• Digs ditches. Nobody is too good for any task. • Returns shopping carts (even if nobody's watching). We leave things better than we found them.
It's amazing how most teams don't set norms/values at all!
Unions have this in spades. "My job is X, I don't do Y, in fact I'm not allowed to do Y as that takes a job away from whoever is supposed to do Y"
But yeah, most people just bring their trash home.
For those interested, Visas are really easy to obtain as long as someone is willing to hire you.
So an approach might be to set only the values you can actually follow through on, and be clear when a value is aspirational. If you really do dig ditches (perhaps metaphorically, maybe by fixing deployment script bugs or something), then you can use it as a value.
To be clear: I'm definitely in favor of team values. Is there a way to make them achievable, but also grow them over time as you get better at them?
It's perhaps a difference of "We dig ditches", vs "the manager dug a ditch last week, the prior week, and this week we are digging these ditches together." All that can change, but the tract record and the habits speak more than just a motto on the wall.
You want selfless devotion to the goal then you damn well better not be wasting my time and cutting costs at the expense of my productivity.
Managers who don't know what they're talking about and insist they do and insist they are right causing massive lost time, then want to hold meeting after meeting about how it is everyone else's fault. You've seen it. Why am I working long hours doing work, some of which is shovelling sand that need shovelling because I'm not too good for it when if that idiot had been restrained to their level of competence we'd already have delivered and I'd see more of my family. Selfless devotion? To what?
In the old days when SSDs were 'expensive' and companies economised and didn't immediately buy them for the team because my time isn't worth saving but they want me to stay back to get more done for a deadline? Selfless devotion to a goal you're showing clearly you don't care about.
This stuff is really normal. You have stories, everyone does. And so we take the path that is best for ourselves and those we like. Any other choice isn't "egoless" it's insane.
Managing a team is hard. Keeping idiots from having idiotic influence is hard. Spotting who is managing up is hard. Noticing, supporting and retaining who is good is hard.
Having someone with a massive ego who you might cross the road to avoid having to socially interact with other than they do a decent job of that hard managing might work out better than "Egoless."