your values have shadow sides
Ben and I advise organizations that are choosing core values to think pragmatically. The values should amount to a very user-friendly playbook. Someone new to the team can pick up the page or half-page where they are named and defined, use their best judgment to act in alignment with those tenets, and excel.
Good faith skeptics sometimes recoil when we come to them with this recommendation. Value sets feel corporate, hollow, hypocritical - like a wilting motivational poster waiting to happen.
One reason these value sets often lack credibility is their authors aren’t serious about their values’ shadows. Any one of the values, taken to extremes or exemplified without the tempering effect of the others can lead to mistakes or absurdities. There can be too much of a good thing.
So a useful thing to do once you’re in the messy middle of your organization’s life (really any time after the founding), is write a companion piece to your core values that captures their shadow sides.
What happens with each value if it is overdone? Your answer to this probably stems from real experience with your team. You’ve seen things go south, at small or large scale, because someone leaned too hard into a virtue and missed a chance to act with greater subtlety and skill. A lawyer exercised Responsibility so diligently that she killed a viable project before it could come to life. A teacher practiced so much Compassion that he let a student wriggle out of that uncomfortable (but safe) place where the richest learning happens. A manager so thoroughly embraced Ownership that their direct reports missed the chance to lead in their own right.
Clarity about what your values look like in practice creates a strong floor for performance. Teams I’ve seen with strongest cultures pull together scrapbooks of real artifacts (emails, Slack threads, quick videos) where values-based “moves” are on display and they have newbies review them during orientation.
A cut above this is to get really clear on what a good faith tumble into the value shadow side looks like, too. When you do this, you’re drawing finer distinctions, more precisely targeting the kinds of judgment and behavior that are truly excellent. Your people can learn the difference between an A+ and a B and start delivering those A+s for you.
-Eric
