While I have written “values statements” many times over the years, it’s not an exercise I’ve embraced.

It often has felt like a smokescreen-inducing, hand-waving endeavor.

“Let’s write down a bunch of statements that are, at worst, non-specific and disassociated from everyday reality; at best highly aspirational.”

Therein lies the problem.

I’ve been thinking of ways to approach this exercise differently: instead of framing it as “values,” we should start with “what’s valued here.”

Meaning: what are the specific behaviors and orientation that we, as a culture, deem important to our collective success?

How do we believe each of us should show up to create maximum impact?

What types of actions do we want to see more of, in anyone and everyone, no matter who they are and where they come from.

I wrote about this in my Culture Graphs post, which talks about the ongoing, iterative interaction between your today values and your tomorrow values. These values—literally the behaviors that are valued in your organization—are not static and they are not determined by what you’ve written down. They are the sum total of how people interact every day.  These actions interact with your cultural fabric and weave something new.

So, start with asking yourself, “what behaviors / attitude / orientation do we value here?”

Things that are concrete, real and specific. Things that we see embodied in the people who make the most impact?

The process of writing these down is a way of uncovering desired behaviors that have been implicit or hidden from most of your team.

You aren’t “creating a values statement,” you are revealing, to your team, what is valued here.

When people struggle in an organization, part of what is holding them back is the fact that no one has taken the time to say “this is how we expect you to behave.” These people feel unseen or culturally out of sync because these behaviors haven’t been made clear to them. Worse, if your senior leadership cannot agree what these behaviors are, they have no way to reinforce your culture.

If you’re ready to jump in to writing down a “what’s valued” statement, I’d recommend this 2002 Harvard Business Review Article, Make Your Values Mean Something by Patrick M. Lencioni. It breaks down values into these four categories (paraphrased):

• Core values: deeply ingrained principles that serve as cultural cornerstones
• Aspirational values: those that a company needs to succeed in the future but currently lacks
• Permission-to-play values: the minimum behavioral and social standards required of any employee
• Accidental values: arise spontaneously, without being cultivated by leadership, and take hold over time.

Without a clear articulation of values, Accidental Values take over, and your Culture Graphs take on dangerous level of randomness. Whereas with articulated Core, Permission to Play and Aspirational Values, you create clarity for your employees and take responsibility for building the culture your team has decided it needs to succeed.

Earlier today, I was reading an email in my Gmail inbox, and I did a double-take. The person who wrote it always writes in Spanish, but this email was in English.

And then I noticed this at the top of the email.

On the one hand, it’s empowering: she and I can keep typing away in our native languages, with essentially no barriers to written communication.

This could be useful in so many ways beyond traditional “translation.”

Think of all the places where we have unseen language barriers. For example, business people talking to product people talking to engineering people. It’s hard to overstate the communication barriers that exist in this game of telephone, and the value of being able to say “I want something that does this” and having that turn into great user stories that could then be handed to the engineers would be…huge.

That said, I have two major worries:

1. The most obvious is that, while I can check the Spanish to English translation, since I speak Spanish, I cannot check the English to Swahili or English to Igbo or Businessperson to Engineer translation. In most cases the black box nature of translation won’t matter, but that’s certainly giving a lot of power to the machine with minimal / oversight. If the nuance matters, that’s worrisome. And even if it doesn’t matter, that’s giving a lot of power to whoever controls the engine.
2. The number of things that will fall prey to this sort of magic — and it is magic — will grow at breakneck speed. I assume that Gmail could already have a default reply written for 80% of the emails I receive, and that their quality will keep improving. How soon until I open Gmail and when I hit reply there’s a “suggested reply” email already written out? That sounds good at first, but the “win” we’ll get in terms of convenience would come with an even bigger “loss”: ultimately it’s a person whose mind I aim to change and whose heart I hope to engage. When my email bot is talking to their email bot, two people are, quite literally, no longer communicating.

We’re already seeing the beginnings of tweens and teens trying to get away from their phones because, 10 years later, they know so much more about the downside of being tethered to their feeds.

I wonder what will put the brakes on the millions of conveniences AI provides, and what will happen to business communications over the next two years. Could it be that spending time crafting a thoughtful email to someone working for another company will soon feel like stamps and airmail paper?

As I was walking this morning, from my hotel to the CGAP Financial Inclusion 2.0 meeting in Washington, DC, I passed an older woman wearing a babushka.

She had a weathered, kind face, and she looked me straight in the eye and gave me a huge smile.

It was a smile that said, “Hello stranger. Good to see you. It is a beautiful day, and I’m happy to share this brief moment with you. I give you my blessing. We are connected.”

At least that’s what it said to me to me.

On a crisp fall morning, in the midst of a busy season, this moment made me feel happy and connected. It certainly made my day better.

And so, for the rest of the day, when I could, I gave people a huge smile. I held their gaze for a split second longer and tried to pass on the warmth and kindness that woman gave to me.

I hope that I made someone else’s day a little bit better too.

Let’s start with a definition.

I define “authority” as “the ability to determine an outcome in the face of uncertainty or opposition.”

As in: we’re huddled around the table, with a set of views about what should be done. Who decides?

To start, let’s think about where organizational authority comes from. Its sources include:

• Positional (permanent): determined by your role in the hierarchy / your job title
• Positional (temporary): an official but temporary designation of a role and its boundaries
• Reputational: (can be based on expertise or respect) when you speak on a given set of topics, your view is weighed so heavily that it carries the day.
• Relational: when you speak, it’s understood that you represent both your voice and the voice of someone else with more authority, so what you say goes.
• Action: by acting like a person who decides, and by making decisions, you influence others’ actions and determine / strongly influence outcomes

I’ve listed these in descending order of formality: positional authority is the most widely recognized and easiest to exert; authority that comes through action (also called “leadership”) is less common and harder to exert.

However, none of these sources of authority stands alone, as in:

• Positional authority can be enhanced or weakened by one’s reputation.
• It can similarly be strengthened or weakened by how / how often it is used — authority rarely but effectively used will lead to better results than barking orders for every tiny thing.
• Exercising authority through action alone could communicate relational authority (“She’s deciding. Someone must have told her she’s allowed to do that, so we should listen to her.”)
• Similarly, it could quickly translate into Positional (temporary) authority (“She’s been acting like she’s in charge of this project. Maybe we should put her in charge of this project.”)

One can quickly imagine drawing a complex systems map of how these five elements play together — submissions welcome.

The interesting question that lurks in the background is: who bestows authority? Over what?

The assumed answer is “someone with more authority than I have.”

This answer presumes a default position of “no authority” with a switch that’s flipped, topic by topic, over time, by those in authority.

Perhaps that’s normal, but we can choose a different default setting, one that starts at the level of culture.

For example, what if our culture says:

• We want people to step up, to make decisions, and to lead.
• If there’s uncertainty about whether you have authority, the answer is yes, every time.
• It is up to the culture (those around you) to communicate if they think you should have consulted more or had someone else make the decision.
• If the choice is between deferral — having someone else / no one speak up / decide — and action, we expect you to make a call.
• In the context of this culture, when two or more people step up and make different calls on the same topic, we will invest in becoming skillful at respectfully resolving these differences and/or conferring official authority over this type of decision.

And, since seniority always also matters, you can add on:

• When we give you this (kind of) title, it means that we have seen you in action enough to have extreme confidence in your decision-making and judgment.
• For anyone with that (kind of) title, our expectation is that you will be decisive and put yourself on the line, even when (especially when) its risky

As I’ve said before, Culture Graphs teach us that culture is a living thing that evolves daily based on the accumulated actions of each person in an organization. If you want more authority, rather than waiting for it to be bestowed on you, you can instead:

1. Ask for it
2. Start exercising it and see if anyone stops you

This last point is where we put ourselves on the hook.

The easy and seemingly safe thing is to hang back.

The braver thing is to ask for authority when we feel it’s important.

The rarest thing is to care so much that you routinely act with authority, that you default to taking brave positions.

If we find ourselves wondering, “do I have the authority to do this important thing?” it’s good to ask ourselves, “have I been stopped before?”

If not, then the person who will give you the authority to take that next step is you.

 

Healing, of course always happens.

The muscles recover.

The scar tissue forms.

The heart mends.

Rarely, though, does healing happen on the schedule we expect. “Time heals all wounds,” as they say, but time also waits for no one. Our hopes and are plans are, sadly, irrelevant.

It’s far too easy to get stuck in that gap between expectation and reality.

To find yourself questioning progress and asking, “will this ever get better?”

Or, worst of all, to allow the stuck-ness to become a thing in and of itself, one that has its own story, its own reality, and its own energy.

This can happen in matters of the body, in matters of the heart, at the level of a company or even nationally.

“How well are we doing, really?” is rarely the question we ask ourselves.

Rather, it is, “where did I hope we’d be right now?”

One of the hardest jobs of a leader is to help our teams be clear-eyed about the challenges of the present without letting them lose sight of the daily wins, the accomplishments big and small, the things that used to be hard that today are easy.

Our plans are just that—hopes about what will come to pass.

“Longer than we’d hoped” is so much more common than “that was easier than I expected.”

It just makes for worse headlines.

 

P.S. Last week’s post on how product-market fit might be different for social entrepreneurs generated a great conversation on LinkedIn, in case you want to check that out.

I’ve been working hard all summer, and am going to take my foot a bit off the gas these next two weeks before Labor Day.

I don’t have any big trip planned. Instead, I’m going to be welcoming this pup to her new home and showing her the ropes.

Her big sister, Birdie, is excited for the company.

Welcome, Peanut.

Many years ago, in my early days as a manager, I remember taking pride when I read, in 360 reviews from my employees, “I can tell that Sasha really cares about me as an employee.”

To be sure, that was good news: I did (and do) care, and I want the people around me to experience that.

But I’ve also come to realize these comments could have reflected that I’d fallen into a trap—the manager self-projection trap.

This trap is fueled by our righteous commitment to fix the past wrongs we’ve experienced.

“Now that I’m finally managing other people,” we say, “I’m going to do this RIGHT. I’m going to manage people the way that I’ve always wanted to be managed!”

Yet another troubled path paved with my own good intentions…

Hopefully you see the pitfall: the way I wanted to be managed was not the way everyone wanted to be managed.

I wanted strategic alignment, clarity of success criteria, and lots of leeway. I wanted to figure things out for myself. I wanted space to be creative. I wanted tons of empowerment and not a lot of direction.

For the 20% of people I managed who also wanted this, I was an awesome boss. For everyone else, not so much.

What each employee needs is specific to them—both stylistically (e.g. directive vs supporting behaviors) and for the tasks they’re working on. I describe this in more detail in Can Can’t Will Won’t and 3-D Management.

Since a good 2×2 is the answer to…everything…here’s one to help you think about whether you’re giving your employees what you want or what they need.

It’s obvious that the bottom left corner is a terrible place to be: you’re basically giving the employee nothing (either of what you value or of what they need) and are doing a terrible job as a manager.

And the top right is nirvana: you’re showing you care, you’re consistently giving the employee what they need to succeed, and you’re being your genuine self as a manger by giving the special things that matter to you too.

The top left is a funny one: hyper-personalized support that doesn’t emphasize what the manager values. This works from an effectiveness standpoint, but I wonder if, over time, there’s less blending of styles and values between manager/managee here.

The bottom right is my “aha” moment, the place where I think I was when I was hearing  “I can tell Sasha really cares about me” but not “I feel like I’m getting the support I need from Sasha.”

What’s hardest about this quadrant is that the employee is not getting what they need, but they are experiencing you trying really hard to support them. And, the harder you (manager) try, the more complicated things become: you’re giving them more of what you would want if you were them, and, because they see that effort and will, they might be less willing to say “that’s great, that’s really kind of you, but it’s not what I need.”

For example, say you’re a supervisor who feels you never got enough praise for your good work. You start supervising a super-high performer, someone who is very ambitious and whose top goal is to get better, and who came from a culture that valued “radical candor.” When they finish a project, you might spend all of your energy highlighting, with highly specific examples, the things they did that were great, without giving them actionable ways they can improve.

You’re doubling down on giving them heaping portions of what you value. I’m sure they appreciate that, but they’re not getting what they’re seeking. Worse, because they can see how much you care, they may struggle to articulate why they feel something is missing. They might even be struggling to know exactly what they need…they just have a vague sense that this isn’t sufficient.

This loop is subtle and it’s problematic: a place where relationships are strong, where employees feel themselves getting lots of care and attention, but, ultimately, something is falling short.

If any of this resonates with you as a manager, some simple questions can shed a lot of light. The next time you are giving feedback to an employee, ask them:

• Of the feedback I just gave you, can you tell me what of it you find most helpful and what is less helpful?
• More broadly, are there areas you’d like me to focus more on, others you’d like me to focus less on?
• My goal is to help you succeed more—are there examples when I’ve really gotten that right that we can build on?

While it’s likely that you and your employee won’t come up with perfect answers to these questions, they are the start of a different conversation. This conversation is essential, and it will be different for with each member of your team.

This exploration will set you down a different path, one in which you are grounded in increasing clarity about what each of your employees need, both in general and for different topics. With this in mind, your job is to start adjusting towards the kind of input they want…even if that feels difficult or counterintuitive for you at first.

Don’t worry about that reaction, and stay the course!

Remember, great management isn’t about being the manager we always wanted—it’s about being the manager the people around us need. More often than not, that’s not the same thing.