MANY YEARS AGO, ON A RANDOM THURSDAY at a random company, I received a message asking me to join the CEO and the head of HR in a conference room. Perhaps your first thought is that I was about to get a personal tour of the exit. But it turned out to be much worse than that. They wanted me to help rewrite the company values.
“I have a draft,” the CEO said. “I’ll send it to you, we can discuss it on Monday, and I’m going to present it on Wednesday.”
“Why am I here?” I wanted to ask, because this project—wherein two hundred people were about to be told what they should value—seemed either too big for such a quick turnaround or completely pointless.
The trouble, of course, was that asking that question didn’t seem like a reasonable option. So instead I returned to my desk and waited for the document to drop into my inbox, all bold and black, like a bomb. But, despite hitting “refresh” several dozen times, the file never arrived that evening, nor on Friday. It wasn’t until I was strolling the aisles of Publix, at two o’clock on Sunday, that I received it, along with an invitation to meet the next morning.
Believe me when I tell you I sincerely wanted these new values to be flawless, as it was now obvious my role was to provide a rubber-stamp approval, and only a flawless document would allow me to provide that kind of approval in good conscience.
“Flawless,” however, was not the word for what lurked in that file. At first, I wasn’t sure what, exactly, could describe what I was reading. After a few passes, though, “plagiarism” came to mind. Almost the entire document either paraphrased or outright copied the “Leadership Principles” on Amazon’s website.
For better or worse, every piece of writing acts as a portrait of its author. In this way, I came to understand our CEO didn’t really have his own values. Or, rather, the values he’d copied were his values, to the extent that he admired billionaires and wanted to be one himself.
I labored over diplomatic ways of saying “Maybe we shouldn’t do any of this” but couldn’t keep the comment from sounding like an insult. So I spent the next ten hours working on two alternative versions that would, at the very least, prevent us from theft.
Much to my surprise, our Monday meeting was genial, and the CEO thanked me for my time and feedback. Then he proceeded to present the new values on Wednesday using exactly what he’d originally sent me the previous Sunday.
After the presentation ended, a coworker summed it up nicely: “Welp, that was weird.” And then he and everyone else went back to work as if it never happened.
This seems to be what most workers do. A Gallup poll from around that time reported only 27 percent of employees strongly believed in their company’s values and, further, just 23 percent strongly agreed they could apply those values in their day-to-day tasks.
My colleagues intuitively sensed that whatever the CEO rambled about had nothing to do with them. Unfortunately, it took me longer to accept that fact. A week later, still trying to make sense of what happened, I sent a message to the head of HR, asking her how I could’ve been more helpful. She wrote back, “Sometimes you have to be patient with a young leader.”
Now there’s a writer, I thought. Equal parts diplomatic and brutal, with one sentence she conveyed how, through a combination of inexperience and ego, he’d painted himself into a corner—feeling like he needed to have all the answers and solve all the problems—and was attempting to control the company through sheer willpower (and a Google doc).
She was saying that in a world that offers you the choices of “lead, follow, or get out of the way,” sometimes getting out of the way is the wisest. Sometimes projects can be so big, they’re pointless—because they primarily involve a person in power wrestling with their own insecurities—and it takes wisdom to admit that’s none of your business.
