No D!ckh3@ds Policy

This one walks a fine line, but I hope all who read it can understand it’s coming from a good place.

I had a meme pop up in my social media recently. One of those quotes attribute to a prominent figure with their image behind it. It’s usually Morgan Freeman or Einstein, and quite often not them who said it in the first place. This one was from Elon Musk and simply states “We have a no-assholes policy at SpaceX”.

I laughed, and love that for so many reasons. My company had always been a values and principles-driven organisation. I don’t think a business can exist for long without them. We hold above all else, Family, Ownership, Development, and Empathy. But... there’s always been an often spoken internally, but always left unwritten (until now), 5th value…

No D!ckhe@ds.

Probably not everyone’s chosen turn of phrase, but it’s ours and it’s stuck.

What that means to us is we simply want to be good people, work with good people, and do good work for good people. Seems fair, doesn’t it?

Over the years, it has been tested. That brilliant, but toxic staff member. That large client that swears at the team. The staff member that holds strong client relationships, does the bare minimum, and expects the world. The client that shifts responsibility rather than shares it. I think every business owner has many war stories.

Early in the life of my company, we were working with a local business and their internal IT Manager to provide some additional skills and resources. A server had crashed, and we had resolved it on the weekend at their request. The failure had occurred due to a change made by the internal IT Manager! When it came to invoicing, the measly sum of $300 for a couple of hours work (early 2000s), the IT Manager turned from partner to a protector of self-interests. Refusing to pay the bill and passing the responsibility for the downtime to us. I may have seen red…

I tore the invoice up, pushed the pieces across the table, and told him we would never work together again.

When walking back to the car, my colleague said in an exacerbated voice, “I can’t believe you just gave him $300 for being an asshole!”

I replied, “No. I just made a $300 investment to never deal with that asshole again.”

It’s a matter of perspective, sure. But making a small loss to uphold a principle or value was a test for me. Would I uphold my principle of choosing to work with good people over money? I think of it as strength training for your integrity muscle!

We have worked out our “no-d!ckhe@ds” muscle many times over the years, internally and externally. It’s not an emotional reaction. It’s respectfully calling out a misalignment of values and beliefs, and that’s OK.

Life is too short not to enjoy what you do, who you do it with and indeed, who you do it for.

Don’t be a d!ckhe@d.