Former Community – We Moved
🆕 Coached community here, for posts & feedback public community here.
The values trap: what's professed doesn't promote
How much should you look at companie's values for your workplace strategies?
It depends.
In some companies, values sometimes are in line with what gets you promoted.
However, that is not always the case.
Realizing when values matter, when they don't, and when they actually prevent success and promotions is a foundational element of political intelligence.
Let's see an example of values preventing personal success:
Goldman Sachs: We Value Our Clients... Especially When They're Muppets
Like most companies, Goldman Sachs talks the talk.
When it comes to clients, they say:
Their interests always come first.Â
Yet, one whistleblower saw it differently.
It was quite of a story back in 2012, when Greg Smith quit and blew the whistle.
He said that the investment bank routinely took advantage of charities and pension funds to increase its profits.
Greg: Getting an unsophisticated client was the golden prize. The quickest way to make money on Wall Street is to take the most sophisticated product and try to sell it to the least sophisticated client
The "sophistication gap" was a way of taking advantage of clients, of course.
And later, on bankers calling clients muppets (I edit his words for simplicity, leaving the meaning intact):
Greg: A muppet is a term for someone you can manipulate (...) A junior trader bragged a client was so trusting that he overpaid $1.000.000, and the managing director who was sitting next to him nodded and chuckled
Goldman Sachs found indeed the word "muppet" in emails referring to clients.
It's not just Greg.
Little later, an economic professor who actually defended Goldman Sachs, says:
Frank Partnoy: "Goldman Sachs is one of the most ethical banks on Wall Street, not sure that says a lot, Wall Street ethics is sort of an oxymoron"
And since what gets you promoted in most investment banks is making lots of money, screwing clients is how you get promoted, not serving their interests first.
Obviously Goldman is not the most ethical business around.
But the point here is not necessarily to criticize GS or Wall Street.
But it's a natural human tendency to want to get more of the pie. As in more abuser/abused relationship, you also gotta look at the "enabler", and clients should be aware of human nature -especially when dealing with bankers-, and take precautions.
The point of this example is in the huge chasm -actually, contradiction- between professed values, behavior, and what gets you promoted.
A poor schmuck who follows the values would either get fired, or languish at the bottom of the pile.
Values matter... As a front
This is not to say values don't matter, or never matter.
They often matter at a surface level.
You want to superficially sound like you do follow and believe in those values -at least when dealing with HR and colleagues you don't know-.
And they also matter a lot when interviewing -that's where the schizophrenic process really starts: say this, do this other thing-.
Sometimes, they can also matter in terms of actual strategies.
If the founder is still around, and if he's interested in mindset and personal values, chances are he wrote the values, they matter to him, and he picks top management based on those values.
But more often than not, when it comes to actual strategies that work, values are mostly irrelevant hot air.
Machiavellian Approach to Values
Publicly profess conformity to the values.
And privately do what gets you promoted.
Higher Approach to Values
If the chasm is so big that it's disgusting, do like Greg did and seek to get out of that business.
One of the reasons I wasn't a big fan of big corporations was exactly that schizophrenic environment that results from HR's nonsense slogans, and the reality of the workplace following very different rules and values.
Striving to aling your personal value to your behavior is a worthwhile goal both for your self-development, and for your mental health.
