Values with Teeth
If no one disagrees with your values, they don’t matter.
A year ago, Mark, Jesse, and I wrote down the first version of the Clef Values. They were everything we aspired to in building a company, and they’ve helped guide every decision we’ve made at Clef since then. They were:
- Fight the default of exclusion.
- Be better today than yesterday.
- Treat others the way they’d like to be treated.
- We succeed together.
- Build trust with truth.
But now we’ve been living with these values for more than a year, and they look a little different to us than when we first wrote them down. They’re all still accurate representations of beliefs we held, but it turns out that some of them have been much more useful than others. We’ve found ourselves repeating “Be better today than yesterday” almost every day, but we almost never say “we succeed together.” Worse, “Build trust with truth” has often made our decisions even more confusing or ambiguous instead of helping us clarify our path forward.
I couldn’t have explained the difference when we first wrote the values, but our experience has taught me that values must have teeth. They need to be actionable and directed. You will be faced with ambiguity over and over at a small company, and if your values cannot help you in those situations, they are worthless.
That also means that they need to be opinionated. I often see companies with values like “Respect” or “Diversity” which are really virtues, not values. No one will win an argument by saying “but our value is Respect!” or “remember that we value Diversity here!” because those values aren’t opinionated. They haven’t planted a stake in the ground. To work at a company with “Respect” as a core value, you don’t have to confront your own relationship with respect. It’s easy to read it, nod, and move on. You can’t disagree with Respect.
With our best values, the opinion has been clear over and over again. When we’re questioning a process or habit that is common in our industry, but which seems exclusive to us, it’s easy to say “fight the default of exclusion” and know which decision aligns with our company values. Whenever we make a mistake, we tell each other that we’re focused on being better today than yesterday, and to focus on the learning mindset.
After a year, we’ve realized that “we succeed together” is too much of a platitude. It’s true, but it’s hard to disagree with, and it doesn’t help us make good decisions. “Build trust with truth” is insidious because it’s hard to disagree with and hard to understand. In a given situation, what is the capital-T Truth? How do we deploy it to build trust? It muddles our thinking and every time we cite it, it leaves us more confused than we started.
So, one year in, we’ve decided to modify the Clef values. This is the first change we’ve made, but it certainly won’t be the last. As we learn and grow, it’s critical that our values do the same. Today, we’re merging two toothless values into a value that we think is much more clear and actionable. The new value is:
We succeed together when we trust each other.
Trust is the currency that powers every interaction on teams. Only when we trust each other can we share the candid feedback and opinions that let us be creative and successful. We give our coworkers deep visibility into how our decisions are made and easy outlets to help them give input and guide our course. When we build trust through good communication, we create an environment for better communication in the future.
This new value has already helped us make decisions, and becomes more relevant with every person that we add to the Clef team. It’s opinionated and direct, and I hope that it will continue to serve us well.
At Clef, we’ve centered our values in our company culture and decision making process. To do that, we’ve needed values with utility. They can’t just be flattering descriptors or aspirational catchphrases. They need to push us to make better decisions and help us align our goals around central beliefs. They need to be bold statements of priority. They need teeth.
Two Factor Authenticity is a community publication on Medium, curated by Clef. For more from the Clef team, follow us on twitter @getclef
