Nobody wants to hear about your values

I’m in my forties. I’m a lot happier about this than I thought I would be when I was 25. Back then, I remember thinking that when I hit 40, I’d just walk into the sea. It seemed like it was such an old and depressing age. But now I’m here, and it’s great. And not in a “yeah, honestly it’s not that bad” kind of way either - it’s genuinely way better than being 25.

One of the reasons it’s so great is that over these 40 or so years of being alive, I’ve collected some people I like. Probably at least five of them (not to brag). These are my people. I mean they’re awful, obviously, but they’re my kind of awful. We align well. You could very easily say we have the same values.

This is despite the fact that at no point in my life have I written a list of values the people I love should have. I have never actively told the people in my life who I am, or what I value in others. I’ve just been the person I am, they’ve been the people they are, and here we are: a group of people with the same values who share time with one another.

Just being who you are attracts people who have your values, and pushes away those that don’t. It’s incredibly simple, and it usually isn’t necessary to talk about it. This is why I find it so frustrating how much time and energy companies spend talking about their values, and how little they spend actually being true to them.

It usually looks something like this. The company leaders will decide that in order to build or retain their culture, they need to make sure everyone knows what their values are. The only problem is, they don’t actually know what those values are themselves. So for several months, they will try to work them out. They will have long meetings, they will book retreats, they will argue and agonise and debate. After several attempts, they will eventually agree on a list of values which will almost certainly be practically identical to the list of values every other company in the known world has. They’ll then painstakingly create an over-elaborate slide deck, which they will present with much fanfare to a group of employees who absolutely do not care in the slightest.

Afterwards, crushed by the awkwardness of of it all, someone will offer some vaguely positive feedback along the lines of “Yeah, I think these values really capture who we are”, like an emotionally stunted uncle pretending he loves the terrible picture of a dog his nephew has just given him. Then everyone else will murmur half-hearted agreement, the conversation will end, nothing will change, and everyone will go back to their desks and continue to behave exactly as they behaved before. That’s what sharing your values typically looks like in practice. The company tells people what their values are, and then that’s pretty much the end of it.

You wouldn’t laugh if a comedian got on stage and just said “Hey everyone, I’m really funny”, without telling any jokes. But you almost certainly would laugh at a comedian who told jokes that you found funny, even if they didn’t make a point of telling you they were a funny person.

Writing your values on the wall doesn’t magically give you or anyone else those values. If you cheat on your partner and get caught, you can’t point at the sign on the wall that says “I’m always faithful” and expect them to ignore the feet poking out from under the bedroom curtain. Nobody cares what you say you are, only what you actually are.

This is not me saying that having values isn’t important. It obviously is because all the companies most of us are trying to emulate have them. But the way we share our values has to be more than just a presentation and some company merch. When we just tell people the values we think we should have but don’t actually live by them, we’re cargo-culting. We’re building the runway and thinking that’s all we need to do to make the planes arrive.

Before he died, Louis C. K. once said “I have a bunch of values, and I live my life by none of them”. That feels like so many companies I’ve worked for. Almost always, the list of values the company said they had just didn’t correlate at all with how they behaved. The “values” they communicated were actually just guide-rails to try to coerce the employees into behaving in a way the leaders couldn’t be bothered to behave themselves.

The point I’m somewhat labouring is that if we are going to claim to have a set of values, we had absolutely better be willing to follow through on that. We have to be diligent with our people intelligence, ensuring we know who actually exhibits those values across the business and who doesn’t, and then we need to respond to that in a meaningful way. HR need to have a dynamic and simple talent assessment process that brings to the forefront the people who exhibit the company values, and quickly removes the people who don’t. If we say we have values, but we then treat the people who live by them the same as the ones who don’t, we don’t really have those values at all. Nobody is going to buy it.

When you have values you live by, people who also have those values will respond to you and be inspired by you. I worshipped Muhammed Ali when I was a kid, not just for his boxing, but for who he was. If he ever wrote a list of his values, I’ve never seen it. But I know what they were. I know the values he lived by and that I was inspired by. I believe if you took a thousand people who followed his life and asked them to write down his values, we’d all produce a pretty similar list, even though he never told us what they were.

It comes down to something simple; you should have values, but you are going to have to communicate them through your actions. Telling everyone what they are isn’t enough. If you treat people with respect, you will attract and retain people who value treating others with respect. If you encourage creativity, you will attract and retain creative people. If you value cut-throat competition and you make work competitive, then people who aren’t competitive will leave and people who are competitive will thrive. But if you just tell people what you want them to be without actually being it yourself, it won’t work. If you want to be something, get on with being it. The people who feel the same way will come along with you.

I’m pretty sure in the colosseum they didn’t have posters up everywhere that said “We try not to get brutally killed with swords”. Everyone probably just picked up on the vibe.