Creating engineering values
Creating engineering values
I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about how my teammates at Scoop identify how we want to act as a community. We have articulated our company values well and they are resonant for how we want to carry ourselves and help establish some ground rules for how we want to treat each other. These have been effective and have worked their way into the language we use. A good example of this is our value of “give a good push”. This asks us to think about what is a shift or an action that could help us to move toward our objective that may put us out of our comfort zone.
As I think about our engineering team, we continually have opportunities to express our values clearly. We have been able to embrace the company level values, but it feels like we are missing values that are closer to engineering and how we want to operate on a daily basis. We struggle to navigate this and often find ourselves operating in ways which make it clear we don’t have a shared sense of what our values are and how we want to be as an organization. To help address this we are going to be explicitly articulating what those values are!
The values your company lives will not come from a document that is handed down to the team. Your team is already playing out a number of their values, but they aren’t commonly recognized or agreed upon. To understand what your values are, it can be helpful to get together a subset of our engineering organization together to discuss what is valued and elicit perspectives on what you believe your values are that help you to be successful. By getting the group together, you can build an inventory of what your many values are. This will give you the foundation for identifying and doing the work to better understand what you want your stated values to be.
Many of these values won’t serve you well. They may be in conflict or just downright destructive. That’s okay. The goal here is to see them all so you can then select the values which resonate most to you and will help you achieve your goal as an organization and community most successfully. This requires a healthy conversation around the values, how they will show up as the community evolves and what the group wants to leave behind.
Once you have settled on the key values that you would like to make your community flow more naturally, these are shared out to the broader org. The team spends time identifying how you are already living these values. There should be good evidence of the values that you can use to help the group reinforce how they have already played out and use those as examples of behavior you want to celebrate. If the group doesn’t spend this time it will be hard to translate the values from a projection onto a group of people to a real living foundation that the community turns into a reality.
The key to making your values stick is to make them shared and lived. If they can’t be identified on a daily basis or people don’t know what they are, you need to go back and do more work on how they are identified, socialized and brought to life. A few ways you can achieve this is by integrating them into appreciations, using them in 360 feedback, talking about them in 1:1s and using them in meetings to set up conversations or key points.
Let me know what you’ve found helpful when you are identifying and solidifying your team’s values! What has and hasn’t worked? What surprised you about it?