Searching for clarity: How do we behave?

This is my attempt at answering the second question of the chapter on Clarity from the book “The Advantage”. The question is about identifying the values that drive the company.

Now, we tried that before and we ran into some issues:

• We discuss values together and we ended up having too many, as we wanted to make everyone feel involved
• We ended up with some values which should be considered a given for any company and not specific to our company
• We included values that we wish we were living, but we actually were not. One cannot expect to have all qualities, all the time, after all

So we did some things right about our values because we identified them, we discussed them, we looked for examples to explain what we meant for each of them. We brought them up at every team meeting for a while. Eventually however we just stopped looking at them, as they were not essential, something defining what we are.

Ok, but why should we have values in the first place? What they are useful for?

I think they are useful as a guideline to make decisions and to bring consistency. If we share the same values and we use them for deciding the direction every time we have a decision to make, big or small, we will end up moving consistently in one single direction and making progress. If we instead we always take decisions without looking at a more general plan, we risk moving in all sort of direction and therefore not making very much progress.

In this sense I think that values make sense when they are not obvious, when you could make the case for the opposite value. For example, I used to work at TripAdvisor and the motto there was “Speed wins”. As a core value we had moving fast. I can imagine other companies having the opposite core value: making always considerate moves and double checking everything to provide the best quality possible. Moving fast and moving quickly are both valid choices, it is just a matter of deciding what is our approach and then stick to it. You do not want part of your team doing things quickly to reduce time to market and the other half being perfectionist because you would end up having a long time to market and poor quality. I think that when you cannot argue for the opposite value then you have a “bullshit value”. If you claim your core value is “Trustability”, well, it does not make any sense to me, because there is no company who could reasonably make the opposite choice and be the company that you should not really trust, right? So being trustworthy is a given. I can arrive to understand when one company picks one of these generic values, in case that particular thing is extremely important to them. For example, if they were willing to accept a huge loss to not lose the trust of a single client then they are giving a strong, clear direction. I see a very big problem when a company end up with 3-5 of these generic bullshit values, without really being willing to accept losses if needed to respect them. You end up with something written on the wall and all of your team, all employees and management, thinking this is just bullshit we have to pretend to believe in. I cannot think of a better way to build distrust in the organization.

So picking values is risky because most of the time it proves not only useless but actively damaging.

One could look at core values as the set of qualities we would require in someone we would consider to hire. If we were American we would apply also that as a filter to decide who to retain in the company, but here in Europe people do not change jobs as easily as in North America. Following this reasoning we should really have 2 core values, 3 at most. We cannot expect to find people to hire who strongly display to believe in 5 different core values, unless they are bullshit values such being honest or respect people.

I also think values should help making the company predictable. This is important for our relation with clients: they should expect a certain homogeneity of behavior from the company. If the company was friendly or serious, that could work well for certain clients and less well for others. They should be able to see a consistent behavior from us, make a decision to work with us (or not) and then not be surprised by a sudden change of behavior because they start interacting with a different representative of the company.

Ok, so how do we choose these values?

By looking at the behaviors put in place by employees and management.

In our case I think we have a few candidates:

• We are pragmatic: we look for solutions we can offer considering resources available and timeframe available. If we can think of a better theoretical solution but we understand it cannot put in place or it is not in the best interest of the client to put that one in place we adapt and provide something satisfying, given the constraints
• We are humble. We do not claim to be the best at everything. There are things we do really well, but for all the rest we help leads finding other service providers or solutions
• We work calmly. We will work hard and do our best to give you the best solution possible, but we do not work overtime or during the weekend. We do not self impose deadlines we cannot respect and we do not serve clients who has unreasonable expectations. We want also our clients and partners to have all the reasons to stay calm.
• We are prepared, we know very well our field and the different technologies available. We know well the techniques and we can come up with new solutions to problem by combining these elements in unique combinations to solve unique problems
• We research new solutions and try to improve. We do that on the Language Engineering side but also on the way we organize ourselves. We study continuously and look for way to improve
• We are not ego-maniacs. We do not blame others or try to prevail in discussions
• Usefulness: we want to build something useful, not just doing random work for the money. 

Having to pick two of these I would say that the ones that represent the most who we are are these:

• Unresting students. We are constantly learning and improving ourselves
• Reliably steady. We do what we promise we will do. We will not hurry to do things because of unreasonable deadline. We strive for relaxed, trustworthy partnerships between us and with our clients and collaborators

Wow, this one was difficult!