services to sales and facilities. Not surveys with forced-choice answers. Actual conversations. I asked people what mattered to them about working here, what they were proud of and where they thought we fell short. As those conversations happened, we logged the words people kept coming back to on their own: safety, belonging, ownership, respect, growth. You cannot manufacture that kind of language. You can only listen for it.

Bringing it back to leadership

Once we had that feedback gathered, we brought it to the full leadership Team, not as a finished draft but as raw material. Each department worked through what those recurring themes actually meant for their part of the operation. What does Community First look like from the perspective of someone running convention sales versus someone managing the parks crew? What does Integrity and Accountability mean to a facilities team compared to an events team fielding stakeholder pressure in real time? The answers were not identical, and they should not have been. But the discussion surfaced something I did not expect going in: how much these values connected back to a simple idea, that our people needed to feel a genuine commitment of care from this organization, not just a set of expectations placed on them.

That distinction changed how we wrote the final language. A value is not just a standard we hold people to. It is also a promise about how we intend to support them.

Why the rollout was the easy part

By the time we published our values and strategic goals, the words on the page were the least interesting part of the exercise. The real work had already happened, in dozens of conversations across every department we operate. What we rolled out was not new information to our Team. It was a reflection of what they had already told us, organized and made official.

I say that because I think it is easy to treat a values rollout as an event, something you announce once and move past. I do not see it that way. The conversations that produced these values do not stop just because we have a document now.

Practicing what we built

The test of any of this is not whether the words hold up on a wall. It is whether they hold up on a Tuesday afternoon during a difficult event, or in a hiring decision, or in how a manager handles a mistake. We have talked as a leadership Team about building those checkpoints in, revisiting these values in performance conversations, in how we onboard new hires, in how we recognize the people who embody them without being asked to. Community First and Empathy and Adaptability should show up in how we treat each other internally, not only in how we treat the guests walking through our doors.

I am proud of how this process unfolded, not because the final language is perfect, but because it came from the right place. Our Team told us what mattered to them, and we listened closely enough to build something honest with it. That is the kind of organization I want to lead, and I am looking forward to seeing these values show up in the everyday work ahead.

By Adam J. Straight
President and CEO, Metropolitan Entertainment & Convention Authority (MECA)