Actions over posters: Why I didn’t write down our company values
I always thought company values posted on a wall were cheesy.
I never understood why some companies would line their halls with framed posters of tired corporate words like ‘integrity’ or ‘innovation’.
Apart from the words being cliché, the company often didn’t act in line with these values.
So how does displaying them in public do any good?
The first problem: Values evolve
Another thing that’s always bothered me about writing values down publicly was that it seems too rigid.
By definition, values are meant to be unwavering principles that govern your behavior. They are what you believe and defend.
But what if your values change?
If I write my values down publicly — on billboards, paintings, bumper stickers, or whatever — what happens when my worldview changes? I don’t want to seem like a liar if I want to change one of my values. Yet, broadcasting my values and then changing them looks like I’m going back on my word.
I understand certain values might be more resistant to change than others. There are principles I believe in today that I’ve believed in my whole life and I don’t ever see changing. (For example, when we started Crew, we wrote down a manifesto for what we aimed to create and these principles still hold true today).
But there’s many other things I believe today that I didn’t believe even just a few years ago.
When I was 20 years old, I wanted a nice car, a big house, and an MBA.
Today, almost ten years later, I share a $200 car with my wife’s little brother, I have a 1-bedroom place, and I don’t want to go anywhere near an MBA.
If I forced myself to stick with my values from a decade ago, maybe I’d have a nicer house, car, and a well-paying job. But I’d also probably have a nice mortgage, student loans, and be doing work I don’t enjoy half as much as what I’m doing now.
My values shifted in favor of having no student loans, having a home I can afford, and work I love.
Now, when it comes to a company, where you’re rallying a large group of people around a few ‘core values’, it’s even harder to change these beliefs, even if you think it’s the right thing to do.
I’m a rookie in the game of life. I’m a rookie in the game of business. And no matter how much I think I know, I really don’t know much.
Things are changing too fast. Everything is connected and information spreads to everyone, everywhere in seconds. Where a decade ago, what you know today might have been good enough to keep you in the game for the next ten years. Today, you’ll be obsolete in two.
If we get too confident in what we think we know, we’re setting ourselves up to fail. The only way to survive today is to continually learn. Which means constantly evolving.
If you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for everything: What values on the wall are supposed to do
When I started a company, one of the things I heard the most from founders and investors was,
“You’re screwed if you don’t write your values down from day one.”
I get it. Having values is important for building a lasting, healthy company. As Brian Chesky, CEO of Inc.’s 2014 Company of the Year, Airbnb said,
“If you break the culture, you break the machine that creates your products.”
Writing values down is supposed to bring clarity. To act as a reminder for what you believe as a company so the things that make your company what it is (i.e. culture) don’t get messed up.
As the old saying in advertising goes, someone needs to see you seven times before they remember you and buy your product. Though the specific number of seven times has since been debated, there’s evidence that shows repetition works to get a message across.
Even if seeing values posted on a wall might be a great reminder, writing values down still felt weird to me.
If you have to write your values down it probably means you’re either not doing a good job of upholding your values or somebody with ‘experience’ told you it’s a good idea to write them down.
If your actions aren’t currently lining up with what you say your values are, you’re likely looking for a quick solution to get them to stick.
I know this because I did this.
I wrote my personal values down recently because I wasn’t doing a good job of following them. I said my values were family first, then my health, then my work.
However, my actions didn’t align. I’d fill my schedule to the brim with work, leaving hardly any space for family or preparing a healthy meal or getting physical activity or enough sleep.
Because I was sucking at holding to my values, I thought writing them down was something I could try to reprogram my brain.
I wrote my values on my computer, where I spend most of my time, to remind myself to pass every decision through the lens of my values.
Family, health, work.
Family, health, work.
C’mon brain.
For two weeks I kept that values list up. Eventually, I started automatically filtering my decisions based on those values.
If I was choosing between going to the gym and finishing more work, I saw my values in the corner of my eye and my decision became obvious. If I hadn’t done any physical activity that day, I was off to the gym.
So writing values down worked as a helpful reminder for me.
But writing values down still needed support from my motivation to change and my actions.
Actions are more important than posters
When we started our company, I didn’t feel we needed to put our values up on the wall or even say what they were.
Our values were made clear by our actions. We worked as a team of four for two years. Hundreds of projects later, we developed what felt like an innate understanding of our values. We didn’t need to say what they were.
It just worked.
For a while.
Now, we’re coming up on our third year and our team has grown from four to twenty-five. I’ve started to understand why companies feel the need to write their values down even if it looks cheesy.
To be clear, I’m not saying writing values down on the wall is the solution. I’m saying I understand it.
It’s easier to hold to values when you’re four people working together on every project. But when you’ve got multiple projects running, it becomes harder to make sure everything continues to operate within the same values.
Why is that?
Shouldn’t the people you hire operate within your company values?
Of course our teammates resonate with our values. They feel them through what we create and how we act. It’s what attracted us to each other in the first place.
Just like in any good relationship though, attraction is only part of what makes it work.
The challenge with upholding values comes in the face of real life. What happens to the things we say we believe when we run into deadlines and expectations?
It’s easy to write down or talk about a set of values, but how you hold up to them in the face of action is the biggest test of what you find important. As legendary boxing champion Mike Tyson said:
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
When someone stepped in the ring with Tyson, they had a plan. And they trained with that plan in mind for months. But when that plan met reality (a.k.a. Tyson’s right hook), it hardly held. Tyson won 50 of 56 fights in his career — knocking out almost 8 out of every 10 opponents (all of which probably had a good plan going in).
It’s easy to write values down and say you believe them. But following them once you’re in the ring, while you’re getting punched in the face, is much harder.
The product feature is due tonight. I know we said quality is important but since the deadline is tight let’s just get what we have up now even though it’s not the greatest.
That email campaign will help us grow, so let’s send it to everyone even though they haven’t said they’re okay with getting it.
Depending on your values, these decisions might be right for you. If you value growth and hitting deadlines above all else, then these actions are in line with what’s important to you.
But what if you want to grow and you want projects to be delivered on time, yet you also have a value for a high standard of quality and you don’t believe it’s right to send an email to people who didn’t ask for it?
This is a tougher call. But it’s a common one.
Giant words in a hallway might be a helpful reminder of how you want to act. But reminders alone won’t be enough to make the right decision in cases like this.
How we act our values
How many people or companies say they value your opinion but you feel they actually don’t?
How many people say family is their number one priority but their actions never live up to that claim?
By far the best way you can communicate a value important to you is through your actions.
Start with you
If you’re a founder or you’re in a leadership role at your company, every action you do gives a cue to your teammates about what the company’s values are.
As Scott Berkun, author of Amazon’s Best Book of 2013 The Year Without Pants, said,
“Most human cultures depend on leaders to define, modify and reinforce the behaviors and beliefs of the group.
This means a CEO or founder has tremendous power regarding culture. They are the only person who can:
Fire anyone
Hire anyone
Decide how/why people are rewarded
Decide how/why people are punishedThe people with the most power to mess up the culture are the ones with the most power.”
New teammates will look to existing teammates to help define values. And existing teammates will look to longer existing teammates.
So the biggest responsibility of helping a team understand and act within values goes to the people who have the most perceived power.
Whether I like it our not, as founder and CEO, how I uphold values through every action I take, will ultimately have the biggest impact on how our team acts our values.
If one of your values is to ‘go above and beyond customer service’ I need to show what ‘above and beyond’ looks like every time I do something. If a customer emails me, how fast I reply shows my team what ‘above and beyond’ means. If I reply within minutes, that means minutes equals, ‘above and beyond customer service’. If I reply in days, that’s what my teammates will deem as the right behavior when they face a similar situation.
The actions you do will outshine any words you write on a wall.
Practice the pain
Once your teammates see how you deal with upholding values in sticky situations, the best way for them to learn is to feel the same pain of making a decision in the heat of tough tradeoffs.
In the cracks and edges of uncertainty there is pain. And pain is memorable. If you want values to stick, everyone needs to experience the same tough situations you have and make their own choices.
It won’t happen that everyone immediately nails every decision perfectly in line with your company’s values. But your teammates need to run into those same forks in the road you did, and make those decisions for themselves.
If they choose the wrong way, you can help guide them the right way. If they choose the right way, great. Congratulate them and do that a hundred more times.
Values posted as a reminder: The last 10%
Maybe values posted on a wall can be helpful as a reminder. But I’m not sold on how big of an impact that actually has.
You can only understand so much in theory. If you take a class in business 101, you won’t come near knowing what it takes to build a successful company compared to if you start your own.
Doing something is at least ten times more valuable than reading about it in a book or on a poster.
I’ve seen firsthand a reminder can help but it won’t work by itself.
You have the right to evolve
If you decide to put your values on display, make it clear they can evolve.
Better yet, make constant learning one of your values.
This is not to say that you should immediately give up on a value once you’re in a situation where it’s hard to uphold it. But if you’ve decided there’s a better way, then you should be able to evolve without feeling guilty.
But don’t make the change without a clear understanding of why. And it might seem like a waste of time, but involving your team in the decision to revise a value or create a new one is an important part of the learning process for everyone.
Companies change. And often that change is necessary for the company to continue trending toward success in a constantly evolving world.
As Berkun notes,
“There is no company that has the same culture today that it did 10, 20 or 100 years ago. Cultures often change dramatically as they shift from birth, to immature success, to full maturity (and of course the vast majority of companies die before they even hit adolescence). Study the history of HP, Ford, IBM, Microsoft, or even Google and Facebook, and this observation is revealed… Ask the first ten employees who leave a successful company why they left, and many will answer ‘the company changed’. Which is fine: it probably needed to change to continue its success.”
If you write your values on a wall they may be seen but they won’t fully be understood. What I do impacts what my co-founders do which impacts what our team leads do which impacts what all our teammates do.
There’s nothing more helpful to my team than me consistently acting within what I believe our values are.
I can write our values down as a reminder but that won’t do anything without follow through from actions, especially mine.
Image credit: Muhammed Fayiz
Originally published at blog.crew.co.
