Your values are what your values are

I'm not a fan of company values. They are often only created as a box ticking exercise by leadership, and are frequently employed as a handy virtue signal to mask deeper organizational issues. They've also been conveniently appropriated by the consulting industry to rack up a few extra billable hours.

Integrity, Communication, Respect and Excellence - these were the company values of Enron.

We all know Enron didn't live those values. So what were they? Marketing? An aspiration?

"I'd love to have integrity someday if I can find the time".

Company values have become this defacto standard across the corporate landscape. Even startup programs are asking founders what their 4 company values are at the inception of their companies. It might seem like a completely harmless exercise, but to me it's a huge wasted opportunity. At any stage, a company exhibits values based largely on the people employed by that company. Those values cannot be easily described by 4 catchy words, and the process of doing so is at best a waste of time, and at worst actively harmful.

So we come to my tautological statement. Your values are what your values are. If you hire a team of axe murderers in your company, you can't turn around and have "empathy" as a company value. Your values already exist. If you want to write them down, then that process is one of discovery, not of definition.

"But I don't want a company of axe murderers!".

Yes, good! That's the right response. What else do you not want in your company? Maybe aggression is a value that you definitely don't want to have. Write that down. Now reflect. Is there any aggression in your company? If so, make it very clear that that is an anti value and go stomp it out (non-aggressively of course). Give your team the autonomy to call out aggression in all parts of the business. Give yourself some personality as a company that is definitely not aggressive.

Of course, you can't do any of that if you're not willing to first discover your values. Remember, they are already there.

It's not a difficult task to discover your values. It requires a few honest conversations with people you trust in your organization. You keep having those conversations until you're confident that you've come up with some negative traits about your company. You read that right, the most important part is understanding the flaws that already exist in your company. You don't have to publish these on your blog, but you should own them internally.

Let's look at some examples. Say you run a security company. One of your negative traits may be bureaucracy. The nature of your business and the people you hire means that everyone makes sure that every process is followed to the letter. This is part of what defines you as a company. Another trait may be that you're overly-skeptic. New things carry risk, and you have an aversion to them. This might make you slow to move, but give you more resiliency.

These traits would be seen as wholly negative in another company, but they're what makes your company unique. In this process you may uncover negative values that you want to discourage. Perhaps this environment has led to cliques forming as people keep conversations to private groups. Perhaps your internal culture has become duplicitous as people direct internal politics to their advantage. That's a negative trait you can start to eliminate.

I see company values much like the greeks viewed ethics. You can only ever try and fail to improve in chosen virtues, and it's that process of trying and failing that makes you a better company. As you incorporate these values into the culture of your org, you grow, and yesterdays aspirations become today's expectations.