30 Jan Are your values balanced or out of bounds?
There are 5 people in front of a whiteboard waiting to work on their values. And I’m talking about Roger Federer.
Fed was back on centre court last week for the opening festivities at the Australian Open. And as he parried shot, after shot, after shot back to Hewitt and Rafter, thousands of camera phones flashed. But what mesmerised me was his astounding balance. Light on his feet. Racquet reaching side to side. Stretching overhead or scooping low balls. Federer in motion on a tennis court is an example for how people can balance their values, when situations and environments pull them to the edges.
When balanced, values help you stay nimble. It’s obvious when you miss a ball. Stretching too far is harder to see. It feels like you’re going to get there. But before you know it, you’re off kilter, trying to stay on your feet.
Looking at values this way owes to Aristotle. His Golden Mean is one of history’s seminal frameworks. In a previous article I described it this way: “Simply put, he looks at a virtue (which we’ll use as a proxy for values) as tempered and balanced when sitting in the middle between extremes.”
Those extremes of deficit, when you don’t have enough of the value, and excess, when you have too much, are the nuance missing for most people trying to use values at work.
Every organisation, team or individual I’ve walked through my values pyramid gets stuck at the bottom or second step. They feel like they know ‘what they are’. Some say they know ‘what they mean’. However, numbers go off a cliff when we get to “I use them in my work every day.”
Which is how Federer and Aristotle can help. Choosing to do X instead of Y is all easy enough when the circumstances fit what you expected. When the shot goes towards the sweet spot on your racquet, But what if it doesn’t?
And that brings me back to the sunny Tuesday morning, stylishly bland boardroom and the team working to find more clarity about their values.
People commonly wobble when examining the boundaries of what they care about. The solid ground of how the value is described tilts under the scrutiny of what it looks like in deficit and when overreach flips to excess.
I’ve noticed people usually find deficits easier—we’re more conditioned to think in negatives. Sure compassion falls short when judgement enters the relationship, creativity dissolves under the weight of the status quo, and clarity abhors the abstract.
Less clear is how those things look when they flip to excess. After all, ‘do more’ and ‘go bigger’ are core to the engagement ethos permeating today’s work cultures. But you can have too much of a thing. Compassion curdles into pity. Creativity floats into fanciful, and clarity hardens becoming rigid and bureaucratic.
Everywhere you look there are tectonic forces testing what you care about. Which makes balance and knowing your boundaries an essential part of putting the organisation’s values to work.
Whether you’re trying to keep the ball in play or hit a winner. Avoid grand gestures. Stay light and steady on the balls of your feet. Ready to reach whichever angle the shot comes from.
Thanks for reading.