I recently bought a 10-person, 20-year-old company which has never formally defined its company values. I'd like to use part of an upcoming team offsite to run an exercise to help establish our values, but not sure how best to do it.

In 'Traction', the author describes an approach which involves asking the leadership team to identify top-performing employees, followed by the characteristics of how these people work, then distilling the resulting list into a set of company values. I'm not sure that this approach would work well for a company of our size.

I'd love advice from anyone who's led or participated in effective exercises for defining company values like this.