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Your HR Team Needs To See Slack's Defiant Take on 'Values'

This article is more than 8 years old.

Can you define your organization's soul with just six terms? Most corporate bosses and their HR teams come unglued when they try. That makes it fascinating to examine San Francisco's Slack Technologies, a software company that has avoided the usual banalities about "integrity" and "respect" in favor of a defiant, six-item list that actually says a lot about its core values.

For a deeper look at Slack, see this month's cover story in FORBES, where the company's maverick CEO, Stewart Butterfield, talks about the value of a liberal arts education. (He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a master's in the history of science.) But the 42-year-old Butterfield has plenty to say about Slack's corporate culture, too.

It's noteworthy that Slack earns its money -- and its $2.8 billion valuation -- by wading deep into the murky mess of knowledge-sharing within organizations. That's not just a software challenge. It's also a test of human dynamics, Butterfield explains, particularly "the ability to interpret people who aren't necessarily great at articulating what they want." The more that Slack can decode hazily expressed preferences, the more valuable its software becomes.

So Slack's list of core values starts with empathy and courtesy . Other companies might mock users' stupid questions; Slack doesn't. People who succeed at Slack bring a lot of patience to their jobs, Butterfield says, and a desire "to intuit what users are trying to say." That's true both in customer service and in software engineering jobs.

Next on the list: craftsmanship. Slack is a detail-oriented company that succeeds by making workers' routines a little easier, rather than by moving mountains. If Slack can help a work team save a few seconds in keeping track of who's coming to the 3 p.m. meeting, that's a win. "People who we would want to have working here get satisfaction out of exercising their own mastery," Butterfield says.

Another Slack virtue: playfulness. Slack's head of software client development, Eric Costello, is famous for creating droll error messages, including this one: "We’ve seen this clear up with a restart of Slack, a solution we suggest to you now only with great regret and self loathing." Such banter helps everyone relax and get a little more enjoyment out of the day, Butterfield observes.

Solidarity matters, too, as does a sense of thriving. Butterfield says he wants people who work well together, and who "feel a sense of happiness that comes from achieving your purpose."  That's best expressed by the Greek word eudaimonia, he says, but "thriving" or  "flourishing" convey the same concept in English.

In a landmark 2002 article in Harvard Business Review, management guru Patrick M. Lencioni wrote that "Most values statements are bland, toothless, or just plain dishonest. [They] create cynical and dispirited employees, alienate customers, and undermine managerial credibility."

Well-defined values don't sound like the safe platitudes of a Hallmark card, Lencioni added. Instead, formal values should help a company differentiate itself from competitors -- picking virtues that run counter to the ways that many other people run their businesses.

"We're a hot company right now, so many people want to work for us," Butterfield says. But even all-stars get turned away if the cultural fit isn't there. "I can think of people we haven’t hired, who were really unable to say anything about what they would do for us or for the customers," Butterfield says.