STOP DOING VALUES
STOP DOING VALUES
- CORPORATE CULTURE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE TURNED INTO A RELIGION
- YEARS OF PERFORMANCE REVIEW yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for “LEADING WITH INTEGRITY”
- Wanted to codify and share corporate culture? We had a tool for that: it was called “DRINKING”
- “Yes, I am embodying CREATE ROOM TO GROW. This quarter I was incredible at DRIVE CURIOSITY.” - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged.
LOOK at what HR have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all of the performance reviews & handbooks we built for them:
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“Hello I would like to Stay Curious Embrace differences please”
They have played us for absolute fools
Ok, Let’s Get Started
As a part of Corporate America, I’m sure you’ve encountered a company that has values.
See, your company has a culture, and the executive desire is to shape that culture by telling you what that culture is.
So invariably, you have a laundry list of things that The Company wants to see you do: no longer can you merely do a good Job, now you must be able to quantify that job in the Values Quadraxus, where every task is measured by whether or not it’s modelling Be Best, Innovate Strategically, or Handshakefulness.
I’m Warning You: Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, Ask Any Senior Developer In Your Company To List The Values Without First Checking The Wiki
Look, I’m just saying, you might be disappointed to learn that company adoption of The Values may only be a handful of brown-nosers and some kids too green to have seen all of this before.
The Defaults: Problem Solving, Teamwork, Creativity, Integrity
As an employee in literally any large company, the expectation is that we will:
- Succeed at our work.
- Work well with our teammates.
- Be creative.
- Be honest.
So, let’s say that the default, baseline expectation of every single white-collar employed adult is “problem solving”, “teamwork”, and “creativity” and “not embezzling”.
Even in companies like Amazon that have embraced survival of the fittest style management where the default expectation is that the only way to succeed is while standing, hands bloodied, over the corpses of co-workers whose hearts you’ve eaten - even then, the expectation is still that you would at least pretend to be a team player while we’re doing it.
So, there are lots of different ways to phrase these, and we’ll see them all come up in Every Values Statement:
Success
Success is fast-moving _problem-solving analytical OWNERSHIP taking-on challenges decision-making under fire doing the thing WINNING, delivering GETTING THE A+ best-in-class VELOCITY award-winning top-tier conquering VICTORIOUS spirited!
Teamwork
Teamwork is collaboration cross-function co-operation SYNCHRONIZING WITH ALIGNMENT respectful HELPING customer-focused stakeholder engaged connected togetherness.
Creativity
Creativity is innovatively pushing the envelope, pushing boundaries, iterating and refining to rethink the status quo, embracing change, agility courage bravery GOING YOUR OWN WAY ideas!!!
Integrity
Integrity is having the trustworthy honesty not to be carrying an armload of stolen pencils into your Nissan Altima, and being enough of a clear-eyed straight-shooter to point out when someone else is.
I’m seriously considering baking these in as the attributes in an exciting new corporate RPG.
“I roll an 18 on my Teamwork check”.
“That’s a fail, you didn’t demonstrate stakeholder alignment. Take 4 wiki damage.”
Anything that falls into these categories is table stakes. There aren’t a lot of companies out there pitching that we should fail at tasks, alone, bring no new ideas to the table, and then lie about it.
If you can not imagine a company intentionally adopting the opposite of a value, it is not a real distinctive value: it is a baseline human expectation. “Honesty”, “quality”, “customer service”, this is all just what we’re supposed to do.
I may or may not have made fun of these in a video I recorded while I was 50lbs heavier than I am now:
These do not represent values or culture so much as a yawning absence of them: “just be a regular-ass good corporate citizen, like you would in any other company”.
I’m not bothered that these values exist and crop up often in Company Values - like, sure, it’s okay to write down “you should be honest, collaborative, and productive, that’s a baseline expectation of all employees everywhere” somewhere in your handbook. What bothers me is that every company treats their own personal set of these like they’ve discovered The Rosetta Stone, so at one company you’ll be Boldly Collaborating, but in another, you’ll be Embracing Teamsmanship - as if these are completely different from place to place.
The Pretendium: Brutal Honesty
Even worse than the “table stakes” values are values that are… let’s say, “aspirational but not actually true”.
Lots of companies would like to imagine that they embrace brutal honesty, acknowledging and embracing the uncomfortable truths - and yet - somehow, during the all-hands, difficult questions come anonymously.
I have a real and enduring habit of discovering exactly the line past which saying uncomfortable truths is no longer (sidenote: “you don’t say”, reading this) . I’m always walking a very careful line, no matter how boldly a company decides that it wants to embrace what they think might be the unfiltered truth.
More Pretendium: Anything That Could Lose Money
We all know the one true value: make money or perish.
You know, Wu-Tang Clan rules:
Cash Rules Everything Around Me
If a value isn’t more important than making money, it’s not a value, and precious few values are more important than making money.
If you’re doing something enormously profitable that doesn’t involve collaboration or innovation, and you do it all by yourself - like, say, it’s your job and your job alone to perform regular maintenance on core payment systems - guess what, values be damned, you’re important.
Corporate Kayfabe: You Have To Pretend To Care
Nobody ever mentions it when Values come up, but they come with an implication that everybody finds exhausting.
We have to pretend to be jazzed about this stuff, because it’s invariably tied to promotions and advancements.
We all, collectively, understand deep down in our bones how silly it sounds to say “This quarter, I Moved The Needle and Teamed Hard by building the Quinquunx Megaystem” - we have to say it, we have to go look up which value the thing we did might be listed under, because that’s how success is measured.
Generally, surviving in the corporate world involves no small amount of existing in the world of pretend. We have to pretend that we’re excited to help everyone, we have to pretend that all feedback is equally welcome, we have to pretend to be bright and chipper and full of energy - because at the end of the day, the whole illusion must be maintained that we’re all buddies and we want to be here because we just love working so gosh darn much.
It would be actively harmful to morale to admit that we’re often tired, irritated, overwhelmed, angry, concerned - everyone playing a bit of pretend is the oil that lubricates all of these work interactions.
At the end of the day, our co-workers aren’t our friends, our workplace isn’t our home, and we’re exactly as replaceable as the next person if we’re ever even a whiff of a liability.
Do you know what? I don’t even think this is even a bad thing. I don’t think I want to work at a company where all of my co-workers are brutally honest about how they feel about me, or work, all of the time. I’m told that “we’re all a family here” workplaces are nightmares. They still have all of the same problems, they’re just more deluded about it.
It’s perfectly okay to admit, sometimes, that we’re a band of professional mercenaries here to solve problems during the day so that we can continue to afford luxuries like “electricity” and “food”.
The Ten Commandments of Consumer Satisfaction™
Corporate Values always feel like a bit of an extra stretch on top of the regular levels of corporate kayfabe, because we are expected to devote a bunch of time and effort to learning the specific lingo of this company’s particular spin on “collaboration, teamwork, honesty and problem solving”. On top of all of this other playing of pretend, we also have to pretend to embrace this weird made-up corporate handbook religion to work here?
Okay, I guess.
Every morning I wake up and tend to my little shrine to Respectful Competition.
Now I’m devoted to Innovation, with Integrity and Acting For Others, Curiously, or whatever.
It’s Okay To Codify and Reward Basic Professional Expectations
Saying “we value teamwork, success, problem-solving, respect, and integrity” is probably fine. Companies don’t have to be unique. This certainly doesn’t have to be a big deal with Formal Names.
What It Means to Have Real, Actual Core Values
First of all, I think every person should have their own set of values. I think that they should reflect deeply about what’s meaningful to them, what sets them apart.
I think that values are non-obvious and involve some kind of trade-off, because otherwise they’re just things that everybody should be doing all the time - baseline professional expectations.
Here are some of mine:
- Impatience: I am, for a developer, more willing than usual to sacrifice quality for velocity. I will ship a worse thing, faster, because I respect the value of getting to market quickly. I still believe in craft - I want to make Good things, but I don’t want to let it get in the way of making Things.
- Whimsy: I am willing to put a lot of extra effort into a product to make it not noticeably better but simply to make it weird, unique, or funny.
- Uncomfortable Levels of Honesty: I often over-share. I treat everybody like a confidante in our first meeting. I am willing to put my career or reputation at risk to speak truths, comfortable or no, but I am very careful not to be cruel or mean about it. I am rarely brutally honest but I am often ha ha, awkward.
- Open-Mindedly Conservative - I’m often (sidenote: not politically, I’m slightly center-left by Canadian standards, which means I’m a raving communist nutbar by American standards) and slow-moving when it comes to reacting to or enacting big changes - I’m increasingly likely to embrace stability, reliability, to go “well, that’s always worked well enough” - but I’m also deeply suspicious of these instincts and try to be easily convinced otherwise.
- Reluctant Helpfulness: I’m willing to sacrifice personal velocity to unblock (sidenote: unless what they’re doing doesn’t seem very important or urgent) . Not because I want to or because I like it, but because I see it as my responsibility.
- Hard-working Laziness: I do not like to do things, which is why I build so many tools and processes to make those things not bother me any more. My ideal state at work is no meetings, no tasks, moisturized and unbothered.
Personal Values Aren’t Company Values
I don’t think that it would make sense for any of these to be company (sidenote: well, except for “whimsy”, I’ll go to bat for any company willing to put in extra effort to be needlessly strange, including, sometimes, my own when I am very lucky) - in fact, when I was much more involved in hiring, I would intentionally try and pick people who would balance out some of my values with complementary ones.
So why did I list some of my personal values, here?
To try and help establish what makes values meaningful, interesting, distinct, and unique.
They must involve trade-offs. Every value must exist in opposition to something.
Why is your company like this? What’s different about it? Do you want to preserve that?
Values Do Exist
All of this might make it seem like I don’t think company values exist. I do! Valve is different, culturally, from Activision. Toyota and Tesla are culturally very different, they value different things.
But - I think that, largely, company values aren’t so much (sidenote: Toyota, notably, lists 10 on their website, and most of them are the same Basic, Obvious Stuff I’ve been complaining about, here.) . They’re discovered, modeled, emulated. If you’re very lucky, someone clear-eyed might notice and codify some of them.
Company values aren’t what a company says in the handbook. They’re what they reward, who they listen to, what they’re willing to trade for, which pathologies they punish and which ones they tolerate, and what they’re willing to suffer to keep.
The values are accreted over years, decades, they’re often fractious - a patchwork of the ideals and values of the people who are influential, a constantly moving and evolving target. Some of them change on a dime, or with new leadership, some of them are so deeply held and intuitively understood that if a new person inadvertently breaks one of them in an all-hands the whole company will be quietly shocked for weeks afterwards.
STOP DOING VALUES. Start having (sidenote: Does this line kinda feel like an LLM wrote it? I definitely wrote it, I thought it was a good button for the article. It just kinda gives off that Machine vibe. Consider reworking.) .