“Our Values” vs. “What’s Valued”

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

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.

The F Chord Opportunity

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been working on playing guitar for about a year.

It is, mostly, harder than I’d expected—given my lifelong experience as a musician—but also extremely enjoyable. Moments of playing a truly beautiful, soulful tune, or of getting my girls to sing while I play, are nothing short of transcendent.

One of the challenges every beginner guitar player will face is learning to play an F chord.

The F chord – image from https://notesonaguitar.com/how-to-play-an-f-chord/

To play it properly, you need to curl and press down firmly with your middle, ring and pinky fingers, and, simultaneously, press down three other strings with your second finger.

Getting it to sound like anything other than a buzzing mess was, at first, impossible. Playing this F in tempo, as part of a song, still seems ludicrous to me.

Each beginning guitar player must decide how to confront this challenge. The natural thing to do is to avoid it: you can do a lot on the guitar without being able to play this awful chord. You can avoid songs that have it. You can play a ‘mini’ F chord, which is much easier. Never learning the F chord, and all the associated bar chords, seems like a viable path.

And yet, there’s not a single “real” guitar player out there who can’t play an F chord.

So how do we handle this as guitar players and in other part of our lives? How do we approach the skills that we could easily dodge and we think no one would notice—skills that are high leverage specifically because the only way out is through.

Skills like learning how to:

  • Sell
  • Write code
  • Coach
  • Negotiate
  • Give honest, constructive feedback
  • Hear honest, constructive feedback
  • Put yourself on the hook
  • Keep your promises
  • Own your mistakes
  • Make strategic choices with incomplete information
  • Disagree productively
  • Develop resilience around our motivation
  • Influence without authority

F chords are everywhere, they’re just not always easy to see.

The 5-minute call

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, I needed to get some information quickly from some folks outside of my company.

I offered up a 5-minute call that was really, truly, a 5 minute call. I made the agenda clear as well as the timing.

All calls got scheduled and completed within 48 hours, they each lasted no more than 8 minutes, and even the ones that had to happen at strange hours felt easy.

Note: this is not a post about cold outreach or marketing gimmicks.

Instead, it’s a reminder that we can get a lot done in a very short amount of time, especially where relationships of trust exist.

Grabbing 5 minutes internally with a colleague is such a normal thing—it’s the reason Slack huddles exist.

But doing the same thing with people outside your company—that is rare.

We get caught up in four emails and 30-minute slots and Calendly.

How much more connected could you be if you used tiny windows to have important, focused conversations.

(Oh, and checking in on how someone’s doing, with a call and not a text, counts as “important.”)

Is “Polished” Writing a Good Thing?

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How we communicate evolves with time and with the medium.

I write my texts (mostly) like I write my emails, resulting in my kids repeatedly telling me that it sounds “aggressive” when I put a period at the end of a text message.

(They also want me to use exclamation points much much more! LOL)

While I’m comfortable with the idea of tone and style evolving over time and in different contexts, I’m uncomfortable with what happens when we no longer need to struggle with a blank page. I’m skeptical that it’s a good thing that Gmail is now offering to “polish” my posts and that LinkedIn suggests “rewrite with AI” every time I string a few words together.

Clear writing and clear thinking co-evolve: I don’t know anyone who writes well who doesn’t think well; and how we express our thoughts in written form is a great way to reveal whether our thinking is as clear as it needs to be. I also know that convenience will win out—why wouldn’t it?—and that the cost of all of this convenience will be mostly invisible.

It’s already established that AI is most useful when you have subject matter expertise, so you can tell the difference between good and bad, and use these tools as leverage for your strengths.

How do we avoid systematically undertraining ourselves as strong writers and strong thinkers, to use the tools without having them replace an activity that sharpens our mind?


 

Right Action, Right Results

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It’s that time of year. Employees and their managers are digging into reviews, reflecting on what happened last year: wins, misses, growth, reflection.

I’ve written before about how to write good annual goals. The short version is:

  1. Write them for yourself first, not for your boss. This way you’re unconstrained, and you can be honest about what success would look like, while asking important questions like “what set of accomplishments would make me proud?”
  2. Write SMART goals – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based. Most people struggle with this, focusing on activities rather than results. Don’t fall into that trap.
  3. Think of your goals as an intention you are setting, both for what you can accomplish and how you can grow.

One question to reflect on is: does my supervisor only know what’s in my written goals, or does she also have insight into how I go about my work?

This is a helpful question because how she, and you, respond to areas of meeting and missing goals will be quite different depending on the “how,” namely:

Whether she says it or not, your boss is unconsciously filtering this performance conversation through this 2×2.

  1. In the areas where you both engaged in the right actions and got the right results—hooray! Everyone wins. Celebrate! And keep it up!
  2. In the areas you engaged in seemingly right actions but did not get results—let’s really get under the hood here, because you’re trying your best, but something didn’t line up. We are teed up to partner!!
  3. If you got results despite not doing the right things—we can both agree that you got lucky, and that’s not the foundation for long term success
  4. And, if you didn’t engage in the right actions and didn’t get the right results—well, this one is obvious.

Assuming that all makes sense, now consider something different.

What if the way you engage with your boss doesn’t allow them to create this 2×2? What if they have little to no visibility into your “how”?

Meaning she knows less than she could about:

  • Your week-to-week priorities
  • Where and how you’re spending your time and getting pulled down rabbit holes
  • Where you’re most productive
  • Where you’re getting stuck
  • What hypotheses of yours were right and wrong
  • …

What she’s left with, then, are the results themselves, with little to no information about what led to those results and, therefore, limited ability to really be helpful.

As employees, we often want space and freedom. But to have a productive manager/coach relationship with our boss, we have to give them the information they need to help us diagnose, intervene, and grow…at annual review time and all year round.

Otherwise, the sum total of what they know is: which goals did you hit, which goals you not hit? Check, check, X, X, check.

Without a consistent conversation about “how,” it’s difficult to get underneath goals and into the “why.” And without “why” we cannot learn and grow.

Spanish in 10 Minutes a Day

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I still remember buying “Spanish in 10 Minutes a Day,” an old-school adult learning book that was never going to keep its promise.

I bought it during college, right after deciding that I was going to take a semester off to live in Spain.

I’d bought the book over a weekend, and the following Wednesday, I found myself on a bus to some volunteer work.

At this point, I’d put in two days’ worth of work—20 minutes, per the book’s lesson plan—and made my way through Chapter 1, which consisted of a dialogue about a lost suitcase (“Hola Señor. Yo he perdido mi maleta.”)

Sitting on the bus, with no smartphone to distract me, I started paying attention to two guys sitting nearby who were having an animated discussion in Spanish.

I started paying closer attention, eavesdropping more aggressively, and trying to get the gist of their conversation.

Of course, I could understand almost nothing. And I was so frustrated.

Think about how silly that is: a week prior to that bus ride, I wasn’t a student of Spanish, and I had no story about my now or future Spanish-speaking abilities.

But armed with my Spanish in 10 Minute a Day book, and—more important—the new story I was telling myself, I’d deluded myself into thinking I was supposed to understand something of this conversation.

The new stories we tell ourselves are powerful. They can motivate us to action, and push us to new heights.

But they also create uncomfortable tension.

I’m eating healthier now. Why haven’t I lost any weight?

I want to learn to swim better. Why am I still breathless after one length of the pool?

I’m resting to give this injury time to heal. Why isn’t it any better.

I’ve promised myself I’ll speak up more. Why didn’t I do it in that last meeting? 

I’m going to invest more in new friendships. Why don’t I have any plans on Saturday night?

I’m starting to learn something new. Why aren’t I better at this today?

 All learning takes time.

The time after we’ve decided to do a new thing, but before we make (much) progress.

The time after we can clearly see the gap between where are and where we’d like to be.

The time living with the tension between what we want to be better tomorrow, and where we are today.

Remember, when we fall short, it is almost never due to lack of skill.

It is because we cannot live with the discomfort of the gap between where we hope to be tomorrow and where we are today.

(Note: it’s easy to see this tension on an individual level. It plays out tenfold at an organizational level. It’s one of the many reasons change is hard.)

Being Happier Costs Nothing

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

It’s easy too.

Notice I didn’t say being “happy” is easy, because it might not be.

But “happier” is always within our grasp.

We go through the world, and we experience things.

Those things are good, bad, terrible, surprising, wonderful, shocking, infuriating, or a great relief.

To all these things we can have a range of reactions.

Regardless of the thing that’s happened, we can then make our experience, and the experience of those around us, a bit better or a bit worse by how we react.

Within that spectrum, “happier” is always possible.

It helps, of course, to notice the things that systematically drag us up or down.

My reactivity and judgment drag me down.

Curiosity stabilizes me and sometimes makes me smile.

Gratitude always helps.

So those are the things I’m paying attention to right now.

 

 

Infectious Happiness

~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

Our new puppy is finally settling down. This means we get to relax a bit after the Defcon 5 of the last four months.

Having a dog makes no sense, really. They are expensive, inconvenient, they make it harder to travel and generally limit your freedom…

And yet I love them. What makes a dog worth it is two things:

  1. (for dog lovers only) Having a warm, fuzzy, living teddy bear in your house is pretty great
  2. (for the rest of us) Dogs go through life with infectious happiness.

When I pay attention to my dogs, I see their unbridled joy at the smallest things—a leaf, a smell, a toy, a squirrel, dinner.

It rubs off on me.

It reminds me that I can be more present, that I can take more joy in the small things, that there’s no reason to be stingy in giving away love and affection.

One thing I’m committing to in 2025 is to show up in a way that lifts others up.

What about you?

What is a company newsletter worth reading?

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

That’s a question we first asked ourselves five years ago at 60 Decibels, and we’re pretty happy with the answer.

Up until that point, I had never come across a company newsletter I wanted to read.

So we decided to do something different. Each month, we share things that delight and surprise our team, focusing on cool findings from data, great visualizations, things that have to do with sound and listening, and, for reasons I can’t explain, surprising animal facts. We call it The Volume.

It’s joyful to create, and a point of pride for us when folks write to us to say, “this is the only company newsletter I read.”

You can check out the last 20 issues here, and here’s a taste of what you’ll find:

> Clean up on aisle…New Jersey
File under: how NOT to compost. 300+ pounds of pasta were recently found dumped next to a stream in Old Bridge, New Jersey. The pun pastabilities are endless here, but the winner from Reddit is undoubtedly “send these perpetrators straight to the pennetentiary!” Honorable mention for “someone is gonna have to pay a pretty penne to clean this up” as well as “throwing away pasta? What a fusilli mistake.” *Chef’s kiss*

> Plastic-eating bacteria
Ever wonder why your picky toddler won’t eat her spinach? Human taste buds change as we get older, including tolerance for bitterness and spice. The same happens with billion-year-old bacteria, whose new flavor of the week is plastic. Scientists recently discovered new strands of bacteria that have evolved to digest and decompose plastic. The bacteria’s change in appetite is caused by overexposure to plastic (cred: humans). The good news is a team of researchers saw the red solo cup as half full, and have begun blending the bacteria with materials to create a plastic that eats itself. Bon appétit, Bacillus subtilis.

> It’s ‘literally’ ‘fine’
At 60 Decibels, we spend months (nay, years) fine-tuning our survey questions (in English and 130+ other languages…our newest additions are Uzbek, Nagamese, Manipuri, and Khasi) to improve comprehension and ensure high-quality responses. So, we have a lot of appreciation for how tricky words can be. Enter this amazing Mental Floss post with 40 words that are their own opposites (aka contronyms, antagonyms, enantiodromes, or “Janus words”). Our personal favorites include some ones we knew—oversight, sanction, handicap—and some serious head-scratchers—help, seed, and fast. As in, “we can’t help it, we’re addicted to seeding tomatoes before eating them. We’re holding fast to our passions.” SOS!

> Your Data’s Daily Commute
Think your morning rush hour is busy? There’s a whole other traffic system happening beneath the waves: 870,000 miles of submarine cables shuttling data across oceans like a transcontinental subway system. But unlike most commuter lines, this transport network is remarkably reliable, it requires only 100 repairs a year! These are handled by skilled sea-faring mechanics who use electrical pulses (kinda like echolocation) to locate breakages, and haul cables from the seafloor to mend faults quickly. Compare that to the 18 weather-related disasters in the U.S. in 2022 that each resulted in $1B+ in damages and thousands of repairs to on-land cables. Note to self: for best weather-proof results, just add ocean.

Have you found other newsletters that you love? Send them my way—we’re always looking for more inspiration.

And if you want The Volume once a month in your Inbox, sign up here.

The Area of our Greatest Competence

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

The early stages of our careers are a discovery process.

We are working to uncover the things we do best.

As we start to figure this out, over a period of years and across multiple roles, we try to deploy that “best-ness” as often as we can.

Our focus is to be doing as many things as possible that align with our greatest strengths—to make the places where we have the greatest competence larger.

Ironically, once we’ve risen far enough, and once our job responsibilities have broadened enough, we come to a crossroads.

Having risen through the ranks thanks to our competence, and having had our job responsibilities shaped by that competence, we are now better than most people around us at most tasks that come across our desk.

At this moment, our work transforms.

We now begin the multi-year project of making the set of things that only we can do smaller.

We do this by teaching.

We do this by learning how to identify talent.

We do this by learning how to hire.

We do this at becoming skillful at delegating—not just dropping things on those around us, but handing things off and accompanying our colleagues to ensure their success.

Most of all, we do this by seeing inevitable connection between “me doing this today, because it’s urgent” and “me getting stuck doing this forever.”

It’s up to us whether and when we start this journey.

Step 1: believe, in your heart, that a big part of your job is letting go.

(More: What Work Should I (and only I) Do?)