Your team will not be a good fit for everyone.
That doesn’t mean you should discriminate against people, especially based on protected categories like race, gender or age. What I mean is that different organizations value different things – they will make different choices when faced with tradeoffs between values.
For instance, Mark Zuckerberg famously told his engineers to “Move fast and break things”; he valued execution speed over quality, and that has shown up in how Facebook operates. Steve Jobs was the opposite; Apple is painstaking about quality, and will not release something that doesn’t meet their quality bar. Neither is right or wrong, just different.
Another famous example is that Amazon used doors for desks for a long time to symbolize their commitment to frugality. Saving money was critical to their profit margins, so they wanted their employees to be constantly reminded that pennies mattered. Google made so much money in its early days that it went the other way, giving its employees such ridiculous perks that they were constantly satirized (in my first month at Google, one of my coworkers ranted about the sushi chef making hand-rolls being taken away; I just shook my head in disbelief). Neither was right or wrong, just different.
Effective executives make these principles and values clear. They have thought deeply about what tradeoffs to make, and communicate them to their teams so that those decisions are aligned across the organization. They also design their hiring, onboarding and promotion processes to align with those principles, so that people joining the organization can make an informed decision on whether to join based on their personal alignment to the organization’s values.
If you are an executive, how are you communicating to your team what matters? What values are you prioritizing in tradeoffs, and how is that being expressed in hiring and promotion?
If you are not an executive, how clearly do your company leaders express these tradeoffs? If they do, how do your personal values align with the company’s?