When I first moved into management, my mentor suggested I think through my management style. What was most important to me as a leader? What did I need my team to know? As I always do when I need to think clearly, I began to write. The document I wrote during those first months of management has stuck with me since, with occasional updates as I learned more and as my job has changed. You can read my most recent leadership values document here.

Simply writing a document with a list of values doesn’t do much by itself. Here are a few situations when I typically refer back to mine.

When I start working with someone new

Whenever someone new comes into my organization, I bring up my values document in our first or second meeting. I don’t read it word-for-word; instead, I briefly state each value and mention a few details relevant to the person’s role.

After we talk through the document, I open the door to feedback. This typically looks something like:

I try to live up to these values, but there are inevitably going to be times I fall short. If you notice that I’m not behaving in a way that lines up with the values we’ve discussed, I would love to know. That kind of feedback will help me get better at my job, and I will be grateful to hear it.

The idea here is to offer a specific, low-judgment framing for giving me feedback that is tied to my own personal goals. It takes a lot more than one request to earn feedback from someone in my reporting tree, but working this into an early conversation is a good start.

When I am handling a challenging situation

When I find myself facing difficult decisions, big or small, I revisit my values document to center myself. I don’t expect to magically get a solution this way, but reviewing my values helps me explore possibilities more effectively.

• A team I manage is missing deadlines. How do I intervene? Revisiting my values, I can reframe this as a predictability issue and focus on that. Before trying to improve the work output of the team, I need to figure out what is disrupting that predictability (unskilled estimation, on-call disruptions, lack of product guidance, etc.). I am transparent with the team about what I am doing and why. Once the team’s predictability improves, I find it is often much easier to see what will help with work velocity.
• An engineer puts together a design document, and I can see that many of the ideas won’t work in our architecture. I need the team to make a different choice. How do I make that happen? My values of health (specifically, psychological safety), transparency, and growth all play a role here. I make sure to discuss my concerns directly in a one-on-one setting. Then I think about what will help the team grow. If the engineer is senior and well-respected, it may help the team to watch us constructively disagree. If they are more junior, can I set them up with a mentor to help work through their ideas at an appropriate pace?

Sometimes, of course, I realize after the fact that I did not follow my values in a challenging situation. This is a good signal for me to think about how I can take responsibility and better align with my values in the future.

When my role changes

When I transitioned to managing a larger organization instead of a specific team, I had to think about what it meant to manage by values.

Updating my values document was a useful structure for thinking about my new role. I went through each value and thought about how it would show up in a manager-of-managers role, and how that would be different from a line manager role. I updated some of my expectations of the team and myself, but kept others the same. I asked for feedback from colleagues whose jobs were similar to my new role. This reflection helped me feel more confident when starting to run a larger organization.

I also used my values document as I thought about how I wanted to shape my organization. Where did I need to put processes in place at my level, and where should I instead give managers leeway to run teams their way? 

• A couple times per year, I look at how much PTO everyone in my organization is taking. For anyone who has taken very little PTO, I ask their manager to check in with them and make sure they are getting enough rest for their health.
• For predictability and transparency, I put together spreadsheets with my understanding of the key deliverables the team is working on, and make that spreadsheet viewable by all the managers under me. I keep it up-to-date so they understand exactly how I am thinking about all our work.
• In order to support individual contributor growth, I put together a performance and goals calendar for use across my whole organization. This has more intermediate milestones than the company calendar, and my reminder emails always contain my own explanation of the importance of whatever part of the process we are going through.

When I look back on the five years since I first wrote my values document, I can remember almost all of the changes I made to the document itself: an increased focus on psychological health, adjustments to the wording when I took on leading a larger group, the addition of a “growth” section when I realized that my focus on mentorship and feedback wasn’t clearly captured. However, I also see the ways my early leadership influences—mentors and role models—shine through. I remember the first time I felt safe on a team, and how much more effective I was at my job. I think of a former manager explaining how to adjust planning processes so that I wouldn’t have false confidence about the team’s capacity. I remember deciding with a senior engineer on the first team I managed that we would openly disagree with each other in front of the team to improve transparency and model safe discussion.

I have no doubt that in every role I hold I’ll have more mentors, more role models, more brilliant peers. Each one of those people will shape how I work—and maybe even inspire the next round of changes to my values document.