Too much of a good thing? The dark side of company values and being too 'I got this'

Four years ago, having just been acquired and merged with another business (and operating with a new brand and new leadership), a survey of our London team revealed that only 56% of people were proud to work at C Space and only 4 in 10 intended to stick around for another year. Unsure of what to do about this, we decided to tackle what we felt was the root cause - our culture. To help crack this, we asked a cross-functional team to work together to co-create a set of Behaviors (Values) to shape the culture we aspired to have.

In response to a feeling that we weren't as proud of our work as we should be, the team came up with 'Only Accept Awesome'. 'Show the Love' was borne out of a tendency we had to focus on the numbers and the big successes, without pausing to celebrate the little things or really look out for one another. 'Do What Scares You' was a push to get outside of our comfort zones and not become complacent post-acquisition. 'I Got This' was about being able to trust your colleagues to follow through on their commitments, and encouraging people to raise their hands when they saw something that could be improved (rather than passing the problem to someone else or just complaining)! There's a whole story about our journey learning to live, celebrate and build our business around these new ideas (but that's for another day).

Jumping forward a year, the same engagement survey revealed that 75%+ felt the launch of the Behaviors had positively impacted our culture. 70% of people could see themselves at C Space in 12 months' time, and pride had increased to 85%. We went through a similar co-creation exercise in the States and evolved and augmented the Behaviors to a set of Values which were relevant to our American offices too (We still call them 'Behaviors' in EMEA, and 'Values' has stuck in our US offices).

We've been living with them for a few years now and while we've definitely not got everything right, pride is still at 80%+ on both sides of the Atlantic and 90%+ agree that we have a strong culture. We've picked up a couple of global 'Best Agency Awards', and in 2018, won the MRS 'Best Place to Work Award' in the UK. We've no doubt that striving to live our values played a significant part in this.

Too much of a good thing?

As we continue to grow and transform and look at what is and isn't working in our business, we're once again taking a look at our values to ensure they're shaping our culture in the way we want them to.

After all, any strength overplayed can have unintended consequences.

We've seen how a relentless focus on 'Only Accepting Awesome' can lead to people not knowing when something is 'good enough', over-delivering against client contracts or having unreasonable expectations of others. 'Doing What Scares You' can be an excuse for blagging your way through something without proper preparation. Being too 'I Got This' can lead to people taking on too much, or them not bringing in others who might be able to help them.

Last year, we were beginning to feel that we'd lost the true spirit of the behaviors (values) we'd developed. We started to realize that while we don't need to change them, they do need 'resetting' for the business we are today. We needed to do a better job of telling the story of the journey we've been on, and we needed to have some challenging conversations around when we weren't living up to our aspirations.

We started to talk openly about the 'light' and 'dark' side of our values as a safe way into the topic.

It's one of the reasons we gave an interview to 'QZ at Work' telling our story so far, not the positive PR story where you get to sign-off on what gets covered, but the journalist's version - her take on what we've been living for the last few years. I confess to feeling totally exposed and a little frustrated and defensive about how she chose to portray events (and some of the melodrama she introduced), but ultimately we thought it was important to be transparent about the challenges and realities of culture-building. We wanted to drive a conversation about our values and why they matter.

We brought together cross-functional, multi-level teams in our EMEA and US offices. They mapped out the positive and negative impact (and unintended consequences) of living any one of our values to an extreme.

Separately, the leadership teams spent time considering whether we were really role-modelling the values we were asking others to sign up to. And we surveyed our team to get their perspective on the 'light' and 'dark' side of our values.

The discussions around the two sides of 'I Got This' highlighted how important it is that we re-frame this for our people. While 'I Got This' drives positive behavior around ownership and initiative ("We embody 'I got this'. I work with some of the hardest working most reliable people I’ve ever met."), there are definitely downsides which need mitigating: "We are an amazing culture of people who are so dedicated to getting things done. You could even say too focused on that to the detriment of stepping back and asking should we do this? Or, how can we do this better, more efficiently, more effectively instead of just diving in and getting it done."

Others pointed to the challenges of people wanting to prove themselves by demonstrating ownership, versus involving and empowering others, or collaborating towards a better outcome: "We definitely have an 'I got this' culture. I feel like everyone at C Space is very quick to say that they can or will do something for the team. As someone who is a bit newer to the company, though, I think that we could do a better job of saying 'I could do this and I know how to do it really well, but instead of taking ownership, I'm going to sit down and show someone else how to do it so that, as a team, our skills will progress'."

You get what you promote

When we first launched 'I Got This' into the business we talked about the importance of 'being the first to take responsibility when something needs fixing' and of 'lightening the load on your colleagues by ensuring they can trust you to do what you say you'll do'.

It's played out: "I got this" is a double-edged sword. We're always looking to lend a hand and help others, but it also can lead to burnout" and "Sometimes it feels like people are so keen to demonstrate they've 'got this' that they just don't ask for help when they need it". The team pointed out that it's easy to recognize someone for having an 'I Got This' attitude if they end up working late or take on more work without complaining. That recognition can be healthy in some circumstances, but not if taken to an extreme. The more a behavior is recognized and celebrated, the more it reinforces it as the behavior that's most valued. This can be dangerous.

We've realized we need to re-frame 'I Got This' (and some of our other values too) to drive healthier behavior and strengthen our culture as we continue to evolve. How do we balance ownership and initiative with the need to collaborate? How can we ensure that people feel that they can say 'I've reached my limit' or 'I need help'? How can we signal that it's OK to have boundaries and understand that they need to look after their own well-being (especially since another one of our Values is 'We before Me')?

As Peter Block points out in 'Flawless Consulting',

"Saying no says that we have limits, that we have a right to declare boundaries and decide on our own what we commit to. If we cannot say no, then yes loses its meaning, and commitment also is taken off the table. We become programmed to say yes and after a while do not know when the yes is sincerely felt or simply born of institutionalized habit."

So the team have re-framed 'I Got This' to help people understand this. It still means 'doing what I say I'm going to do' and 'taking the initiative to make things happen' but we're dialing up some other important elements. It also means:

• asking for help when I need it
• not stealing the spotlight
• not saying yes to everything 
• ... or pretending I know the answer when I don't

Of course, tweaking the way we talk about this won't change everything. But language is important. We need to not just focus on what they do mean, but also what they don't.

We need to ensure leaders model and celebrate these behaviors, that they're baked into the competencies we use to inform promotions and progression, that we're celebrating people who do these things, the people who show 'they've got this' by spotting and solving problems, but also the people who recognize that they actually haven't got this, require help or need to say no.

We're doing various things this year to ensure that people understand the true spirit of our values. We're proud of the culture we're creating and know that we'll always be working on it. We know we'll never get it totally right, that culture is fluid and messy and changing but that having healthy and open conversations about what's not working is an important step in becoming better.

If you're interested to see where we ended up, the latest update is here.