It’s that time of year again in corporate land: goal setting. This is a time of stress, frustration, and cynicism for many of us working in the corporate world. What could feel less reflective of our individual uniqueness than a bunch of goals meant to align to a corporate strategy?
One answer came to me recently while reading The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. I initially wanted to read this book to better understand our divisive political state, and to drive more productive conversations to work better with those across the political spectrums. What I didn’t realize was how applicable the book would also be to the workplace.
The key insight that I stumbled upon was via Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). While this theory is young, and has its share of opposition, the framework is nonetheless useful for career advancement even if proven incomplete.
To put it simply: Through a shared understanding of each other’s values, leaders and their reports can more easily align on meaningful goals and career paths.
To elaborate a bit, let’s take a quick peek at the image above. Haidt’s studies found that most people (who participated in his studies, in the U.S.) fell under one of three political groups: Liberal, Conservative, and Libertarian. Liberals align most deeply to 2 or 3 of the foundations of MFT, while Conservatives align to all six foundations roughly equally.
The Main Obstacle: Company Values Often Override Individual Values
People-leaders and their reports can fall on very different ends of the MFT spectrum. Even if some people-leaders are liberal in their private lives, they often take on their companies’ more conservative values during workplace conversations, such as goal setting and performance evaluations. Imagine a group of leaders being asked who deserves a raise more — an employee who makes everyone happy, or an employee who helped a product deliver greater ROI. It’s all too common that the goals we’re meant to align with reflect the conservative end of the MFT, which creates tension with employees who are on the liberal end of the MFT spectrum. And yet, corporations are in dire need of the benefits that employees on the liberal side can bring. It’s just easier, it seems, for leaders to apply conservative measures of success, like “carrying your weight” (the Liberty foundation) or “being in a role for ‘x’ years” (the Loyalty foundation).
Employees (like me!) who are motivated by the liberal foundations of Care and Fairness (things like community engagement, talent growth, coaching/mentorship, and ethical and inclusive practices) will struggle or face poor results when being evaluated by a leader who is focused on a companies conservative values. As much as companies like to espouse culture and diversity, it’s often project outcomes and contributions to the bottom line that drive promotions.
The Key is Reframing
The solution is fairly simple in theory. And this applies to people-leaders and non leaders. Both should use this approach to negotiate meaningful goals: Dig in a bit more to what, specifically, someone finds meaningful. Do they love building human connections? Do they enjoy learning about a diversity of perspectives?
By reframing a goal, you can still deliver that outcome in a way that also drives product outcomes. For example, individuals can establish meaningful human connections with project partners. They can facilitate workshops and witness a broad variety of human perspectives. You can coach peers on more diverse and ethical practices, and create a re-usable framework for the rest of your company to utilize and benefit from. While these might take one outside of their comfort zone (which is good!), the act of shared reframing is the magic that marries seemingly conflicting values.
I look forward to learning more on this topic, and hope anyone with a similar passion for bridging differences in the workplace will connect with me and share ideas. Thanks for making it this far!
