Your Promise of Value encompasses how you behave as a business, the benefits you offer prospects and deliver to customers, and the relationships you create with customers over time.  In a way, it represents “what the business is here to do”.

As such, it is isn’t only for prospects and customers.   A Promise of Value also describes how the founders and their team have decided to fulfill some of their own needs for agency, mastery, autonomy, purpose and community.  And as such, it creates a framework around which people who work in it as employees can fit their own fulfillment of those needs.

The ideal for a business is to kill two birds with one stone – so that making and keeping it’s promises to customers simultaneously delivers fulfillment for the people who work in it.  But that is hard to achieve (and may not be desirable – where would change come from?)

So as a business you have to accept that not all employees will want the same thing.   Some employees will want all these needs fulfilled by work.   Others will use what work gives them (perhaps money, mastery) to fulfill other needs (perhaps purpose, community, agency) outside work.  That means that offering multiple opportunities for fulfillment that are consistent with your Promise of Value is the key to creating an engaged workforce.

In other words, your Promise of Value is not just for your customers, it’s for your employees too.   And both promises need to be kept if you want to succeed as a business.