People Driven Development

PDD: Episode 4 - Valuation of Values
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Morgan VanDerLeest: [00:00:00] All righty, let's take a look. Dear PDD, I'm a frontline manager at a series C startup with a team of eight, and we're in the process of revamping our company values. As our C level team argues, the current values no longer align with the business. The trouble is the company didn't do a great job of living the last set of values.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So my team feels a bit jaded about them altogether. How can I help support this values transition both within my team and within the company.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Signed, Not Valued.

Eddie Flaisler: What a sad, depressing nickname for someone to sign with. You have to wonder if it's about values or it's about something else. But, oh, well. Let's do it.

Eddie Flaisler: Play the intro and let's go.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I am Morgan.

Eddie Flaisler: And I am Eddie.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Eddie was my boss.

Eddie Flaisler: Yes.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And this is PDD: People Driven Development.

Eddie Flaisler: How have you been, Morgan?

Morgan VanDerLeest: Doing well. Can't compain. Started a new job recently, so that's all good things. How about yourself?

Eddie Flaisler: I've been good. I've actually been talking a lot about values recently. That's what led us to [00:01:00] picking this note. I think one core issue during such a time of transition that, you know, all companies are going through right now is the alignment on why certain choices are made the way they are.

Eddie Flaisler: And I feel like all I've been talking to my friends about lately is this is happening in my work. Why is that? Or for a manager: "I've been trying to make that change and nobody gets it. But to me, it's very obvious that these are our core principles." So during the time of transition, you really have to ask yourself, is everyone aligned on what we're trying to achieve?. And how. I think to that end, don't you think the question is very interesting because they say the company didn't do a great job of living the last set of values. How do you read that? What would you define as living?

Morgan VanDerLeest: The first thing that comes to mind, I think for me is kind of around recognition. And how do you see the values in your day-to-day or week-to-week work. It's one thing to have them on the website [00:02:00] or they get mentioned at All Hands or something, but to be consistently reminded, have those tied into some of the ways you work, maybe it's around performance or behaviors or something in that sense.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So it seems very likely that maybe as part of the revamp at this company, they're looking to lean into values more knowing they didn't do a great job previously. And then say, Hey, we're going to revamp, come about with this new thinking, new emphasis and see where that gets them.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I wonder too. Culture in general. Is this a directly intentional or indirectly intentional way to adjust how some of the company's culture works. What came to mind for you?

Eddie Flaisler: It's really interesting that you mentioned culture. One thing that I wonder about is trust, because if the person's team members don't think the company did a great job living to the values, so they're jaded. It means that what they heard their leadership team say, or what they believed in when they joined the company or what they were looking for and what was sold to them didn't end up being the truth.

Eddie Flaisler: And, you know, I would [00:03:00] like to be not cynical, but more empathetic and say: I'm pretty sure everyone is very well intentioned to live up to those values. But then the question is what was done to align between what is being said to the team and what is actually being done. I think that, one thing we may want to start talking about is: Why do companies have values anyway?

Eddie Flaisler: What is the point, as you said, besides having something nice on the website. I think the ultimate goal seems to be alignment on the basic principles that bring us as a team aspirationally. It's also a lens for decision making, but I feel that is something we should talk about a little bit later.

Eddie Flaisler: But lastly, tell me how you think about this. I always find that values at their core are a communications aid. I see it like a mnemonic device. When you say something as high level as be an owner or lead with empathy, think out of the box, we have a high bar. These things [00:04:00] are very, very high level. So clearly they don't stand alone. The goal is to remind you of something or open the conversation about how we make decisions and how we show up at work. Does that resonate with you?

Morgan VanDerLeest: For sure. I think you can have more lofty or simplified values with a smaller company. For example, very early startup. You're all in the same room or pretty close to it. You're having a lot of interactions. So the CEO and leadership, as long as they're actually living the values they're talking about, you get examples and quick feedback on things all the time, whereas once your company starts growing, if a company wants to lean into values as a way to structure the culture or the thinking process, you have to have something outside of just the CEOs and leadership, because day to day, most of the team isn't interacting with those folks. And so having these things to look to, and hopefully with some examples and iteration on what those look like is incredibly important.

Eddie Flaisler: You mentioned examples and in my mind, that's [00:05:00] probably the most important thing. More than the values themselves. It's the associated behaviors. What do we encourage and what do we not encourage as a company? So far we've been very high level Let me drill down a little bit and be more concrete.

Eddie Flaisler: For example, I'm sure you've encountered values around trust. Like, we trust each other. We have a high trust culture. We operate from trust. These are things you typically find on a company's values list. But what does that actually mean? Take a step back and say, what if in my company, I would be very, very mindful about defending authority and scope of ownership of everyone who works with us. Not pointing fingers or singling out or blaming or shaming. Making sure we don't insult, tease, threaten, berate. Demonstrate accountability.

Eddie Flaisler: Right. So, you know, we practice what we preach. We are reliable. Instead of just resorting to saying we have high trust, you can [00:06:00] think of an infinite number of behaviors that you can pay attention to and you can decide in our company, we keep making sure that these behaviors are not only recognized, but also show up in critical situations like planning or strategy and not just in all hands. It's in how we do things.

Eddie Flaisler: So we talked about trust. Another example is: we are a team, right? I've seen that value. Nobody knows what that is... but what if we had an agreement around discipline? What if we had an incentive system? We can talk about incentive systems around supporting our teammates. Making that as important, if not more than our own individual contributions.

Eddie Flaisler: Again, depending on the setting and the role and so on. It looks differently for everyone. But what if we actually made a behavior out of that? So these desired behaviors. And examples of things that are not working at our company and are not okay, are in my [00:07:00] mind, what makes a value implementable at a company.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Yeah, that checks out to me. You almost can't have the values without the examples. As you mentioned, because they can be interpreted in so many different ways. And as your company grows and more people join, and they're seeing these values through their personal lens, it's all going to get interpreted differently. Unless you really showcase examples of that and then highlight them as people live them out day-to-day, week-to-week and beyond, your values are not doing the service that they could be to the company.

Eddie Flaisler: So I'm curious. I just talked about examples of concrete behaviors associated with a certain value. Have you encountered in your experience situations where values are actually used in practice in decision making? Did you sat in meetings or a part of strategy making or planning where someone called out: hey, our value is X or our operating principle is X, let's remember that as we make the next decision.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I'm not sure it was done in quite so explicit [00:08:00] a manner, but I can think of some cases where, for example, we had execution speed and product quality being two higher level values. And we can get to prioritization later, but essentially we said, Hey, we're going to prioritize speed over quality for some amount of time.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And so when we were making decisions in meetings, et cetera, to say, do we want to get this in front of customers earlier or spend some extra time on polishing and refinement, where do we draw that line? We tended to lean towards the execution speed side of things. I find that to be a tough value set because your measurable components there are very different. Your execution speed, you can see very quickly as you're doing it, how quickly are things going out the door, number of releases, tickets, whatever you want to use. Whereas a quality metric is a lagging indicator. You're not really going to be able to tell as much about that until a couple months down the road after you've been moving really quickly for a while.

Morgan VanDerLeest: So I think if you're using some kind of healthy conflict [00:09:00] between values to also be thinking about, how do we know that the value was working or not? And if you're talking apples and oranges, maybe revisit how that works.

Eddie Flaisler: Totally. It actually reminds me of two of my own more obvious examples from the past couple of years, where a certain value was translated directly into how we were making our decisions. So one thing I've worked for a company where one of the values was: we prioritize innovation and thinking out of the box.

Eddie Flaisler: And sounds really cool, right? But how do you support that? When we were doing planning? Or when we were doing strategy? One major thing we focused on is cognitive load reduction and self serve. So I'm going to say that again, cognitive load reduction and self serve when the value is around innovation and thinking out of the box.

Eddie Flaisler: Now, I'm not sure, you know, for everyone listening, if that connects. I know that for the longest time it didn't connect to [00:10:00] me. Only then I discovered the reality of a person needing to have the bandwidth to innovate. And the mental space to think of original solutions because you're not busy just grinding and doing more and more manual work and supporting 20 different types of stakeholders.

Eddie Flaisler: So in our different departments, in particular in engineering, as we were thinking of strategy and prioritizations, we really invest in creating these frameworks for teams to serve themselves. So if Team A needs something from Team B, Team B would prefer to build something that allows Team A to take care of that need themselves.

Eddie Flaisler: And in the world of software, it can be an API. It can be an automation. Or it can be very good documentation for how to use what we build. So you don't get in a situation where every time someone in the company needs something, I need to stop what I'm doing, which may or may not be more [00:11:00] important and just do that, right?

Eddie Flaisler: So these work choices are directly related to the value of innovation. Similarly, we had stewardship versus ownership. I've worked for an organization where a big value was we are all stewards. It's not about, I own this, you own that. We are interested in solving the bigger problem and helping.

Eddie Flaisler: But if you think about it, Morgan, you cannot stop there. We as a system, we as a company, need to set up that framework that allows people to be helpful. So let's think about what that is. A, how do you recognize performance? Right. If your promotion model, if your compensation model is all aligned around individual contribution... why would anyone want to help someone else?

Eddie Flaisler: If goals and metrics are super, super team specific, and there's not enough focus on cross collaboration or organization wide success. [00:12:00] Why would teams be motivated to work with each other? And these are all frameworks or incentive systems that are being set up, which can actually be counterproductive to what you're trying to achieve or can be conducive to what you're trying to achieve if you actually were mindful of that value as you set up the system. Does that resonate?

Morgan VanDerLeest: I love that. I love particularly the way you took the company value and then helped kind of massage and translate it for your organization and your teams. I think that's great way to help make those connections for people. I know previous company I've worked with, I really respected the way that they kind of tied in the values to the way the company worked.

Morgan VanDerLeest: They reworked the performance management process, and every role at the company had a role scorecard. And it was split into two sections. There was a performance side where it was your competencies. How well you do at a certain area? And there was behaviors where they took all the company values and tie for this role, here are some examples or some ways that you can show up [00:13:00] to help showcase this behavior. And then you were ranked on those two axes of performance and behavior. And I thought that was a great way of helping to tie together, you could be a great performer and knock it out of the park on business value objectives.

Morgan VanDerLeest: But if you're not acting in ways that supports what the business needs from you and setting that example for other people, you're actually not a good fit. I really appreciated the way that the company made sure that the leaders and managers took the time to help tie together company values. For this org and department, how can this role help showcase these behaviors that would live out our company values?

Morgan VanDerLeest: I found that really helpful.

Eddie Flaisler: It seems to me, we both have similar experiences in terms of the importance of a system to support that value set and maybe in a way again, I don't know the organization of the person asking the question, but what is definitely true is that that system needs to be implemented somehow, right?

Eddie Flaisler: So even if you decide, okay, these are the behaviors. That's what we like. That's what we don't like. That's what we believe in. You need to make sure you bring that to life. So do [00:14:00] you have some rules of thumb for bringing those systems to life?

Morgan VanDerLeest: I think that's a great question. I think even just thinking back to some of our conversations recently around ownership, transparency, involvement. As a manager within the company, you do have a responsibility to uphold the company's value structure, essentially.

Morgan VanDerLeest: But how do you do that in a positive moving forward, doing things in the best way that we can sense? Get buy in from the team. Hey, here's our values. How can we live these out? What have y'all seen as examples of this, or can you give me some examples or brainstorm some examples of living these out in positive ways?

Morgan VanDerLeest: It's almost like a team norms, team practices session, but around specifically how can we live out these values in a way that at least within this team, we would like to see.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Secondly, there's a notion in lean development towards value stream mapping and that being the idea of identifying which work is important, which work is not important, or at least less important right now. And that's what a manager is doing a lot of is helping to [00:15:00] balance these things out and bringing about what the team is focusing on at any given point in time.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And this is a great way to tie all these dots together for your team and say this is how I was thinking about how these were important based on the company's goals, the company's values and where these rank together. So again, as opposed to kind of thinking it all in your head and spitting out, Hey, here's what we're focusing on. It's here's what we're focusing on. And here's why. Tying it back to those values, those objectives. It's really important and it really helps the team grow as well because it's things that they're not always thinking about on a regular basis. But to see my manager thinking through how we relate to the business it kind of helps them develop more of that business sense and also helps tie their work to the business as a whole, which is really important for inspiration, motivation, that sense of ownership, all these things.

Eddie Flaisler: Absolutely. I think, what you mentioned is spot on because communicating why you're going to do something, communicating your thought process, it's the transparency everyone talks about. [00:16:00] But, you know, I always say that transparency isn't about verbal diarrhea, isn't about sharing everything without filters.

Eddie Flaisler: Transparency is about making people understand how you think about a certain problem, and it's a wonderful opportunity to show people that these values matter, that these operating principles that the company expects the individuals to uphold is also something the leadership team is thinking about.

Eddie Flaisler: Just saying, I am making this decision because we have decided, but we're letting you know is not transparency.

Eddie Flaisler: Or even saying, We have decided to go with this reorganization because the current thing is not working. It's not transparency. Transparency is we have decided to go this transition because the current thing is not working and we believe the new thing will work because A B C D. And also, what do you think about this?

Eddie Flaisler: And also, here's what I think about what you're thinking. That's transparency. [00:17:00] And then people can make their own decisions. But starting with your why is so crucial. Not only does it help build trust, it also helps build a shared understanding of how we make decisions in this company. So that's incredibly important.

Eddie Flaisler: You know, you mentioned some very strategic aspects of building this underlying value system in the company, but I can think of, you know, slightly more tactical things. The first one is we kind of touched on that, the reinforcement of values in actual conversations, right? As, as opposed to inspirationally in an all hands.

Eddie Flaisler: So when we have the strategy conversation, when we have the planning conversation. Are we making a decision right now that is aligned with the fact we want to be: stewards versus owners. Are we making a decision right now that helps us or helps the team move toward more innovation. And you know what?

Eddie Flaisler: Maybe we're not making that decision to move towards innovation because we're otherwise very pressured and that's okay. [00:18:00] But if that's a repeated pattern, maybe it's time to ask ourselves just like this leadership team did: is this value fair or do we keep setting false expectations with our team members only to have everyone around disappointed that we don't end up doing what we said we would.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I love that.

Eddie Flaisler: Thank you for that. I think the second thing is recognition for adherence and consequences for lack of adherence. And, you know, I feel this is kind of a delicate topic. I have to admit, you yourself touched a little bit upon the performance management aspect. I have to tell you, and again, I'm not generalizing. I have a very small sample set just me. I've encountered quite a few examples where because an engineer was quote good everything else was forgiven. In terms of how the people are treated in terms of how this person shows up as a team member. In terms of, are they helpful?

Eddie Flaisler: Are they not helpful? Do they work on the right priorities or just do their own thing? And I do [00:19:00] feel that more often than not, I heard the answer, "but this person is delivering" when I wanted to take performance action. So I think it's really, really important to make sure values. are part of how we assess performance for better and for worse, meaning it's not just about punitive.

Eddie Flaisler: The opposite is also true. And even more important. We recognize and reward the way people show up. I don't remember if I mentioned that in the past, but, one of my favorite thing, probably in every company I've worked for is to have Employee of the month or employee of the quarter, kind of McDonald's style, funny.

Eddie Flaisler: And it's rarely about, Oh, this person delivered X or this person achieved Y. It's also about how they showed up and what they tried and how they affected their team members and positivity and investment. Because we're not always, I think this is something you mentioned in the past, which I [00:20:00] really like, we're not always given the opportunity to deliver something. Imagine we started working on something and then because of a change in direction, we didn't get to finish. So we have nothing to show for. So not only do we not have something actually live in production, but now imagine also nobody recognizes all the effort and can do attitude. And positivity and investment that we put in.

Eddie Flaisler: That's horrendous. So that is why that's an example of why recognizing a person's why and how they embody the values is so important.

Eddie Flaisler: Speaking of, starting something and not finishing it. I think this is again another very typical value, be an owner. Honestly, I think every single company I've worked for, I'm not saying all of them have that, had some flavor of that. And just in our previous episode, we talked about what a system or what a company can do [00:21:00] to create ownership.

Eddie Flaisler: And one of the things we brought up is the sandcastle experiment. If we keep moving the goalposts and we keep cutting initiatives in the middle and changing directions, you will not have owners. People will not see the fruit of their labor and of their investments. So we need to balance agility and being nimble with remembering that we have human beings.

Eddie Flaisler: So that's a perfect example, again, for how you make choices, strategic choices that align with the value you're trying to embody, or you're trying to kind of make people show up with in the company.

Morgan VanDerLeest: Funny that you mentioned that. It's one of the reasons why I really love, even if it's not a direct company value, to really lean on learning as an outcome for everything. Cause you do have those scenarios where a project either doesn't get into production or it doesn't work out the way that we wanted.

Morgan VanDerLeest: And so a lot of effort could be put into a thing either didn't happen or happened, but didn't have the effect that we wanted. I can guarantee you [00:22:00] that you and probably people around you learned something from that. And if you really lean on that, that means no matter what happens with that project, it was a worthwhile thing and it was a good outcome.

Morgan VanDerLeest: You know, how did you think about structuring this thing? What's a new learning you had kind throughout it? Did you get to see a new avenue of the system with this? Did we learn something new about customers? What are all these little things that you can pull on? And that's again, a great way that your values can help show you a different view than just the specific achievable outcome of a thing.

Eddie Flaisler: Yeah, this makes total sense, Morgan. It's really interesting because we talk about performance management and about making strategic decisions and about, recognizing how people embody values. But one thing comes to mind, data-driven decision-making. When it comes to talking about things that so many consider, maybe it's an extreme word, fluff, or more around human interaction and less around concrete deliverables. I feel like many would argue it's very difficult to measure how well people [00:23:00] uphold companies values.

Eddie Flaisler: There is no necessarily a metric for that. So how do you measure the immeasurable? How do you make sure your observation and your assessment of how well we do as an organization in embodying our values, how do you measure that? How do we get some input to know if we're in the right direction or if people are doing it the right way?

Morgan VanDerLeest: You know, that reminds me of the quote that's often taken out of context: " if you can't measure it, you can't manage it." The additional pieces on the front and back-end there from W. E. Deming: " It is wrong to suppose that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, a costly myth." Want to let folks sit with that for a minute. I feel like I've heard almost at every company that I've been at for years: have to measure the thing, have to have the data, have to have these specific numerical input. It does feel like within the industry, we're getting a little more focus or understanding around qualitative metrics being as, or more beneficial to understand for team health [00:24:00] performance. I'd recommend folks look into the SPACE metrics. I know that I'm going to futz them on the chat here. Maybe you have some more context there, but it's the idea that not everything needs to have this numeric value. You can make decisions off the inputs that don't necessarily look like a number and I think that's why it's so useful. You know, I feel like a broken record. I talk about this sometimes treat people like people, where are they, how are they doing? How are they in relation to a certain thing? Talk to them, get their feedback, set up ways that you can get their feedback in an easy and transparent and clear way. And that alone can help you figure out how are you doing against whatever kind of external measurements that you have for your team, department, company, et cetera. What do you think?

Eddie Flaisler: I think that what you mentioned about qualitative metrics is very powerful and SPACE is indeed a very, very strong framework for that. In the world of developer experience and in the [00:25:00] world of DevOps, There's a lot of recent work around incorporating qualitative metrics and kind of behavioral assessment.

Eddie Flaisler: How do people feel about something, sentiment analysis as a way to gauge how well we're doing as an organization or what works better and what works not as much. And you know, it actually reminds me at one of the most brilliant bosses I've had. I'm gonna do some name dropping, Thierry Chassaing, who's the head of engineering at Box. And I think he's a great guy and he's smart. And I learned a lot from him.

Eddie Flaisler: When Thierry joined, when we would have one on ones, he would give me feedback based on what he heard other people say. And he would collect a lot of information about people's views and people's opinions. And at first, I have to admit, Morgan, I hated that. It seemed borderline political and unprofessional.

Eddie Flaisler: I did not understand where he was coming from. Why did he care so much about what [00:26:00] people were thinking? I wanted numbers. I wanted spreadsheets. And one day I told him we had a one on one and I said, you know, Thierry, I'm so confused because you're such a data driven person, but you sit with me in this conversation and you tell me this person said this, this person said that, what is this, a gossip group? We're trying to run a business here.

Eddie Flaisler: And he said, Eddie, you don't get it. These people are all that matters. They're your peers. They're your leadership team. They're your team. You work with them. If they are not happy, if they perceive the situation as not working, it's all that matters. The numbers are secondary to that.

Eddie Flaisler: And I think that is the biggest thing I learned from him because he really is a master of balancing high delivery, detail oriented, data oriented decision making with as many numbers as possible, where numbers make sense with talking to people, [00:27:00] understanding where they are, doing sentiment analysis, and accepting that sometimes you need to make decisions that may not make sense on paper, but this is where the team is, and you need to think about their health and motivation as well.

Eddie Flaisler: So I think this concept of looking at the qualitative and not obsessing so much over the quantitative when making a decision about, is this value effective or not? Is this person embodying a value? Is this organization embodying a value? I actually feel it's probably one of the best methods we currently have as a society, as an industry, as a humanity, right?

Eddie Flaisler: So. I'm completely with you about this being the proper way to measure these things.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I'm glad we can agree. I loved hearing about previous manager and it really helps kind of reinforce with me the idea: data is important. It is useful. It's also easy and splits off from reality because we are unable to gather every little piece of data and how it correlates and ties [00:28:00] together to make a full cohesive picture.

Morgan VanDerLeest: That's what the qualitative is for. And as soon as we hyper fixate on a data point, we lose out on all these things that make the picture matter.

Eddie Flaisler: Totally. One thing I would want us to cover before we finish today, because I feel it's something that kind of shows up in many organization is value weaponization. It's not a very fun topic to discuss but I don't think any conversation about values is complete without mentioning one of the more problematic aspects of having a value system that is not well defined with the underlying behaviors or where enforcement is not as strict and transparent as it needs to be.

Eddie Flaisler: So one thing that I was googling earlier, and I believe it was in 2019. Gizmodo posted an article which they called Exclusive: The Letter Travis Kalanick Never Sent. This remains one of my favorite articles of all [00:29:00] times. I know Travis Kalanick is a controversial character.

Eddie Flaisler: I was working at Uber under his leadership. I'm aware of arguments on both sides. This is out of scope for this conversation. But what I will say is that I found his letter, or the one that was published by Gizmodo is very introspective regarding how the old Uber values really went downhill.

Eddie Flaisler: They ended up being misused and he gives some examples. So one of the values that Uber was Meritocracy and Toe Stepping. So even without quoting from the article, let's just think through that. On the one hand, everyone wants meritocracy, right? Best idea wins. But on the other hand, as we just discussed, there are people, you're managing a team, not individuals.

Eddie Flaisler: If you, if you choose something, there needs to be a way to choose that and to make others feel included, even though their idea was not chosen. Toe stepping, who wants to [00:30:00] do that, right? Why would anyone want to show up at a workplace with a knife between their teeth. "Always be hustling." He says in the article, let me read it: "always be hustling is a normal and positive part of startup life. But gone too far and you find you're not leaving anything on the table for the partners and communities you serve. You end up running on empty." My interpretation of that, it actually takes me to the topic of work life balance or burnout.

Eddie Flaisler: You want to get as much as you can from your team, from your business, from your community. That doesn't mean draining everyone. It's not sustainable. As an organization leader, you have a responsibility that is above and beyond just getting that next dollar. Is it something, you know, when we say always be hustling, we need to be specific.

Eddie Flaisler: It can be horribly misinterpreted.

Eddie Flaisler: " Let builders build" is a value, I personally hate it. And I'll tell an anecdote nobody's interested in, but I would still [00:31:00] share it because this is my stage and it's cool.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I'm interested,

Eddie Flaisler: Thank you. In my first performance review at Uber... when I joined Uber, I was assigned to a team that had absolutely no structure. It was a new R&D team. There were some high level goals we were supposed to achieve, but no investment was made in creating the framework for the team to actually build for things like sprint cadence and how do we do planning and what is a spec and what is an engineering document and how we make decisions.

Eddie Flaisler: And I was brought in for that purpose. Exactly. Some people were not happy with that. Because they liked chaos. And even though in retrospect, I think we were able to achieve together some amazing things. It took me time to get buy-in on that. Before I got buy-in on that, the first performance cycle came with 360 feedback.

Eddie Flaisler: And a person said, " Eddie gets zero on let builders build because he blocks innovation by forcing us to follow process." Now, I completely [00:32:00] recognize how red tape and too much process are a horrific hindrance for development, for software development, for any type of innovation. But lack of structure does the exact same.

Eddie Flaisler: You're not focused. You don't know what to expect by when. What are we trying to achieve? How are we going to do it? What considerations do we need to take into account? But it was very easy to use a value as a tool to try and trump my efforts to bring structure to the team. And I remember that was a very unpleasant time for me.

Eddie Flaisler: From that moment on, one point that I made as a leader was to always make sure that if I have a certain value that I'm holding my team accountable for embodying, I want to make sure everyone is clear what it means to uphold that value and what it means to not uphold that value.

Eddie Flaisler: So it's not just widely misused to achieve self serving goals. And we can go on, Uber had another value I see in this article, Principled Confrontation, which I [00:33:00] don't think anyone needs to be a psychology expert to understand that it can also mean be an asshole. Not sure if you're supposed to say that on a podcast, but it's about treating each other well, as you mentioned. So when we say principled confrontation, we need to be very specific. That was my spiel around misuse of values and the importance of associating very specific good and bad behaviors to make it clear what's okay and what's not.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I can really appreciate that last piece there around emphasizing a particular area of the values or shifting around how they were important, I think is an important one to call out what we mentioned earlier: be clear about your objectives. As a manager or an executive, you can think these values on time horizons too. At some points in time, it's more important for a department or a team to emphasize certain values over others, depending on what's needed for the group. If you do that without communicating about it or sharing, Hey, for the next week, the next month, some period of time, we're going to lean more on process [00:34:00] or organizing ourselves or knowledge sharing or whatever the kind of alternative would be over building. As folks are going through their day to day, they're now thinking about how they do that in a different way. To kind of tie this weaponization of values and then a negative side of values back to Not Valued's question, often at some point in time, companies need to shift their values.

Morgan VanDerLeest: I would find it incredibly unlikely that a company can set their values and keep the same ones in perpetuity. Because those values can play an important role and how they relate to the business and objectives and customers and employees and how these pieces all fit together well. You're probably going to need to shift them. It probably makes sense to make a decent enough of a shift that it's not just tweaking the values a bit. And at the end of the day, you're always going to have some folks that are jaded or unhappy or don't like change, but the values need to evolve just as much as the company evolves, as the team evolves and as people evolve. And helping play a positive role in making that [00:35:00] transition happen is vital.

Eddie Flaisler: And I think it boils down back to our conversation about transparency and decision making and how important it is to actually help identify those who are a good fit for the company and those who are not.

Eddie Flaisler: Because if it doesn't work for them, you did your due diligence in sharing how you think about this and you identify who can come with you on this journey. And who is not interested in doing that. As opposed to maintaining this obscure model of how we're thinking about things. So you yourself are never sure how the team is feeling about that.

Eddie Flaisler: I think it's so helpful to let people know how decisions are made because it gives them the opportunity to truly show what they think about that and whether this can work for them or not. There's a common language. We talk about the same thing and we have an opportunity to agree or disagree. Which ultimately builds a more cohesive organization. Because those who stay with you are fully bought [00:36:00] in.

Morgan VanDerLeest: That is a great point, Eddie. And I always appreciate thinking through things like this with you. All right, y'all, if you enjoyed this. Don't forget to share and subscribe on your podcast player of choice. What tough challenge are you facing as an engineering leader? We'd love to hear from you at: peopledrivendevelopment@gmail.com. Until next time, see y'all.

Eddie Flaisler: Cheers.