Values Aren’t a Moral Imperative

One of the most impactful exercises in DRI Your Career has been the values exercise (Jean wrote about it here). At first this surprised me, but then I thought about it more.

Even when you haven’t named your values, they are part of you. They shape how you see the world, and often feel like moral imperatives.

Yes there are people out there who are just operating out of pure self interest. But values conflicts occur all the time between reasonable people who are just trying to do a good job. They aren’t about right and wrong – they’re about prioritization.

The exercise doesn’t ask you to pick from a list of abstract words you think you should care about, and there are no right answers. The real values show up in your reactions; they drive your steepest emotional spikes. When something at work annoys or upsets you, it’s usually because a value is being poked.

Not all values conflicts are moral red lines. Many of them are quiet, everyday mismatches where both sides have valid motivations. Seeing the conflict less personally helps a lot.

You might really value trust and delivery and be annoyed with a nitpicky code review that doesn’t let you merge. But the reviewer values being thorough and leaving things better than they found them. Understanding the deeper motivation – the underlying value – can uncover the real conflict and make it easier to address without forcing someone to compromise something important to them.

Two people can share the same values and still end up in conflict. Say Person A is struggling with Person C – there’s a real problem, C dropped the ball or let them down. Person A talks to Person B about it. Person B chooses loyalty – downplays it, protects Person C.

If Person A doesn’t know Person B well, they feel gaslit. But if they do know them, they know Person B is loyal to a fault, and they find another way to come at it – one that doesn’t end up in an impasse.

Both people value honesty. Maybe they both also value loyalty. They just put them in a different order that day.

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I’m not saying it’s always the case. Honesty and loyalty is an easy one to resolve. If it’s honesty and self-interest? Someone not taking responsibility for something they did and how it landed. That’s not a prioritization difference you can shrug off. That’s good information about that relationship, and you’ll need to take it into account going forward.

Understanding your values helps you see why certain environments feel good or bad, what kinds of work energize you, what you’re protecting when you react, and where you can let go. Not every values conflict is a moral battle. Some of them are, sure. But not all.