Bullshit values, actionable values: the talent.io experience

I cannot think of an organization working without rules. Take of the iconic delegates of rebellion: teenagers. When you are talking with teenagers, they almost always tell you that they stand against any embodiment of rules. “Rules are rigid. Rules are the heritage of dated way of thinking. They are the victory of tradition over legitimacy.”, they say. Yet, however odd this might appear, there are very few organization more prone to obey to rules than teenagers. They wear the same clothes (basically you have three choices of sneakers: Stan Smith, Vans or Converse), use the same expression, watch the same movies, listen to the same music. Social pressure is moving them toward a convergence of tastes & habits. And what we call social pressure is nothing but rules. Only they are not written rules, but tacit rules.

As a headhunter turned tech entrepreneur, I noticed that more and more corporate organizations were developing ambivalent beliefs toward rules. Rules are thought by business practitioners as both unavoidable and totally bullshit.

I’ve never spoken with someone that asserted that rules should be banned from organization. But when you deep dive into what they imply by rules, you almost often end up with rules synonymous with prohibition: you mustn’t be late, you mustn’t be rude, you mustn’t be sexist. When rules try to escape the sheer world of proscription, when rules are going toward values, a general outcry happens.

And I do understand why. We have all in mind some bullshit values claimed by some C-level executives: “We are cool. We are innovative. We are daring.” And these kind of empty speeches made us believe that writing up values was a meaningless exercise.

What if values were not bullshit

As we were developing talent.io, a recruitment platform for tech profiles, we started to question this belief. Couldn’t the values be a great way to communicate explicitly what the tacit rules are? Even better, could they be of any help when a trade-off has to be made between two values by our team members.

This personal interrogation became a corporate priority as we grew from 3 to 35 people in 15 months, and opened offices in three different cities (Paris, London, Berlin). We became aware of growing concerns in the team around how to make decisions quickly, who was responsible for what, and the fact that founders could be single point of failure when they hold up the decision-making process and people are waiting for them.

So, with my two co-founders, we decided to take actions and write up what our key values were.

The first challenge was to avoid the alluring trap to write up the values by ourselves. When we asked our people what the values of their previous companies were, they answered: “I don’t know if we had any”. “I think we had some but I cannot remember which.” “I remember this one and that one.” The reason why? None had been involved into the actual making of these values.

And there were many other traps we needed to avoid.

The following of this article is by no mean the ultimate way to write up your values.

This is just the story of how we built ours and the reasoning behind it.

Coming up with our values

Step 1 : Take feedback from the team & organize the feedbacks

We sat in 1 to 1 with every single people of the company.

It was like a huge audit of the talent.io team. We asked them 3 questions:

What do you like about your job and the team? What do you not like about your job and the team? What would you do differently if you ran the company / Do you have feedback about our work as founders?

There was a lot of positive energy during the exercise because everyone could feel they were important and being listened to and it was mind opening for us as founders. And the truth is: the feedback was not always positive.

We ended up classifying all the feedbacks into 4 groups :

• personal growth / transparency / company alignment
• autonomy / relationship with managers
• team / working together / relationship with colleagues
• office / wellness / happiness

This 4 groups may differ from a company to another. But it might be a good topology to start with: lots of the startups issues look alike.

STEP 2 : Define actionable values & decide your selection criterias

Values must go beyond the expression of goodwill. Values should be actionable for any employee, in any situation to help them decide what is right within the organization.

Sharing these objectives, we needed now to define our selection criterias for our future values.

Our own 4 criteria were:

• Values must be easily converted into concrete actions and behaviors.
• We should be able to measure whether a value is alive in the company.
• the number of values should be very limited (less than 3)
• There should be a consensus amongst founders behind all values

We ended up selecting the three behind that fit all criteria:

Take ownership. Think team. Make impact.

STEP 3 : Announce, process and follow.

The announcement :

Setting up your values is a pivotal moment for your company culture. You are expecting some level of behavioral changes from your team.

Values have a big influence on how people work together, communicate and make decisions. So we decided to talk about them during a long company weekend with all team members outside of regular work hours so we could take the time to go through them in depth and why we cared about it.

To make sure that people could fully understand the values and how to be involved with it, we matched them with concrete actions, behaviors, processes and/or metrics.

Here is a sample of what we did with our 3 values:

1. Take ownership :

The objective is to empower people to make decisions and take initiatives. This way we can create a low-authority environment that encourages functional ownership for everyone.

We put in place a concept of Role that anybody can volunteer for or get elected and take ownership over it. A role means that a team member becomes in charge of a project and completely owns the decision related to this role. (Thanks to the advices of Nicolas Hernandez from 360Learning)

To avoid creating a team of mini-CEOs, we force everyone with roles — in which they have the decision-making power — to ask for inputs and recommendations from everyone affected by the decision or from people with more expertise than them in the team. Note: This is not a consensus-building exercise. You have the obligation to ask people for inputs and recommendations but you hold the final decision that you think is best for the company, regardless of individual interests.

Each role also comes with a definition of how we measure success for it and we strongly encourage making data-driven decisions.

2. Think Team :

The goal is to create trust and dependability to others. In a low authority environment, we need people to think beyond their scope and focus on maintaining a healthy workplace for everyone.

Here is one of the many things we did to make this value actionable: We created a process for managing conflicts:

• We made clear people are aware that conflicts happens.
• We made clear it’s not OK to be aggressive towards others, but it’s OK to really defend your opinion if you feel strongly about it. Be hard on the problems, soft on the people.
• If a conflict arises, you should address it immediately and face to face.
• If you can’t resolve it, it’s OK to involve a mediator — another team member trusted by both parties.

3. Make Impact:

We have very high ambitions for the company. We want to make sure people are aligned behind this ambition. It’s critical to have a high focus on results to achieve ambitious goals. We wanted to make sure everyone can answer whether they are having a good week or not. Whether they are contributing positively to reaching new highs.

One — of many — elements behind this value was to make sure we provided most of our team with methodologies to come up with their own ambitious goals. We built dedicated tools and dashboards, making it easy to follow where you are and progress made.

What did YOU do & what our experience became

I’m curious about your own experience around values. I’ve seen many startups highlight their values but not that many startups talk about how it worked for them in their team. Did you follow a similar process as we did? How would you do things differently?

I believe values are the backbone for your company and must adapt as your organization scale. We still don’t have enough data to tell whether we chose the right set of values or not, but we will continue to measure and learn.

Jonathan Azoulay

Thank you for the feedback Mister Willy Braun of Daphni

And as usual, almost everything here comes from the brains of my favorite partners Nico and Amit :)