Every value has a shadow
There’s something I keep noticing in client work; founders rank their values without realizing they’re doing it.
They do all the right things: They print the values on the wall (or Confluence/Notion if remote!), talk about all of them at the all-hands, and put them on the careers page. So far so good. 👍
None of the values get explicitly ranked. There’s no list that says “ownership beats empathy” or “speed wins over judgment.”
But it turns out there’s often an implicit ranking and people figure it out - they’re smart and they see what behaviors actually get rewarded.
Promotions go to the people who push hardest on ownership. The leader who slows things down to think gets coded as a blocker. The employee who flagged an emotional issue in a 1:1 gets quietly passed over. These are the subtle, powerful, and real signals people see that teach them the true values rankings - the ones that aren’t stated, but are true in practice.
You may think you’re “done” with values because you wrote them down - they’re good! - and you even feel like you’re using them. They’re not just words on a page.
But the work never ends. Values must be stated and must be lived, yes - but you can’t let them get out of balance.
Every Value Has a Shadow
Any value, used in a vacuum, can be abused. Taken to the extreme, it can become a disease, not a value.
A few extremes you’ll recognize:
- “Radical ownership” without empathy = burnout, blame, and your best people leave
- “Innovation” without accountability = chaos and half-finished initiatives
- “Speed” without judgment = tech debt that compounds until you can’t ship anymore
- “Transparency” without discretion = every unfinished thought becomes a debate, and the team thrashes on decisions that weren’t decisions yet
- “Team first” without honesty = an organization that can’t have a hard conversation, and people stop growing
Aristotle was making the same point about the notion of extremes twenty-three centuries ago when he described virtue as the mean between two vices. Courage sits between cowardice and recklessness. Courage by itself, untethered, becomes recklessness. It’s something humans keep relearning.
Aristotle’s concept applies to your values: Any one value by itself is a vice, not a virtue.
Each value should not stand alone. The best sets of values create a system that’s balanced against itself.
When one value gets all the attention, that value starts running to its extreme. The shadow version of the value shows up (vice!). The rest of the values stop doing their job and things are unbalanced.
Making the Ranking Explicit Doesn’t Fix It
The instinct can be to fix a values issue by being more decisive: Pick the right value to lead with, and make the ranking explicit so at least it’s intentional.
The moment any value sits at the top - even a “good” one - you stop balancing them. Decisions stop forcing the leadership team to think. The diagnostic friction that values are supposed to create disappears. The friction is a feature, not a bug!
Here’s how this type of bad fix plays out: A founder notices things aren’t getting done. People are waiting to be told what to do. Initiatives stall halfway through.
The diagnosis is obvious: we have an ownership problem. So they fix it!
Ownership goes to the top of the values list. It gets talked about in every all-hands, shows up in every performance review, and the promotion criteria gets rewritten around it. The message is clear and definitive: we reward ownership.
And it works! …for a while. Things start shipping. People stop waiting. The founder feels like they finally cracked it.
But then second-order effects show up.
People stop pushing back on bad ideas, because the ownership value got embodied as “don’t slow things down.” Managers stop checking in with their staff because ownership has become “people figure it out themselves.” Quality slips because the team has learned that finishing matters more than getting it right. The leader who flagged a concern in a meeting gets passed over for the one who just blindly charged forward.
A year later, the founder is wondering why their best people are quitting and why decisions feel reckless.
The original diagnosis wasn’t wrong. There was a real ownership problem, but ranking values isn’t the fix.
The fix isn’t to promote or demote values in a ranking - any value placed at the top means balancing measures stop doing their jobs. Any ranking will drive values to their extreme and become unbalanced.
Ask a Different Question
When you notice that one of your values is dominating - either implied through your lived behavior or explicit in a ranking - ask “which other values are underexpressed?”
If a value of speed becomes running with wild abandon, it’s a symptom that judgment has been ignored. The solution is putting judgment back into the system. The rituals, the reviews, and the way you talk about prioritization.
If the team is burnt out, it’s a signal that the empathy muscle has atrophied. The solution is rebuilding the practices of empathy - the 1:1s, the retros, and the way managers are evaluated.
“Which other values are underexpressed?” is the question you want your leadership team trained to ask. It surfaces the real disharmony before it becomes attrition, or burnout, or a culture you didn’t intend.
Your Team Isn’t Asking for a Ranked List
If someone on your team comes to you asking for a tiebreaker between two values, they’re not really asking for a ranked list. They’re asking “what behavior do you want from me when these two collide? What does ‘ownership balanced with empathy’ look like?”
Give your team behavioral definitions so that the values stop being abstract.
The individual contributor will know what “ownership with empathy” looks like in their next 1:1 because you wrote it down.
The manager knows what it looks like in their next performance conversation.
The leader knows what it looks like when a project is sliding and someone has to make a decision.
The values stay in tension. Nothing gets ranked. The behavior is instructive.
Turning values into behaviors, and acknowledging their tension, is admittedly harder than just letting behaviors be emergent. But its clear nature is also the thing allows your culture to actually scale.
This Isn’t Just About Work
The same trap shows up in personal life.
You might value career, family, health, and growth. You may or may not rank them, but if you watch where your time goes, there will be a clear priority!
The dominant value is where you spend most of your time. You optimize for career and notice your health is gone. You optimize for family and your growth stalls. You optimize for growth and the people who matter wonder where you went.
The diagnostic question from earlier works here: which value is underexpressed right now?
Pay attention to which value taken a back seat; it contains a very important clue as to where you may want to adjust 🙂
Call to Action
This week, pick an area at work where your values are imbalanced. What is the symptom? Has your team given you clues?
From there, figure out what the balance needs to be, and then integrate it into your systems. Operationalize it. What are the rituals and processes that would create balance? What modifications can you make to artifacts to ensure teams see something new?
As always, I’d love to hear about your experience. Email me at kevin@catalyst.group18.co and tell me what you’re experimenting with.
Kevin