The Limits of Company Values

Earlier in my entrepreneurial career I set out to build a values-driven company, where deep human values would shape the culture and help define the organization. I’m not talking about the corporate values statements you see posted on the walls of many large companies today. More often than not, those have little bearing on day-to-day operations — they’re more corporate marketing material than anything deeply authentic to the culture, and I find myself generally wary of any values statement that comes with graphic design. I wanted to build a company where the values didn’t need to be posted anywhere, because they were alive and real in the culture every day, and everyone was crystal clear on what they were and what they meant.

To get there, I spent many hours with the other founders of the company I was building at the time, uncovering and articulating the common values we held most sacred. As the company’s CEO I worked very hard to instill these into the organization and its culture. And whatever other pitfalls I fell prey to as a leader — and there were plenty — I think it’s fair to say I did this part quite well. Everyone in that company could name the four core values, describe what they meant, and share examples of how we lived them. We consciously drove our decisions by these values, and did our best to build the culture around them — and doing so led to a more meaningful workplace and a more tight-knit community of authentic, like-principled individuals. I believe it helped the organization thrive for many years.

The dark side of values

So when I stress the downsides of defining and articulating values for the organization, it is coming from a place of great appreciation for the power of doing so — in fact it was through the success of that approach that I began to discover its dark side.

To illustrate what I mean, let me share a challenge I faced in my values-driven company: Every value we had articulated came with an “anti-value” of something else — a bias towards one side of a pole, and a push-against the other. Thus is the nature of values — for example, valuing “adaptability” means we’re de-valuing whatever we think of as its opposite. Yet while we often think of this opposite negatively (e.g. “rigidity”), the same energy we’re rejecting can come out with a useful expression as well (e.g. “stability”). And the energy behind the “adaptability” we value can also come out negatively, which is more likely when it’s overused, without the balance of the opposite we’ve dismissed — too much “adaptability” without a balancing focus on “stability” easily becomes wheel-spinning chaos. When we drive the organization with human values we are usually systemizing an imbalance of polarities, and harnessing just a subset of the energies an organization could otherwise integrate.

Is there an alternative?

So what other options do we have to harness the value of values, without that dark side? I’d say a large part of what company values do for a company is boost alignment and cohesion via a strong culture, and I think Holacracy has the potential to do that as well, without necessarily requiring a culture built around a single set of values. What’s the advantage of that? Picture an organization capable of dynamically harmonizing multiple competing energies/values for the sake of a broader purpose — of collapsing to one side of a polarity when that serves this purpose best, and then leaping to embrace the opposite when a counterbalance is needed. Picture an organization that holds a space for many values and preferences to arise, recognizing and honoring all of them without institutionalizing a bias. Instead it privileges them on a case-by-case basis, based on what serves its purpose best in that particular moment and context. That would invite each of us to show up with our own values and preferences, even conflicting ones, and contribute the best of what we can offer to move the organization forward — with alternate mechanisms for getting alignment and cohesion.

However we get there, this polarity-harmonizing capacity is a powerful one for an organization needing to adapt and effectively express its purpose in the midst of a highly uncertain, changing environment. Institutionalizing company values certainly has many benefits—I’ve certainly experienced them—though it does tend to push against this capacity (something I’ve experienced too, in my own organization and others). And I believe Holacracy has the potential to instill this capacity, as well as much of the alignment and cohesion we get from values—perhaps making the current focus on building cultures around a single set of values less needed.

In many ways, I’d say Holacracy stems from a ground beyond the human experience and our focus on values — it allows all of them to be, without getting stuck in any of them. It helped me recognize that a dynamic play of preferences and polarities can be harnessed and integrated in service of evolution and the company’s part in it—for its purpose. I don’t know if Holacracy will completely obsolete the need for consciously building cultures around human values, or if companies using Holacracy will still find lots of value in their values that Holacracy just doesn’t cover — it’s up to each of them to answer that question for themselves, and Holacracy certainly isn’t incompatible with a values-based culture (quite the opposite). For my part, I wonder what else might be possible now with Holacracy as a core operating system, which may not have been practical before. I’m really not sure where that question will lead me and the organization I’m now helping to build, though I sure intend to find out.