Your team has values. I'd bet good money they're on a slide somewhere. Quality. Speed. Customer first. Ownership. Integrity.
Now a question. At 4pm on a Thursday, the release is due Friday morning, and the tests on the payment flow are flaky. Quality says hold it. Speed says ship it. Customer first says... well, which customer? The one waiting for the feature, or the one whose card gets charged twice?
Your engineer has five values and no idea which one wins. So they guess. Or they ping you. Either way, your values stopped doing their job.
Values Without an Order Are a List of Arguments
Here's the thing most values statements miss. Values rarely clash with bad behavior. Nobody needs a values poster to know stealing from the till is wrong. The hard calls happen when two good things pull in opposite directions.
Speed versus quality. Transparency versus confidentiality. Customer delight versus a sustainable on-call rota. Every one of those is a fight between two things your company claims to love.
An unranked list gives your people no help in those moments. It gives them ammunition. The person who wants to ship quotes "bias for action." The person who wants to wait quotes "craftsmanship." Both are right according to the slide. So the decision goes to whoever is loudest, most senior, or most tired.
Garry Ridge, the former CEO of WD-40 Company, saw this problem and fixed it with one move. He put the values in order.
What WD-40 Did Differently
WD-40 Company has six values. Their own values page lists them, and they're numbered for a reason:
- We value doing the right thing.
- We value creating positive lasting memories in all our relationships.
- We value making it better than it is today.
- We value succeeding together while excelling as individuals.
- We value owning it and passionately acting on it.
- We value sustaining the WD-40 Company economy.
The page says it plainly: "our values are hierarchical." When two of them pull against each other, the higher one wins. "Doing the right thing" sits at the top, "above all else."
Look at where the money sits. Dead last. Sustaining the company's economy matters. It's on the list. But if making this quarter's number means doing the wrong thing, the order settles the argument before anyone opens their mouth.
Ridge explained the purpose in an interview with Roland Berger: "We implemented a set of hierarchical values to protect people and set them free." He described the goal as letting people "make decisions without fear," without "quacking up the hierarchy somewhere around the world."
Read his phrase again. Protect people and set them free. A ranked list does both. It protects the employee who makes the unpopular call, because the order backs them. And it frees them from waiting on a manager to break the tie.
Disney Figured This Out Decades Ago
WD-40 isn't alone. Disney's theme parks have run on ranked values for a long time. Cast members learn the Keys: Safety, Courtesy, Show, Efficiency. For about 60 years there were four.
The order is the whole point. Disneyland Paris recruiting material, quoted by Kenny the Pirate when Disney announced a fifth key in 2020, puts it this way: the Keys "appear in a specific order," and Safety "must never be sacrificed for another key."
Think about what this does for a 19-year-old ride operator. A guest is having a wonderful time, the show is running, the line is moving. Then something looks wrong with a restraint. The operator doesn't need to call a supervisor and debate whether stopping the ride hurts the show or slows the line. Safety outranks show. Safety outranks efficiency. Stop the ride.
The fifth key tells you something too. When Disney added Inclusion, the announcement coverage noted "It's unclear where inclusion will be placed." Adding a value forced a real decision. Where does it rank? According to MickeyBlog's rundown of the Five Keys, it landed third: Safety, Courtesy, Inclusion, Show, Efficiency.
Contrast this with most companies. Adding a value usually means adding a bullet point. Nobody asks what it beats and what beats it. So the list grows, and the guidance shrinks.
You Already Know This From Software
If you've written software for a living, you've seen ranked values work. You signed up to them.
The Agile Manifesto is four ranked pairs. "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Working software over comprehensive documentation." And the line people forget: "while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."
The authors didn't say documentation is bad. They said when you're forced to choose, here's the winner. Twenty-five years later, people still argue about agile, but almost nobody misreads those four lines. The word "over" did the heavy lifting.
Engineers make ranked tradeoffs every day. Consistency or availability. Latency or cost. Readability or raw performance. We'd laugh at an architecture doc listing "fast, cheap, reliable, secure" with no priority. Yet we accept exactly this from our team values.
Why Most Leaders Won't Rank Their Values
I've thought about why so few teams do this. I think it comes down to discomfort.
Ranking means admitting something you care about loses sometimes. Nobody wants to stand in front of the team and say "quality beats speed" when the CEO is pushing a launch date. Nobody wants to put "profit" last on the list in front of the board. So we leave the list flat, and everyone gets to believe their favorite value wins.
Patrick Lencioni called this out in his Harvard Business Review article "Make Your Values Mean Something" back in 2002. He opened with a list: "Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence." Then the punchline. Those were Enron's values, from its 2000 annual report. He also found 55% of Fortune 100 companies claimed integrity as a core value. His verdict: most values statements are "bland, toothless," or flat-out dishonest.
A flat list is how values go toothless. When nothing outranks anything, nothing costs anything. And a value which never costs you anything isn't a value. It's decoration.
How to Rank Your Team's Values
You don't need a company-wide initiative for this. You run a team. Start there.
Step one... write down the real list
Not the poster. The things your team argues about. Look at the last three hard calls you made. What pulled against what? Those are your actual values.
Step two... force the pairs
Take every pair and ask: if these two collide, which wins? Write it down. Quality versus speed. Customer versus teammate. Security versus convenience. If you find yourself saying "it depends" every time, you haven't decided what you stand for yet.
Step three... put the uncomfortable one where it belongs
If shipping on time sits below doing the right thing, say so out loud. If it sits above, be honest about it too. People already know where it sits. They've watched you. The ranking only makes visible what your behavior already taught them.
Step four... back the person who follows the order
This is where it gets real. The first time a junior engineer holds a release because quality outranks speed, and you're the one who wanted it shipped, your reaction decides whether the ranking means anything. Thank them. Publicly. If you overrule the order the first time it's inconvenient, you've taught everyone the real number one value is "whatever the boss wants today."
Step five... use it in hiring and reviews
WD-40 talks about values as the way they make decisions, not a nice frame on the wall. Do the same. Ask candidates about a time two good things collided and how they chose. In one-to-ones, ask your people where the ranking helped and where it felt wrong. Adjust it when it's wrong. A ranking isn't scripture.
The Real Test
Here's how you'll know it's working. Your phone gets quieter.
Fewer "quick question" messages asking you to break ties. Fewer escalations where both sides are right. More decisions made by the people closest to the work, at the speed the work needs.
This is what Ridge meant by setting people free. A ranked list doesn't restrict your team. It hands them the answer you'd give if they called you, so they don't have to call.
So pull up your team's values. Count them. Now ask yourself: if the top two collided tomorrow morning, would everyone on your team pick the same winner?
If the answer is no, you don't have values yet. You have a list. Go put it in order.