I love this quote from Gandhi: "Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. And your values become your destiny." Put simply, our values define what we can achieve.

At Newfront, we learned early on that building the right culture was one of our biggest opportunities and challenges. Our business grows by supercharging insurance professionals with technology. We have world-class software engineers from places like Amazon, Google, and Palantir, experienced operators from McKinsey, Uber, and Opendoor, and seasoned insurance professionals from both smaller regional brokerages and some of the largest firms on earth. No other company to my knowledge has brought these groups together, but at Newfront this diversity is our strength.

Note: we refreshed our values in 2021 and you can see the latest on the Newfront Careers page. Please enjoy the rest of the blog post to learn more about how we originally set the values.

Given this variety of backgrounds, our team needs shared values to help ground conversations and work through complexity. Values help people make all the micro-decisions that comprise our day without needing to "run it up the chain." This defines how successful the team is at getting things done and achieving big, audacious goals. The values become your destiny!

In addition to defining our values, we outlined a set of behaviors for each. These provide shared understanding for our entire team and offer real examples of how we live our values at work each day.

I invite you to get to know Newfront by reading through our values: 

Empower People

It’s people who make insurance work, and our vision of the future has people at the center of the industry. This is the bet we’re making and it will be the key to our success. We deeply value our teammates and the work they do. We’re building technology to empower people, not replace them.

• We develop new tools and processes to make ourselves and our teammates more efficient and improve outcomes.

• We’re teammates and coaches. We give and receive feedback that is both constructive and delivered with good intention.

• We default to respect. We treat people with trust and kindness. How you do something is just as important as the skills you have.

• We promote collaborative experimentation. We encourage innovation via collaboration.

Ambition

We’re modernizing a $500bn+ industry that has resisted change for so long and we’re actively shaping the future of work. We face huge challenges and we’re excited to take them on. 

We are determined to achieve our mission and build a lasting company. It’s what we all signed up for when we joined. We see a better way, and we want to make it happen.

• We are bold. We think big. We work hard to get the job done and we’re not deterred by failure.

• We take action to make this company better and move quickly to provide the best outcome for our clients.

• We are optimistic about the things we can achieve. We're positive and solution-oriented.

• We aren’t satisfied with “good enough.” We seek excellence in everything we do.

• We act like owners. We happily step outside of our formal job descriptions to pitch in and lend a hand for the betterment of the company. When something goes wrong, we seek solutions rather than point fingers or pass the buck. 

Question Dogma

Our industry has baggage and we wouldn’t be here if we didn't think we could shake off some of that weight. Moving the insurance industry forward requires a fresh outlook. We seek out diverse perspectives and question basic assumptions about how things should work.

• We celebrate innovation and uncovering new ways to do things better and faster for our clients. 

• We question the status quo and we’re open to being wrong. Our dogma can be our own. We believe change happens through curiosity and creativity.

• We follow established practices when they are indeed the best, but we're enthusiastic about evaluating alternatives that could lead to stronger outcomes. 

New Standards

We hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards because a modern brokerage means more than better tools and service. Starting with a deep sense of integrity, we aspire to set a new standard for our industry when it comes to equity, transparency, diversity, and corporate responsibility. 

• We do what is right even when no one is looking. We default to transparency and integrity.  

• We make decisions that are informed by data and critical thinking. We question our biases and do not make snap judgments or leap to conclusions. 

• We celebrate diversity! We seek and value diverse perspectives, and work to create an open, supportive culture.

• We critique problems, not people. We acknowledge what works and what doesn't, and we put our best foot forward to change the industry.

To ensure our values are lived, not filed and forgotten, we’ve woven them throughout company processes, from how we interview candidates and conduct performance reviews to the wins we celebrate at our weekly all-hands meetings. Each month, we give our “Golden Cert” award—one of the highest honors achievable at Newfront—to an employee who epitomizes our values. It’s in this way we set up our values to become our destiny.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear your feedback on Newfront’s values and perspective on incorporating values into company culture. You can reach me at gordon@newfront.com or connect with me on LinkedIn here.