Competing Values

There is a movement in some Asian countries to encourage firms to be more family friendly, but it highlights a sharp conflict between two key elements of many cultures in the region:

– a strong work ethic that places a premium on professional success
– close family ties and a commitment to caring for family members

14-hour workdays, combined with no family leave benefits, can make it tough to address problems at home. The needs of older and younger family members can make it hard to focus on work. You can end up with a situation where employees do not effectively focus either on work or on family, with their attention constantly split between the two, and no one is going to be happy with that. With better family-oriented policies, employees can deal with family issues when they need to, allowing them to focus clearly on work the rest of the time.

Competing values are not uncommon, whether in a society or in an organization. In a company, sometimes it is a conflict between the leadership’s expectations and the employees’ desires, but very often there is a clash between some of the fundamental values of the firm upon which everyone agrees.

Consider, for example, your need for your employees to keep developing their talents, compared with your need to provide products or services to your customers. If your employees are taking classes, they are not producing work for your customers; if they do not get development opportunities, though, your customers may not be getting the cutting-edge work they want, and your employees may leave you for someone who appreciates the need for professional development more.

As you try to balance these competing values, you need to be careful about the messages you communicate. For instance, hair salons that provide training for their stylists, but only outside of the stylists’ regular working hours and without compensating them for their time, are saying that this kind of development is not important to the salon. If you bring your folks in on their day off so you do not have to close the salon, then you need to pay them for their time; that allows you to meet both your needs. You need to encourage a corporate culture that acknowledges competing priorities and maximizes your accomplishment of both, rather than focusing only on some while paying lip service to others.

Balancing may seem easier in younger firms, but it often does not happen because leaders wait too long to strike that balance. One thing you often see in startups is a general agreement that the firm needs to first be generating revenue, and then once it reaches a certain point, there will be a chance to address other issues. If you wait too long, though, those issues become harder to change; that’s why a 6-month startup is more flexible than IBM (well, it’s one reason, anyway). If you’re in a younger organization, address those cultural conflicts now, because the older your firm is, the more work you’ll need to put into finding that balance. Be careful about waiting too long, or you may find it too difficult to start paying attention to the things you have been ignoring.

Questions of balance come up throughout the organization: CSR versus revenue generation, questions of discrimination against single people when family-friendly policies are put into place, the potential conflict between hiring a diverse workforce and hiring purely on individual merit. Your biggest job as a leader is to find the balance between competing interests and values; just be sure you don’t wait until it’s too late.