Article (Cheeky Half Episode 43): Values don’t ‘trickle down’ so easily.
A founder starts a business with a set of values, and for a while those values are simply how the place works. Fair pay regardless of gender or tenure, a decent attitude to work-life balance, a workforce that doesn’t all look or think alike: with a handful of handpicked people and nobody standing between the founder and the floor, there’s very little to interpret. Then the business grows, and the values seem to get a lot harder to find. Call it ‘trickle-down values’, borrowing the economists’ phrase along with its reputation for arriving late, thinly, or not at all.
Distance seems to be the mechanism, or at least the delivery route. Each layer added between founder and floor is staffed by people who arrive with habits of their own, and under pressure those habits can win out over values they haven’t quite absorbed. One manager defaults to an old pattern, the pattern sets a precedent, and the next person inherits the precedent in place of the value. It resembles the party game in which a message is whispered along a line of people: nobody garbles it deliberately, though everybody adds a little interpretation, deciding which parts to take literally and which the boss surely didn’t mean.
The founder is often the last to find out. Still espousing the values, and still posting about them, a founder can seem sincerely unaware of how far the floor has drifted from the stage, which leaves an awkward question about whether that’s delusion or a blind spot. In the worst cases the values do more than dilute: they get contaminated on the way down and can end up ‘weaponised’ against the people they were supposed to protect.
Who experiences this matters. Anyone joining a large enterprise expects the posters on the wall to disagree with the corridors, and arrives carrying a suitable amount of cynicism. Someone who joined a small company because its values were real, and watches them shift within months rather than decades, has no such buffer. The dissonance turns personal, and the question becomes whether there’s integrity in staying or whether it’s still early enough to right the ship. That’s a heavier question than whether an employer has fallen short, and for some people it seems to land as something close to devastating.
How big does a business need to be before all this becomes inevitable, if it’s inevitable at all? Large enterprises are widely thought to show that a message written at the top seldom reaches the floor intact, but that says little about a small business which starts with the values and works to keep them. We wonder if the exception exists and simply hasn’t been noticed, or whether every threshold arrives quietly and nobody marks it.
Listen to Cheeky Half 43 of Leadership Decanted.