We're Better than this Value Washing

I hope you’ll indulge me a bit this week while I make a small point about something I think we’ve fallen into. You know about green washing and sports washing, of course, but we might have fallen into a little bit of value washing in this industry, and I think it’s a little bit below us. I would define this as making lots of statements about our values to appease the masses without really making the hard decisions that should come with it.

For this article, I spent a lot of time looking over websites for firms in the marketing, creative, and dev shop space. These include clients that I’m working with, their competitors, and then just general “keeping up with the times” stuff. (Having said that, if I ever end up in prison one day, the lack of internet access and not being able to look at those sites might be a fair trade, because it’s just exhausting.)

A New Proposal

If I were king for a day, I promise you that I’d get a lot done. The first thing I’d do is add spam texting to the evils that qualify for the death penalty.

The second thing I’d do is require every firm with a “Values” section on their website to detail one very difficult decision they have made for each value statement.

Values Should Be Gut-Wrenching

By definition, or at least by my definition, it’s not really a value until it forces a very difficult decision that plays one thing off another. Here are the values I pulled recently from a random industry website, followed by my question in brackets:

• “We put clients first.” [Doing this means you need to resign whenever that client needs something for which there is a more skilled provider. Otherwise it’s just easy to say that.]
• “We lead with compassion. It takes courage to be vulnerable and building a culture of trust and safety means respecting each other enough to be honest.” [What mistakes or cost overruns are you transparent about and which ones do you hide? What happens when “you building a culture of trust” means that someone else doesn’t feel safe in that interaction?]
• “We are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. We acknowledge bias and work to remove it, in both our approach to testing and in our culture. We’re dedicated to building a diverse and inclusive team that brings together a wide variety of perspectives and experiences.” [Look across your staff, which is largely urban, middle class, educated, and progressive. When is the last time you actively tried to recruit a skilled worker with a vocal conservative bent who might understand half the country better than your team does?]

Values = Performance Reviews

I was struck by another statement I stumbled across recently. I’ll omit the name of the firm since it’s not relevant to the example:

“We’ve assembled what we believe is a dream team of experts in all things [_]. Every single member of our team exhibits [_]’s values of Hunger, Joy, Curiosity, Collaboration, Responsibility, and Fairness.”

Now, these are good people doing good work, but are you honestly telling me that part of the employee review process is to measure the extent to which each employee demonstrates Joy? I’d probably get fired.

Shallow Leadership

In a recently article, Gustavo Razzetti labeled these statements as “shallow leadership principles” and I think he’s right. Easy to say; harder to live. “Instead of inspiring employees,” he notes, “they breed cynicism.” His entire article is great, and he goes on to explain that throwing these values around simplifies reality, promotes binary thinking, feeds extreme behaviors, deflects responsibility, and are used to weaponize culture.

My Suggestion

Maybe we shouldn’t put any of these on our website, but instead start by picking one thing we believe strongly in and having an internal roundtable about it, one value at a time. Playing devil’s advocate and testing ourselves. A good place to start would be to unpack what a “People First” culture means to you, especially when your firm isn’t doing well and performance expectations are slipping.

Then maybe post your values, and explain the hard choices that each will mean in real life. Or skip that and live them rather than talking about them.