Values influence us, but also provide a perspective for growth. We do not choose them consciously, although we can work with them. For this, it is important to start with a valuable inventory, find them in yourself, and then in your company. This is a good exercise for understanding people better. Also, we can significantly improve our lives if we give up what we don’t need and focus on the main thing. People often spend their whole lives searching for their values, so don’t expect a quick answer. A narrow ray of consciousness is not capable of covering the fullness of our subconscious. We can see its limits and learn new ones, but this path has no end. Man is not capable of fully comprehending the divine.

Nothing prevents you from being successful without understanding yourself. But this understanding will make us happy and even more successful. This knowledge can also help us understand what we want, what we strive for, and how to align our team on the same wave.

How to find values in yourself

For inspiration in the search, let’s look at examples of universal human values: God, mind, freedom, love, inner world, calling. I suggest you to think about what else you would add to your list.

When searching, we will rely on the statements:

• During adulthood, they change little in ordinary life¹. The valuable core is almost unchanged, with experience we remove the excess in ourselves and discover new ones. An obvious conclusion: with a change in company culture, either employees will change their behavior to a limited extent, or people themselves will gradually change. But it will not be possible to rebuild a person completely for himself.
• Values change after receiving new experiences. This is a necessary criterion for changes. Values are a matter of interpreting experience. First, experience is needed, and then effort to interpret it^[2].
• We can find intermediate, peripheral values. They serve as guides to our main ones and are not so crutial for us. But it’s also great, because even this knowledge is important for understanding yourself.
• Values lie in the symbolic world. We live and die for abstract ideas: freedom, wealth, happiness, power. They have no price, cannot be exchanged or sold. This is what separates humans from animals. We live in a virtual world of various stories. Physical things or money cannot be ultimate values, but only a tools.

The task of searching is not easy, because, in fact, they are not inside us, but we are inside them². They seem obvious to us because we rarely think about them. For example, why do we pass the person in front of us in the queue, even though we will not receive any personal benefit. The search for values takes place either by an appeal to the senses or by an appeal to the mind^[2]. Let’s look at several options along the way. The search for values is not the task of this article, so we will not go deep into it.

I consider the main way to find values is sorting out my priorities to understand what is really important to me. But it needs clarification. We are very limited by the social world. At the same time, a person strives for social behavior in order to integrate into society and survive, and for antisocial, for his personal motivations, personal concern^[3]. Don’t look for value within your social roles. We need these roles for adaptation. Please note that the roles are very similar and the people are all individual.

The key questions for us are: “Without what does my life have no meaning?”, “What will I never give up?” This answer is difficult to come up with, so we will look for workarounds.

1. Analysis of your path

Our lives are defined by the key decisions we make. We are influenced by education, first job, family relationships, children, choice of country of residence. Important decisions and life turns are built on our priorities and goals. For example, there are thousands of professions in the world, but we chose one. Analyzing our past path, we can find the general line of our behavior, the motives that determined our life. It is also worth looking at the tasks we set for ourselves. On what prompted us to take difficult steps.

On the other hand, our future will be determined by the ideal image of ourselves. After all, a person sees himself in the future only because he has a value core. Values expand us and give us guidelines. Based on our plans, desires, fantasies, we can find the image of the “ideal self”, which is the embodiment of our values.

The key questions we ask ourselves^[4]:

• Where am I going?
• What do I want from myself?
• What goals did I set and am I setting for myself?

This is an excellent academic method, but it is quite difficult to apply it to life due to a large number of psychological defenses. It requires a certain preparation, because often our desires come from a lack of something, a need to have what we don’t have. But we remember that values are not needs.

2. Prioritization

Let’s have a look at another question: “What is a valid reason for firing from a job?”. It will tell us what we are working for and what we are looking for in our work.

Let’s imagine a situation where our colleague announced that he would be looking for a new job. Under what reasoning will you support him and try to help him, or let him go. Maybe he wants to learn, but he’s stuck here and can’t move forward in your team. Or he wants to move close to the sea, enjoy his life. Or he wants to spend more time with his family. If that what he said is important to you, you’ll wish him luck.

What reasons for firing do you consider important: the desire for close communication with colleagues, salary increase, career growth, variety of tasks? And which ones are “low” for you? Maybe personal profit, a desire to work less? If a person even needs money, why does he need it? He may want to build a house, or get well-deserved respect. It may be that money is needed to give quality education to your 4 children.

Let’s imagine that we have a large corporation, and our colleague wants to find a small promising startup. He wants to be part of a team that will change the world. The desire for power or popularity is an important motivation in today’s world. For example, Steve Jobs was the idol of millions. Many people look at his path with reverence and want to repeat his success. He was a world star, he was building the future, he was admired. Every day that such a person spends in a calm corporate environment will be a nail in the coffin for him. And if he inspires you, your values are similar to his³. Although for someone else, such a working place will help to open up.

Questions are not as important as correct thinking. Starting with almost any question, you can reach self-understanding. But it is easier to rely on real situations and your feelings about them.

3. Shaking up the situation with questions

We ask questions that will put us in the same situation, but with slightly changed conditions. Shake up the imaginary situation.

For example, a client wants to order a service that will not benefit him, but is financially beneficial for us. The performer faces a choice: professionalism or profit. In that case, we can ask ourselves the following questions and see if our initial answer has changed.

• What if this money is the last chance for the company to stay afloat?
• What if, due to the lack of this order, the company will be forced to fire me or someone else?
• How would I want my subordinate to act in this situation if I were the owner of the company?

Moreover, shake up exactly your initially chosen position. Make sure all questions lead to the same answer. Very often we think one thing at a time, and when we get into a situation, we behave not according to our idea. Such questions will help you see the integrity of your position. It will also help you find the limits of your values. That is, under what conditions you can violate them, and for what purpose. And are there such conditions in general.

Audit

Finally, we must check ourselves.

• Values are not norms and rules.
  They are not related to our behavior and do not limit us. At the same time, it is not our wishes or needs as a result of lack of something^[2].
• They should not contradict each other.
  Groups of opposite values are distinguished, for example, individualism against collectivism, monumentality against modesty^[1]. If you find values that are incompatible, then try to prioritize them in your life. Or reconsider. We will discuss this further.
• Universalization Test⁴: Can my values become the values of all people?
  For example, if we value freedom, we cannot afford to prohibit the free choice of others. If we value diligence, we must cultivate it in ourselves. If we are not ready to follow our own rules, then it is not a value for us.

How to find values in your company

With the development of the IT industry, completely different companies were formed. We are familiar with them ourselves or through acquaintances, we can describe for ourselves their culture and what kind of people work there. Each company has its own individual tone, people in the organization are somehow similar to each other. Like attracts like. Ambitious people want to work with people like them. People who maintain a balance between personal life and work are concentrated in other companies. The third ones like parties and socializing. Let’s see how these different companies look at the questions we discussed above.

You may have noticed that when you have a party at home, it lives its own life. You can notice and pick up a change in mood, or you can break in and lead in the direction chosen from the very beginning. In the latter case, there will be less fun. It takes a lot of strength and art to hold a party strictly according to plan and not spoil the evening for the guests.

The same is in the company. When created, everything will be built around the founders, but with time and growth, it will increasingly live by its own laws. The manager will be a key figure, but now he will not be able to remake everything in a week at any moment. As a living organism, the company has its own opinion, painful moments and aspirations, and it will resist or help change. If you feel resistance, it’s not always a bad thing. It is important to distinguish why the company resists change. Often people resist what doesn`t fit their values, but they also always resist complicating their dimension of perception. It is impossible to imagine how a person who feels the beauty of the world lives, if we do not feel it. It is also impossible to understand how a system will work, for example, according to the Agile methodology, if you have never worked with it. We understand only what we ourselves have experienced and realized, only what is at the level of our dimension of perception. Changes and complications will seem unnecessary, harmful. Therefore, it is important that transformations are conducted by a person who has similar experience and knows how to think at a higher level. Otherwise, if the management follows someone else’s experience, the result will be determined by chance.

A new challenge that many people have accepted is remote work. In this mode, it is more difficult to keep everyone on the same wave. People tend to make up the rest, when they see a part of the picture. For example, when communicating online. That is why it is so important to articulate values very clearly and create general lines of behavior for all employees. A good example is All-Hands meetings with company management, where everyone can see and relate to management.

The first example we will consider is the selection of “product” and “outsource” companies in the IT industry. It is about different structures. In the mass mind, a product company focuses on customer satisfaction, profit, speed, quality. There is more freedom, high work speed and mandatory responsibility for work results. “Outsource” often bets on strong executive qualities, reliability and the desire to serve the customer. The first one can be based on the desire to change the world, or the value of craftsmanship, so that the created product will be the best on the market. The second one can come from the desire to be great, to mean something in this world, to improve the quality of people’s life in a specific country, especially in the “third world” countries. Big companies change the world. But the important question is: what is the need for expansion? Growth or development without understanding “why” will not make sense in the long run. A company cannot do everything at once, focus is needed to achieve the most important goals.

Another example: the teams that launch the restaurants and the teams that support them are completely different teams, a different way of seeing the world. Specialists in the restaurant business know this and take it into account.

Likewise in engineering, you should not expect that when we start changing processes and working with values inside, all people will stay with us. Human social adaptation is very strong. If the company’s values will change, people will change accordingly. But if these new values will move away from a person, then he will leave, and rightly so. A company affects a person more than a person affects a company. An ideal option, although very rare, if the company’s values coincide with ours.

A person is looking for a place where he can reveal himself and which will help him improve the qualities he likes in himself. A well-built structure and discipline helps a person to even wake up earlier to come to work tomorrow morning. But there is also a reverse effect. If there is no discipline in the company, for example, it will weaken our personal discipline. If everyone is late, then we can start arriving late for meetings more often.

The processes are not to blame here. Complex forms of behavior, such as responsibility, respectful attitude towards people, obligation, require a lot of strength. If there are many opportunities to relax around us, we relax. Therefore, we need to thank the company for the help, but we have no right to blame it if there is no help. We are paid for this, so that we contribute our skills, and not just use the opportunities provided to us.

So how do you understand a company’s values? We proceed from the fact that the issues of defining values are “inconvenient”. They should not be from the list of decisions that we make automatically.

• If the company loses 50% of its income in a month, what decisions will be correct? Downsizing is a very possible outcome. But who to cut?
• What offers will the company not accept in any case?
  I saw a great example when a product company refused all offers to take on other people’s projects. Even for very good money. “Changing the world” is not the same as “serving”.
• It is worth reviewing all your appointments in the calendar and understanding which ones are really important. What meetings make up the core of the organization? Which can’t be missed?
  We can open the calendar and imagine that every working day has a day off. Which meeting will we simply cancel and which will we postpone?
• What should be done if a person does not have time to launch the project on time?
  If there is an external customer, then we can see what is more important for the company, its obligations to the customer or the well-being of its employees.
• Does a person have the right to make a mistake?
  There are companies where employees are fined for mistakes. Is this acceptable? And how does the company react if it loses a lot of money due to the fault of an employee? It is not clear who is to blame: the employee who made a mistake, or his manager, who entrusted him with this work and should have seen the limits of the person’s competence, or trusted him. Another good criterion would be that if the person who made a mistake was reminded at least once for his miscalculation, then the issue is not yet closed. How to make sure that the error is closed forever? Is it impossible?
• Does the company strive to create complex products?

If the company’s policy is already well thought out, a careful look at the hiring and firing process will help a lot. For example, why do some companies only hire senior developers and above? The principles of finding new people and saying goodbye to the old ones give good clues.

In a day, we can find a dozen situations where values will be clearly visible. They pierce through our every day and, in the best case scenario, all our decisions are based on them.

What’s next

Values are closely intertwined with our worldview. That is why it takes a special skill to look for them. This task is similar to how Baron Munchausen lifted himself by the hair. In the same way, we need to look at our thinking from the outside. There are many techniques that help to do this indirectly. We looked at a few of them.

For the same reason, the company’s values are even easier to find than your own. We can look at them from the side. In a small company, it is quite easy to adjust them, although in a large one it can be a unfulfillable task.

In any case, it is important for a person to understand both his values and the values of the structure of which he is a part. Knowing just one point of this list is useful, but does not give a complete understanding of where we are and where we are going.

In the next part, we will look at how knowledge of values will help us in the long and short term.