Lead Better - If the Team’s Values Truly Matter, Then People Need to Be Evaluated on Them

0:00Good afternoon, Scott Baker and happy Saturday afternoon to you. It is a lovely Saturday afternoon and welcomed everybody. Another addition of lead better here for Saturday March 21st and we're tackling today's field note from admired leadership, which is about company values and the title of the field note is if the team's values truly matter, then people need to be evaluated on them. So we have values and we have evaluation, which it does occur to me. The word is baked into the other word. We sometimes don't think about that when we think of evaluation, but an evaluation is an assessment of how much of the value is in there, right? Sure. Yeah. No, I thought of that before. It's a way to think about it as being baked in, right? Yeah.

1:00And of course, it's a little bit of a trope, a little bit of a meme that organizations will have these values that they have plastered on the wall or put inside of frames and then never actually have them out in any kind of way, right? And so this is a great way of saying, okay, how do you actually turn these things into behaviors that actually, that people will notice that action is surrounding them? Right. In fact, here's a question before we really get the train rolling. If you're aware of an organization, it doesn't matter. Financial institution, airline, whatever. And you just as not working for them, but just as the client customer and they say, our values are honesty and integrity. Like what went wrong? Does part of you think, does part of, does part of you, before you, maybe you don't even know that much would be like, I'm pretty sure that's not true. Like the, in fact, if you say that integrity is your value, I'm like, I think we have a problem here already.

2:01Yeah. I was assuming integrity. Yes. And any airline that says honesty is their integrity, is their organizational value is wrong. They're concerned about their, you know, their on time record than being honest about their on time record or honestly, even about what on time record actually means, right? They'd rather just crowd you in the plane and push you back from the gate and not talk about it. Right. Now, so next problematic question, and I'm getting into my tough questions early. So that's one, which is how we react values in general. We'll get to this evaluation part. Do you think, as I was pondering this idea of the evolution of company values, mission statements, all of this, you know, we live in an increasingly over my lifetime, you know, fractured time in general community, national community, global community in terms of what, what, what values are what?

3:04And so when I was entering the workforce, the idea of like, well, this is a company. This stands for these values. And you'd be like, Oh, okay. I want to be a part of that kind of thing. Do you think that, and I'm buying, biasing this by age, do you think that younger generations are really looking for companies that say these are our values, or is that even, is that even something from another era? My guess is that younger people like the idea of authenticity showing up in every area, like they want a younger generation is more inclined to think that, you know, your political motivations are worn on your sleeves as well, so that everyone knows who you are, where you're coming from. And so yeah, but authenticity by itself could be the value. I think that's like the overall generational marker that, that our younger generation

4:06has without actually saying authenticity is our value, right? So if there's any version of a hypocrisy that shows up, they're definitely going to call it out. And that hypocrisy shows up in all kinds of values that you don't actually live out. Yeah. So that they're necessarily saying, we want the values to be something that you state in your advertising campaigns, or as the, you know, the call out letters underneath your logo, that those are value based, I don't like that, that may have been a far gone era where you're actually talking like that, but there's probably a greater emphasis on the, on the hypocrisy not being there, even though stating the values isn't necessarily what they're asking for. Okay. All right. And we talked a little bit about sort of the generational thing, Masira, the other day. I mentioned then, and I never delivered on it, this, the, the, the fight from a decade

5:09ago between Adam Grant and Brunei Brown and that Adam Grant had referenced this the other day, and they now do a podcast together, but, and I, he didn't really explain like what the original dust up was. And I kind of remember it, but I, I searched back to get a little fresher on that. If we have time, remind me here in about seven minutes, and, and, and, and, because I think it is interesting, but I don't, I want us to get through the core of the field note, which is also just flat out, interesting. So in this, in this admonition of the field note, which is saying that whatever you have, um, in your company and your athletic team, you might even do this with your family members, right, that you can say you have certain values. But then how do you, how do you, how do you evaluate that? And so the core of the, of the field note is that they bake that into the performance reviews. Right. That whole process. And it's not just like, all right, integrity is our value. Does Mikey have integrity? We actually have to go to, like, well, what does that look like? Like how are we demonstrating the actions that fulfill that value?

6:13Now, I think it sounds like, okay, that's a great idea. It does sound like it's a little bit of more work than most organizations that probably put into their performance reviews to even think of how to evaluate that. Yes. Now, I'll toot our own horns a little bit. I love the way that our evaluations that we do of each other inside of our firm actually are positioned in such a way so that the behaviors that we talk about, the best way to give and receive feedback, especially giving it, if I'm typing out, you know, there are certain ways to do it. The way that the questions are asked on my evaluation of you, Scott, on my, on your evaluation of me, precludes that we're going to operate under those behaviors. So it actually says it in the question, right? I don't want to give it away. It's one of those behaviors that is in our platform. It's part of the playbook. You can go take a look at it if you're watching it yourself, but we've got, we've got a dozen behaviors specifically around feedback.

7:16Those evaluations are all about different ways to feedback. And I think three of the seven questions can have all those behaviors kind of baked in. Yeah. I got to just, right, because I just realized that I actually am on your list for your performance reviews this year, because we can pick certain people and yours is due. I actually have to fill this out by 5 PM on Wednesday, April 1st. Oh, okay. I guess it'll be good. So, so what you're laying out right now, you know, I'm going to be putting this right into your perfect annual performance review, Mikey, yeah, go ahead now. Let me talk a little bit about one way that an organization that we're familiar with, Dell. They had kind of a famous thing because they, they wanted to actually show that a value that they were espousing quite a bit around radical transparency. So they had, they were talking a lot internally about radical transparency.

8:19And according to Claude, who gave me this information, so take that for grain of salt I've invented, that as a result of that specific value being something that they were trying to live out in the organization, one of the thing that Michael Dell and then President Kevin Rollins did was they shared their 360 evaluations and made them public with the whole organization. Interesting. So, the way they lived that out, so that's a version of it showing up in your evaluations, but not exactly the same type of thing. They kind of went meta with this idea of saying, you want us to be transparent. This is our version of transparency. Here we go. Yeah. So it's a great example of saying, if you've got a value, turn it into a behavior, but the specific way we're saying, let's actually make it very specific is make sure it shows up in the way that your promotions, your evaluations, some of the incentives that you have around the office, all those should be tied to those values as well and make that very practically

9:23tied. Right. Now, I'll define here then some of the things we should be having in mind as we would put these into the process in our organizations, but I do want to just comment because you commented about, you know, cloud giving you this information, that I would like this performance review heart and the values of it to be baked into the LLMs, and which because earlier today I was researching something and in the prompt I said, both to cloud and a GPT, you know, only factual things, double check all of this, source everything, and then I automatically now just paste a thing that says, there's everything you just wrote to me, true. And then they always go, well, no. And then they list all the things that are not true. And then I say, well, I did that just now for those who were listening, I tried to have that sort of like, you know, shamed kid sort of a head nod, no, they don't. And in fact, in fact, in my conversation with the GPT, which is, this is a, you just

10:28have a problem to see even having these, you know, it said, well, my intention wasn't, you know, to deceive you. And I said, well, that statement actually is correct because you are not physically or metaphysically capable of having an intention. Yes. But I said, but the impact of what you do can be, can be actually wildly evil. And so that's what actually has happened. So just so you know, right. Okay. It would be great if we could evaluate, and by values, by evaluation, the LLMS, I had a very top scientist as a friend of mine who I've been just, we've been talking about how, how it seems to have gotten worse in the AI world about the level of LLM lying. And he just sent me a whole like raft today of things that he had had to kind of go back and forth and just kind of sort of out and in and was like, I should have just done it myself. Like from the beginning, it made it worse. So that is sort of a model then for them, if we were saying in our own organizations, if client response time, if, if aggressiveness, you know, relationally, you know, if working

11:33to completion, what are these values? But that if you have abstract concepts, you can't put in a performance review, you know, things that are just abstract, you need to then operationalize those so that they actually have something that say, well, how do you sharing information proactively? Like not being asked to give information, supporting teammates in their work, you know, giving constructive feedback. These are, does this team may give constructive feedback regularly? And then you could rate that thing. That's a way of saying this is important in our organization. And I, I kind of like the, you know, somebody who said once that when you think about an organization and you say, well, well, beyond his values, it's like, well, what makes us actually strategically really good, different from our competitors? So we could honestly say we are better than our, than most of our competitors on this thing, right? Because this is what's really important to us. And then what would that look like on video? And I think that's always a good gut check because you can say authenticity is important

12:36to us. Okay. What does that look like? Yeah. Bill Tancredi, our friend Bill Tancredi, famous veterinarian, who I got the chance to meet personally in Austin about three years ago. I think Bill probably remembers that. But he said, what about values that conflict with one another, right? That occasionally you will have. And so he's asking from a medical point of view, like he's a man, so, so privacy might be on his mind more than so if you have a conflict with radical transparency. Exactly. Right. So if that conflict comes up, you do, in fact, have to choose one of those values to be a superseding value, which oftentimes people don't talk about, right? My values are so valuable that none of them will conflict because they're all virtuous. And therefore, if you're talking about virtue, virtues aren't going to conflict. Your values will occasionally and then conflict. And when they do, you have to choose a superseding value. And then the way that really rubs the road is those behaviors that they're showing up,

13:36you need to understand if you're asking your team to demonstrate specific behaviors, and they feel in conflict because it's a violation of one of the values or the other, then it's a great conversation. By the way, William or anybody, that's a fantastic conversation to be able to have with your team, right? Oh, yeah. For sure. It seems if we have superseding values that are in conflict with each other, let's choose one over the other as our real superseding one. And then therefore, how does that actually react? Like when we're interfacing with people across the desk, how does that actually work? What a great way to have, like, a conversation with the team to kind of go through what the possibilities of what that conflict means. Well, and one of the things if you're afraid, and I think it works maybe even better in a modern context, but I always like to lens the only phrase, how do we behave, right? So if you can say, here's why our organization exists. And then rather than just saying these are our values, how do we behave? What is characteristic about this organization and the people on this team that unique to

14:37us? Yes. What are those things? Right. Obviously, we know it's not, this part about a value, putting it into performance is great. But the slow guns, the posters, those aren't going to do a whole lot. It's actually just continually lifting those things up, matter of course, like you're not even saying, let's remember that you're just always talking about it. You're always living it out. There's no bumper stickers. So I like that. Here's how we behave. I think of actually making, like, what if this is, if this is 33% of your performance valuation, should it be like independently rated as 33% of your bonus at the end of the year is tied to how you score on living out values? Would you take it that far? Do you like that? Well, you could. I think that there is a, I mean, I think there would be an implication that would say, if you are a superstar in terms of elevating how we behave together, you are going to rise

15:39in that organization. And so I wouldn't want to make these things necessarily a, you know, a, a swat on the back of the hand, so to speak. Like you just, you were slightly not, you know, proactive enough in sharing information. So we're docking you. I'm not sure that how well that works. But I think that rewarding, the ways that we do reward things, we get more of those things. So I think the way that we lift those things up, the people we promote, perhaps there are bonuses involved. Sure. But just to circle back real quick to the, the Adam Grant issue was in 2016, Adam Grant wrote a New York Times op ed and it was saying, unless you're Oprah, be yourself as terrible advice. And he opened the piece by quoting Bernet Brown's definition of authenticity and what she took as kind of a real shot at her and the be yourself sort of movement.

16:40Now she then published an open letter saying that she felt the grant had taken her definition of authenticity out of context, linked to one of the wrong constructs that was mentioned. And so I think, but I'm interested in, in this idea and I'm not, I'm not a, I've read enough Bernet Brown and Adam Grant, I'm not like taking sides at all in this. But there is a romanticization of this idea of authenticity that we admire leadership would be like, this is not what it's about. And so we continually bring it back and I think it's to the values, it's what do you consistently do? So even as you put, put this into practice in your organization, if you're going to have performance reviews built around this, well, that's going to be the thing that they're evaluating you on to at the top of the organization, because if you're not consistently an exemplar, I like that. I like that. And none of this matters. Yeah, you're right. That pressure is great. Like that's, you're not saying that because you're saying, be careful. You're saying, let's go ahead and do that.

17:42Like put that pressure on yourself that people are looking at you to live out your values. What a great thing to do. Yeah. Fantastic. Let's do it again tomorrow. Thank you. And we'll talk tomorrow.