Share |

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.

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.  Linking back to my first blog post, I see the human-values-driven company as a beautiful expression of the stakeholder model in action.  Yet therein also lies its limits:  It is still viewing the organization as just a collective construct, a container for us humans, to be driven and limited by our values and desires.  This is an anthropocentric perspective on organization, a fusion of the organizational entity with the group of humans within.  The transpersonal view suggests our organizations have the potential to become differentiated and liberated entities, free to operate as agents of evolution beyond the limits of any single set of human values.

To illustrate what I mean by the limits of human values, 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.

Picture instead an organization capable of dynamically harmonizing multiple competing energies for the sake of a broader evolutionary 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.  This organization holds a space for all of these 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 evolutionary purpose best in that particular moment and context.  It invites 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.

I think this polarity-harmonizing capacity is required for the “transpersonal” approach to organization I described in my prior blog post.  Where the shareholder approach is largely unconscious of human values at play, and the stakeholder model privileges certain values from within the human perspective (often well-evolved values), I believe the transpersonal approach stems from a ground beyond the human experience and our focus on values – it allows all of that to be, without getting stuck in any of it.  It recognizes that a dynamic play of preferences and polarities can be harnessed and integrated in service of evolution; not because the organization values evolution, but simply because it’s an agent of evolution.