May 27, 2019

Thinking About Values

Hi All,

Before you get to the article, I'd love a bit of feedback from you. I'm starting to write more posts on leadership/management topics (the following post is an example). Since my site started as a pure technical blog this is a bit of a departure. I still intend to post both types of articles and I'm considering splitting the blog into 2 separate topic-focused blogs to keep things interesting for the audiences that have found me at different points.

I'd love to hear from you whether you're interested in dev content, leadership content, or both. Feel free to reply to this email or vote in the twitter poll.

Thanks so much,

Ben

📖 This Weeks Article

As a way to help myself grow in my first year as a manager, I've been working through Google's New Manager Training which they have generously published online. One exercise that stood out to me was a "values selection" process, where they encourage managers to select a ranked list of 5-10 words that resonate with them as values from a list of around 400 "values words".

Choosing values is an odd process, because you're choosing between "goods". When I first went through this sheet, I circled over 40 words as values that "resonated" with me. They're things that I value and strive for, or wish that I was more like. Deciding between adventurousness and cowardice is not a "values decision". A real values decision means that you're trying to decide whether good traits like adventurousness, belonging, or clear-mindedness are more important to you.

Management often forces you to choose between goods: Will we ship quicker? Aim for higher quality? How do those choices impact work/life balance for our teams?. It's hard to know if we're making good choices, because the results routinely lack clarity. Indicators lag, causation is fuzzy, and we don't get to compare to a control group. Values can be guideposts through ambiguity. I've seen the power of this at a company level in my current gig, where having a set of values that are kept in the spotlight often allows us to weaponize them as decision making tools ¹.

Going through the list, I eventually cut things down to 20, 12, 10 and then 8. That still feels like a lot to me, but for each of the 8 I can easily cite work situations I've faced in the past month where my response came directly out that value. In the end I ended up with Integrity, Thankfulness, Community, Prudence (in the classical sense), Generosity, Continual Improvement, Accountability, Justice. I find that these are easy to connect to my everyday work when I write them out as more detailed sentences though.

1. Act with integrity.
2. Live with thankfulness for what I’ve been blessed with.
3. I want to work and live life in community.
4. Make decisions based on a rational analysis of reality, not feelings and first impressions (Prudence).
5. Don’t save it all for myself. Leave margin and be generous.
6. Continual Improvement + Goodism are a powerful combo².
7. Be accountable for my responsibilities and hold others to the same.
8. Actively work for justice

I've published them here with a bit more detail.

Those are "guideposts" that I can easily quote to myself or post up somewhere, but they still have enough substance to say something meaningful when I'm considering how to handle a low-performing employee, organizational changes, or personal career decisions. I've already seen these values bring a clarity to my thinking about tough things in a short period of time. If you're interested, I highly recommend checking out Google's training.

🔗 New Site Content

• My post on Herding Lions is up on the blog.

😎 Cool Stuff

• I loved this (old) post on the Technical Debt Quadrants by Martin Fowler
• Lara Hogan (whose material for managers I've linked a bunch of times here already) has a new book coming. Instant pre-order for me.