values as tools for equity
When your values are clear, accurate, and cited regularly (in praise, in goals, in strategic decisions), you’ve made them a key part of your organization’s dialect. They are a part of your code, in two senses of the term: your shared language and your system of rules (which is a system of incentives).
Most folks on a team, especially new to a team, are wondering some version of these two questions:
How can I be great?
How can I belong?
In a values-driven place, values can answer both questions. You’re great by embodying the values; you belong by speaking of them, with them, in reference to them.
A place like this has much simpler internal politics and economics. People don’t have to get ahead by deploying hard-earned political skills: reading rooms, decrypting leader preferences, constructing alliances, identifying back channels, shielding motives, cultivating “authenticity”. Instead they can be earnest - even a little dopey - in delivery of the values stuff.
The incentives are simpler too - doing this easily understood and regularly documented set of things, these value behaviors, is what gets you praise, promotion, permission. It makes you persuasive.
Values are usually written in less than a page and often less than a paragraph. They are accessible. You don’t need tenure, privilege, or particular identity markers to understand them or to get to see them.
In addition to their other benefits, this accessibility makes them tools of equity, too.
-Eric
