A couple days ago, I sent a message to individual employees.
My advice was to be careful expecting much from company value systems, which are basically synthetic bone grafts. They create bonds between companies and workers that might not happen naturally.
But nature always returns. And when it does, corporate interests have a way of melting those bonds rapidly.
Woe betide the employee who mistakes company for family, which makes a person feel disowned when they are inevitably sacked as a commercial convenience.
Today my message is for a different audience. Namely those organizations who actually want values to matter, want them to be real, and want them to be the basis of a positive culture working to engage, connect with, and retain employees.
Before my message, a brief digression.
There are many ways to drive performance.
Authority. Because the boss said so.
Command and control. Don’t think, don’t argue, don’t innovate, just work.
Direction. Do this, this, and this, follow the checklist.
Micromanagement. Do exactly this, exactly this way, go faster, go slower.
Coercion. Do as you’re told or lose your job.
There are of course other, better approaches that index on collaboration, talent development, and individual contribution. I de-emphasize them here because (a) it suits my literary plan and argument to do so, and (b) the rarity of these approaches justifies my doing so.
The top-down approaches mentioned above are unfortunately popular. They make those responsible for results feel a sense of control. The’re also like a self-actuated inflation pedal for the egos of executives, who have been conditioned to believe they are where they are because of their superior skill and intelligence. Rather than the actual reasons of luck, timing, and connections.
But the thing about top-down approaches. They suck. They are soul-corroding and dehumanizing for employees, being built as they are on the idea of intellectual inequality.
They also don’t provide employers with the best value for their labor investment. Top-down approaches leave people burned out, disengaged, and lacking commitment. They do the bare minimum to avoid getting fired.
Which is why some employers, though not nearly enough, recognize that a strong value system, embraced from the bottom up, is much better approach. Shared values not only provide a common blueprint for execution, removing the need for helicopter management, they also instill a sense of belonging. Unity. Common endeavor.
Value-driven organizations have better morale, productivity, and retention.
So my message today is for those who are operationalizing a values approach, or trying, or aspiring to.
And the message is damned simple.
If you want people to buy into your values, you must first make them feel safe.
Safety is not just another value in a list of values. It is the gateway value. It opens the way to the embrace of other values.
When people feel secure in their role and have stable expectations about the future, they will trust the value system. They will buy in and participate.
When they don't, they won't.
In other words, their participation in a shared framework of values and culture will be coextensive with their feeling of safety.
And in this context, I don’t refer to ordinary, boilerplate psychological safety. I refer to a higher level. Something I call top cover.
This refers to a situation in which the people in a team know their leader is looking out for them. Protecting their interests. Loitering overhead. Watching, ready to chase off or neutralize adversaries in instant. Safeguarding their environment. Not permitting anyone to threaten what they are doing, their ability to do it, or their right to do it.
So long as they are delivering, the leader plays the role of notoriously, openly, and obviously protecting the team. (And even when they don’t deliver, the leader handles accountability within the team).
When a team feels this level of protection, they spend very little mental energy on the high tax of insecurity. They think progressively. They attack problems without fear of reproach. They are bold. They give their all and their best.
And with the lowering of defenses comes openness to values. Trust can happen.
Teams without top cover have to worry about defending themselves and their teammates. They take less risk. They don’t stick their necks out. The defenses remain up. And with those defenses up, trust cannot truly happen. Any connection to values is tenuous and temporary.
Military organizations are a great model here.
We tend to attribute the strong cultures of military units with the extreme stakes of combat and shared crucibles. But veterans know not every unit, and not even every combat unit, has a strong, value-driven basis. Only those with strong top cover develop a strong sense of unity, just as only those with tactical top cover take risks together when the bullets are flying.
But there’s something else that makes a strong culture more likely in military units: job security.
People sign up for years at a time. They commit themselves, but so too does the service commit to them. They cannot be casually discarded. There is some residual level of top cover for everyone in the form of process and employment protections.
This is the secret sauce. Two-way commitment boosts the feeling of safety and stability. And with this, people buy into core values. They make themselves vulnerable to one another by allowing their moral basis to be defined to an extent by what they believe together.
Back in ‘14, the US Air Force conducted a massive drawdown, cramming five years of restructuring into a single year voluntarily. There was a corporate interest in doing so; it was a move to grease the political wheels and earn more cash for weapon modernization efforts generals saw as important to the service’s future.
But for the first time in a generation, it made airmen nervous about keeping their jobs. This was just one step in a journey of dissolution as the service’s shared values fell aside. It’s taken years to relocate them, and the current crop of leaders are struggling to re-instill them.
Which brings us to the currently unfolding debacle of layoffs, mainly being done by profitable companies whose employees are not expecting threats to job security.
Layoffs are catastrophic to the adoption of values and culture.
Corporations have sent nearly 8k employees packing in the 18 days of ‘24, putting them on pace for 162k layoffs this year. This is deeply unsettling to employees in those companies, especially when executives refuse to explain why it was necessary (that’s you, Google). In the absence of transparency, they feel like disposable commodities.
Executives at these companies don’t seem to understand or maybe don’t think they need to care about the knock-on impacts of laying people off. They don’t seem to get that creating an unpredictable environment really throws people for a loop. It makes them feel unsafe … like they can do what is expected and still lose their jobs.
But these business leaders are either ignoring sound advice or they are horribly ill-advised. Because buy-in is, has always been, and always will be coextensive with the feeling of safety in a team.
Top cover creates safety. With that sense of safety, the door is open to embrace of values. And with that, a chance to achieve better results within a culture that brings credit to a business.
But top cover means unapologetically protecting a team. It means committing to a simple principle that if someone does what is expected, they are safe.
Without top cover, the current trends of more burnout, less discretionary effort, and receding commitment will worsen.
TC is a former Amazon GM and an independent writer and speaker on the subject of leadership. He has a masters degree in organizational leadership and management from George Washington University and has built and led teams of many thousands of employees.