Engineering Management for the Rest of Us

What life events have the people you work with been through that changed the way they think about things? What can you learn about how they’ve evolved as people by understanding what shaped their values?

If you pay attention, you can see how a person’s values dictate their behavior and ethics. Your values can be formed at a young age, and they can be a…

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People can be internally inconsistent. Sometimes it seems that someone values one thing, but they act another way instead. For those around them, this can be disorienting. When you see miscommunication or conflict arise, perhaps dig in to whether this may be the source.

Working to understand values isn’t a silver bullet to solving every problem, but it affords us a deeper sense of where to start when building understanding and trust within a group. Unpacking a person’s values with them can also help us understand what drives and motivates them. And, the core of working well together is mutual understanding.

Communicating our own values also gives our employees a bit of context about our working style and needs, which they’ll need in order to best understand us.

Individual values can be related to ethics and what we think is moral. Cultural values can also reflect context that’s greater than an individual, and…

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We can also think about our own values in terms of how we react to other people. If you find someone interesting or, conversely, you don’t like how someone communicates, perhaps consider how that is related to what you value?

I make a list of team values for whatever organization I run. Why do I do this? Because there are certain things I value on my team, things that I don’t necessarily need to convince the entire company are important.

Here is a sample of some words that can express values, though this is a condensed list. You may find other values lists that are more comprehensive. Perhaps you may notice a few in here that resonate with you: Accountability, Advocacy, Autonomy, Compassion, Collaboration, Contribution, Creativity, Curiosity, Dependability, Diversity, Empathy, Ethi