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> An alternative you haven’t considered is that leadership is excellent at communicating what they want, but it’s not reducible to a simple set of incentive foa

> An alternative you haven’t considered is that leadership is excellent at communicating what they want, but it’s not reducible to a simple set of incentive foals. Can you give an example? > Another alternative that you are not considering is that the world is dynamic and excellent leadership involves adapting goals as the world changes, not maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison with other organizations. I did consider this. I don't think maintaining consistency for the sake of easy comparison is a good reason to maintain consistency, but consistency in values is good because it changing values is damaging to an organization. It requires a cultural shift that usually causes deep pain and often requires firing members of leadership (I suggest reading https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190926 for a good post that influences my thoughts here and matches my experience). If leadership is unable to maintain consistent values, that is a failure of leadership in my eyes. They are unreliable. Values can change, but they should do so slowly and rarely (and with good, and preferably transparent, reason). If a leader is unable to maintain cohesive goals over a reasonable timescale, that's also an indictment of their abilities to plan within and understand the space they are working in. Or to put another way, your organization will not develop a cohesive identity and culture without clear goals and values. Now oftentimes, you do have some clear values even if you don't state them, but then the question for leadership becomes "are those really the values you want"? And if you don't know them well enough to be able to state them, I'd suggest that the answer is probably not. > Perhaps people can judge leaders based on results and culture I'll reiterate: you cannot judge a leader based on culture if they don't declare what that culture is, or if their values and goals change too often. Values and goals set culture, and if values and goals change, culture changes. If all you know about a leader is that their values and goals change often, you can't judge them and their organization by how it looks today, because you can have high confidence that it will look fundamentally different soon. That's a sign of dysfunction. So I do judge them based on that: I judge them to be bad leaders. You appear to disagree, but I'm not sure how you are judging them if you can't even be sure of what their values will be tomorrow.

zepto 5y ago
Leaders maintaining values is a matter of whether they have integrity, not of whether they can write down a set of rules for determining employee pay grades. I don’t really know why you trust organizations that can write a statement of values down not to change. Frequently these statements are written by consultants anyway, and organizations that do have good written principles that they live up to, do so because they have leaders of integrity, not the other way around. I accept that you can’t see any other way to judge leaders than by examining their written statements.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  > I don’t really know why you trust organizations that can write a statement of values down not to change. I don't! But I do trust that it will be moderately more difficult (and far more transparent) for them to do so than an organization which chooses not to. If you have your values declared, people can hold you (or the org) accountable to them. If you then change them, you have to announce it, or people will continue to hold you accountable to the old one. > and organizations that do have good written principles that they live up to, do so because they have leaders of integrity, not the other way around. I agree! But good leaders also make it easy for their reports to hold them accountable, and it's far more difficult to hold someone accountable to a set of values if those values are unstated. That's why the values need to be stated. Like, please explain to me how you live up to the organizations principles if no one knows what they are! (and if everyone agrees on what they are, why can't you write them down?) And I should clarify if it wasn't already clear, I'm not talking about values like "integrity" or "respect the user", but things like "bias toward action" and "move fast and break things", that give you insight into how decisions should be made in the org. > I accept that you can’t see any other way to judge leaders than by examining their written statements. I judge leaders by examining how their stated values correspond with their actions. Their stated values give me a framework for judging them.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > I'm not talking about values like "integrity" or "respect the user", but things like "bias toward action" and "move fast and break things", that give you insight into how decisions should be made in the org. How do are these qualitatively different kinds of value? >> I accept that you can’t see any other way to judge leaders than by examining their written statements. > I judge leaders by examining how their stated values correspond with their actions. Their stated values give me a framework for judging them. An alternative is to simply judge their actions, how they treat people, and the results their organization produces by your own values.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      > How do are these qualitatively different kinds of value? The second set are tradeoffs, they give you a framework for decision making: "integrity" is obviously a thing you want, but everyone wants it, it doesn't really tell you anything about the values that a particular organization has in comparison to another. The second set are implicitly about tradeoffs: when on the fence, prefer doing something to not doing something, or when you're uncertain, make a change and deploy a feature even at the cost of potentially breaking things. This gives you information on how decision should be made and what the organization values (features > reliability, at the margin). When that value changes ("move fast with stable infra") it tells you that while the organization still values velocity over reliability in some places, when dealing with core infrastructure, you should work the other way, preferring stability over feature velocity. This is explained better in the blog post I linked, I'm mostly restating what it says, but worse. > An alternative is to simply judge their actions, how they treat people, and the results their organization produces by your own values. But, and here's an important thing: a leaders' values may be different in different circumstances! The same person, when running a 5 person startup, and a 50,000 person company, will land on different sides of the same tradeoffs! Organizational priorities change. The values I'm describing are how you communicate those organizational priorities. If you just try to judge a leader or organization based on how they acted in the past, you will be misled if circumstances have changed, unless you can read the leaders mind. That's why stating values is important. Again: they're how you communicate priorities. How the leader acts and how they treat people don't fundamentally matter when you're trying to figure out if the work you're doing will be considered valuable by the organization. Like yes, you should work for leadership who you enjoy working for on a personal level. But that's totally independent from how good a leader they are. There are very nice people who are incompetent leaders, and there are people I consider assholes and wouldn't want to work for who do a good job of managing their organizations. It seems like you're talking about personal values (and ethics) which are important yes, but not at all what I was talking about. I'm talking about organizational values as an aspect of leadership. These are in many ways totally distinct from the personal ethics you hold. And importantly, I think with very few exceptions, trying to glean anything about organizational ethics from stated values is a fool's errand. But they are still important for stating organizational priorities. Don't confuse the two!

zepto 5y ago

Leaders maintaining values is a matter of whether they have integrity, not of whether they can write down a set of rules for determining employee pay grades. I don’t really know why you trust organizations that can write a statement of values down not to change. Frequently these statements are written by consultants anyway, and organizations that do have good written principles that they live up to, do so because they have leaders of integrity, not the other way around. I accept that you can’t see any other way to judge leaders than by examining their written statements.

joshuamorton 5y ago
> I don’t really know why you trust organizations that can write a statement of values down not to change. I don't! But I do trust that it will be moderately more difficult (and far more transparent) for them to do so than an organization which chooses not to. If you have your values declared, people can hold you (or the org) accountable to them. If you then change them, you have to announce it, or people will continue to hold you accountable to the old one. > and organizations that do have good written principles that they live up to, do so because they have leaders of integrity, not the other way around. I agree! But good leaders also make it easy for their reports to hold them accountable, and it's far more difficult to hold someone accountable to a set of values if those values are unstated. That's why the values need to be stated. Like, please explain to me how you live up to the organizations principles if no one knows what they are! (and if everyone agrees on what they are, why can't you write them down?) And I should clarify if it wasn't already clear, I'm not talking about values like "integrity" or "respect the user", but things like "bias toward action" and "move fast and break things", that give you insight into how decisions should be made in the org. > I accept that you can’t see any other way to judge leaders than by examining their written statements. I judge leaders by examining how their stated values correspond with their actions. Their stated values give me a framework for judging them.
- zepto 5y ago
  > I'm not talking about values like "integrity" or "respect the user", but things like "bias toward action" and "move fast and break things", that give you insight into how decisions should be made in the org. How do are these qualitatively different kinds of value? >> I accept that you can’t see any other way to judge leaders than by examining their written statements. > I judge leaders by examining how their stated values correspond with their actions. Their stated values give me a framework for judging them. An alternative is to simply judge their actions, how they treat people, and the results their organization produces by your own values.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    > How do are these qualitatively different kinds of value? The second set are tradeoffs, they give you a framework for decision making: "integrity" is obviously a thing you want, but everyone wants it, it doesn't really tell you anything about the values that a particular organization has in comparison to another. The second set are implicitly about tradeoffs: when on the fence, prefer doing something to not doing something, or when you're uncertain, make a change and deploy a feature even at the cost of potentially breaking things. This gives you information on how decision should be made and what the organization values (features > reliability, at the margin). When that value changes ("move fast with stable infra") it tells you that while the organization still values velocity over reliability in some places, when dealing with core infrastructure, you should work the other way, preferring stability over feature velocity. This is explained better in the blog post I linked, I'm mostly restating what it says, but worse. > An alternative is to simply judge their actions, how they treat people, and the results their organization produces by your own values. But, and here's an important thing: a leaders' values may be different in different circumstances! The same person, when running a 5 person startup, and a 50,000 person company, will land on different sides of the same tradeoffs! Organizational priorities change. The values I'm describing are how you communicate those organizational priorities. If you just try to judge a leader or organization based on how they acted in the past, you will be misled if circumstances have changed, unless you can read the leaders mind. That's why stating values is important. Again: they're how you communicate priorities. How the leader acts and how they treat people don't fundamentally matter when you're trying to figure out if the work you're doing will be considered valuable by the organization. Like yes, you should work for leadership who you enjoy working for on a personal level. But that's totally independent from how good a leader they are. There are very nice people who are incompetent leaders, and there are people I consider assholes and wouldn't want to work for who do a good job of managing their organizations. It seems like you're talking about personal values (and ethics) which are important yes, but not at all what I was talking about. I'm talking about organizational values as an aspect of leadership. These are in many ways totally distinct from the personal ethics you hold. And importantly, I think with very few exceptions, trying to glean anything about organizational ethics from stated values is a fool's errand. But they are still important for stating organizational priorities. Don't confuse the two!