Bullshit Values

Your values are what you do when it gets expensive

I. The Worst Google Doc Ever Written

At a former company I ran we had a big well-formatted Google Doc of company values. Countless hours were spent honing our values down to timeless gleaming gems like “honesty and integrity.”

“People-first” sounds like a great value until someone asks for a longer-than-average maternity leave. At which point “people first” rapidly becomes “what does the market say is normal.” When your lawyer and HR consultant are telling you about all the ways comparable company policy analysis says you should not give someone their extra days off, the Google Doc with the overlabored listicle of bullshit values is nowhere to be found.

Almost every org I’ve worked with has one of these horrible Google Docs.

These so-called “values” are supposed to guide decisions, set expectations about behavior, and give permission to push back.

I call bullshit.

In practice, “values” tend to give people a vocabulary for feeling good about doing what they were going to do anyway, and a weapon for prosecuting people who do what they don’t like.

II. Reality Check

I really wanted to believe in values, you know.

I’ve started lots of things, and written an embarrassing number of these values statements. I am a grave offender among the accused here.

The first time I fired someone was a woman who’d joined our team to raise money. She was a very “values aligned” hire. “Honesty & Integrity” and all that. We spoke the same impact sector language, ran in the same circles and she was well known. She was also very expensive.

She turned out to be starting a competitor while on a salary 2x either of the founders had. Oh, and she raised exactly zero dollars.

When we decided to fire her, we knew her fragile ego couldn’t survive a single morsel of real feedback, and so we lied. “We don’t have the budget to keep you onboard anymore, but we really value your contribution and collaboration so much.” Lol. We then lied to everyone who asked why she wasn’t working with us anymore.

We did not lie to spare her feelings. We lied to spare us the potential blowback of having a high-status person running around offended and shit-talking us.

Here’s the test I’ve landed on: a value is bullshit if you can’t name a specific time it cost you something you didn’t want to lose.

Embarrassment and inconvenience doesn’t count. I’m talking about money, status, a valuable relationship, a year of your life. If you can’t produce the receipt, the value is an aesthetic not a position. You’re LARPing it.

III. Five Types of Bullshit Values

Here’s some of my favorite kinds of bullshit values, and how they get abused.

1. Alibi values. Values deployed after the fact to explain what you were going to do anyway. The Google Doc with “Honesty & Integrity” is 40 point font, paired with the quiet decision to withhold, white lie, deflect, get other people to do your dirty work, and use plausible deniability. The alibi value gives you something you can claim to be only in the strictest interpretation. The value doesn’t guide behavior; it’s used for cover.

2. Gotcha values. Values weaponized in disagreements. “One of our values is collaboration,” used mid-meeting to justify why you should do some extra work to make my job easier. “Disagree and commit” used so your boss can tell you “you’ve disagreed enough, now commit”. “Bias for action” meaning please stop asking inconvenient questions.

3. Benchmark values. Values that sound nice, but magically always end up tracking the benchmark of “the market”. “Employees are our greatest asset” until they ask for a raise. “We hire A-players only” but only if they’ll accept the exact same salary as the company on the next floor up. The value holds right up to the point where holding it would cost more than the industry standard, and then it folds immediately in the face of an HR consultant armed with a spreadsheet.

4. LinkedIn values. The socially-required list of good-people values. Always the same Linked-in post-worthy bullshit list: Honesty. Integrity. Hard work. Truth-seeking. These values are a tribal uniform. You wear them because people you respect wear them, and you want to be respected too. They’re so vague and universally accepted, that you probably never actually tested whether they’re yours.

5. Opposite-day values. Values that describe the culture you wish you had, but that everyone knows are bullshit in practice. “Radical Candor” but actually getting promoted requires avoiding conflict with leadership, “Ownership” but everyone knows to never cop to a fuck up. “Flat organization” but actually quiet political games run the show from the shadows. The value tells you exactly what you’re not allowed to be.

IV. The Immense Cost of Bullshit Values

Spending your days performing ablutions to fake ideals damages the people performing them.

Bullshit values are corrosive to an org and to the people inside it.

They teach everyone in the org that words don’t mean things. Each time a value folds, everyone watches. The lesson isn’t that our values are aspirational and we won’t always be perfect. The lesson is that claims by leadership are cosmetic.

They destroy the ability to have real disagreements. Once values are weapons, you can’t argue with someone invoking one without sounding like you’re against honesty, or integrity, or people. So you learn to keep your head down.

They make people cynics. Not just about the company, but about the category of values itself. Someone who watches “people-first” collapse when it matters most will react to the next invocation of that value with an eyeroll, forever.

The cost of bullshit values anywhere is the poisoning of the legitimacy of values everywhere.

The natural next question is: what do values that aren’t bullshit actually look like?

More on that next time.