How to Communicate your Identity as a Company

When is the last time you read a set of company values and knew what that company was about? I don’t mean superficially. I’m not talking about the industry they’re in, or how many employees they have. I mean you got a sense of their mission, their goals, their targets. Are they an optimistic company, or do they plan for the worst? Conservative or reckless? Do they design twice or do they cut once and learn as they go? At Upside, we've been thinking a lot about our identity and our values.

Your values codify the essence of your company. They’re your signature, your imprint. They are the shortest possible description of who you are. Tell me, when you see a value like this, what do you think?

Some of you might find this energising. It’s only three words, has a random swear word and holds that all-important imperative tone. But if a company emboldens this and pastes it all over their walls, what does that tell you about the company? All we know with certainty is that this is a company that values getting things done. Much like every other company that’s ever existed.

Perhaps this statement is for colleagues, rather than outsiders. It’s a rallying cry for the departments to get busy. Let’s run with this example and picture a simple organisation. This company has only two departments — sales and software. Let’s take the execution of this value from two different perspectives, and unearth the problem with a value statement like this.

Sales

Sales is a complex and difficult profession. There’s an element of magic that turns a good sales pitch into a great sales pitch. It’s easy to understand what a high performing sales department does. They sell. There are a few different ways we can slice this — transaction volume, favourable contract rates, new markets and so on. But if a sales department is “getting s*** done”, they’re invariably signing more contracts and winning more business.

As we win more business, we increase the work in progress for the organisation. This is natural. The more contracts we sign, the greater our commitment. If we’re clever about the deadlines, we may be able to minimise the work we’ve got going on at one time, but our sales department is getting s*** done. The whole team is hitting sales target after sales target and it’s not long before the organisation is operating at maximum capacity.

Engineering

Counter-intuitively, a software department that wants to get s** done can not say yes to everything. It takes a great deal of saying no. This has some mathematics behind it. Little’s Law is an equation that came out of queueing theory, that describes the relationship between the work we have in progress and how long it takes us to complete each item of work. This is a staple of manufacturing and over the past few years, has made its way into the common consciousness of software engineering.

As you might imagine, the longer the queue, the longer a work item is going to have to wait for. If you couple that with the dangers of context switching and the increasing operational overhead, you’ve got a dangerous cocktail. A responsible engineering department minimises these factors.

Your engineering department begins freezing non-essential work. This is necessary if you want them to get s*** done. With a sales department that is performing like Jordan Belfort on steroids, how are they going to manage all of this new work?

Here’s the thing

In the best possible situation, people internalise and practice the values that you create. They take them home with them and they talk to their spouse or their parents or their children about them. They love those values, they resonate on a personal level. So what is so wrong with get s*** done, and how did it lead to such misalignment? Let’s get back to basics.

What is the purpose of a value?

When we see values in the wild, outside of the context of business, they can take a strict or relaxed form.

The first two are strict guidelines. There is no misinterpreting them. You always follow the law, you always treat your server with respect. The latter two are less targeted, but they still take the imperative form. They’re a direction.

Values constrain behaviour, in whatever form they take

A value, guideline, principle or ideal has a clear purpose. It narrows our field of vision and limits our possible options. They are constraints on our behaviour. We trade a handful of freedom for a great deal of alignment.

This sounds negative, none of us wants to be constrained, but the study of constraints as a productivity mechanism is a fascinating one. Even catchphrases like “Be true to yourself” are constraints. The alignment we create here can create a shared sense of purpose. A comradery of living by the same code.

It’s clear why our value didn’t work

What purpose can we glean from get s*** done? What constraints do we apply to ourselves? It isn’t clear. There was probably a fantastic conversation before creating this value. There was a room full of people, surrounded by notes and post-its, laughing at having finally described the feeling they all shared. They wanted to get s*** done. Only, that’s not a value, is it? It’s a description of a feeling, at one moment, shared by a handful of people. How do dozens, hundreds or thousands of other people internalise that?

If the company was only a handful of people, this could work. It’s sensible to go and talk, at length, to 10 people about these values. At this size, every employee could have been present at the inception. But what happens when your company is 100 people? 1000 people? That special meaning is lost and all that is left is the phrase.

Look at these other values and tell me, what purpose can you glean from them? What constraint have we applied to our behaviour? How have we narrowed our focus?

Some of these are better than others, but I could lift them and stick them onto any company and make them work. Remember, your values are your signature. They’re a distillation of who you are. You don’t want boilerplate, because you are not boilerplate.

So what does a great value look like?

Fortunately, great company values are not difficult to find. Take this value statement from George Merck, written in 1950.

The constraint here is clear. Every single employee at Merck knows what it means, and as an outsider, I immediately get a sense of the priorities at Merck. A sales department and a software department are encouraged into an ethical debate with this discussion, but they aren’t pitted against one another. What about this one from Etsy:

Optimise for developer happiness

This one seems initially obvious. Of course, you want happy employees but look at it again. They’re not optimising for growth, revenue, transaction volume, market share. They’re optimising for the happiness of their developers. Now, when the sales department is about to sign a new contract, they’re forced to find out the impact this will have on the engineering department. When an engineering team are building an internal tool, they don’t have the option to take shortcuts with the UI. They need to talk to the other developers to find out what works. Collaboration is built into this value. What about a completely different business like Nordstrom, who wields the following mantra daily:

Service to the customer above all else

We couldn’t take this and apply it to other stores, because it’s clear that other stores have different ambitions. No, this is a Nordstrom value. It is part of their corporate fabric. It is their signature.

What do all of these values have in common?

Everyone will see something slightly different in these values, but I think there is something consistent about them. Compare them to the previous values that we discussed. First, they’re open but they’re not vague. The spirit of George Merck’s statement is clear, 70 years later.

These values wear their constraints without apology. Look at Nordstrom’s value. It prioritises things for you. At the top of the pile is “Service to the customer”. Everything else subjects itself to that top tier.

These values listed above are specific enough to represent the company. They’re open enough to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. They commit. You can’t commit to getting s*** done in any real sense. Imagine if George Merck had gone into the Time magazine interview and said: “Well, I just want my employees to be bold”. We would have learned nothing new about Merck as a man or Merck & Co. as a company. Instead, he committed.

So what now?

Inspect your company values. Look at them on their own, without the support of your experience. Imagine you weren’t in the room when they were written. What can you learn from them? What do they say to other people? What commitment do those values make?

If you look at your values and detect a sense of uncertainty, how do you think it looks from the outside? Search for the commitments your organisation has made. Real, big, audacious goals. Work out why you want to do them and turn those into a simple, memorable message. That will say more than a catchphrase like get s*** done ever could.