COEXISTENCE WITH VALUES DETERMINES SUCCESS!!
Do you know what the values are?
By definition it says that they are principles or standards of behavior; judgment of what is important in life, quality or set of qualities for which a person or thing is appreciated or well-considered
What do you think if in a job interview you were asked to define your values? Or if your first day of work in the new company asks you as part of Onboarding to think about it. What do you think?
I believe that we need our values to help form the core of who we are and we can define what is important to us, this will allow us to have the necessary tools to live happier, more productive, and satisfying lives.
Working for a project I met development teams being distributed, in Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Spain: UX people, graphic designers, QA, and developers. The first thing that seemed important to me is that team members know the values of their team. I sent them a couple of questions before a meeting to talk about it, here I show them: What do you think is important as a team? Do you think innovation is important, do you want to have fun every day or be a professional that you value as a team?
Explain that when you are clear about the team’s values, it helps you to understand what you can expect from each other. When you recruit new team members, you can discuss team values in advance to find out if there is a match between the candidate and the team. If being skillful, for example, is an important value, then you can expect team members to spend time developing their skills and taking on work that is outside their comfort zone.
Most people on a team never talk about their values. Yes, there are often company values - you can find those values on walls, at the front desk when you enter an office, or even printed on desks or as computer wallpaper — the question is, are those values always the same as the team values? Some of the corporate values are also quite important to the team, but it is also likely that the team has more applicable values of their own that they find much more important in their work.
One of the things that I find very important for a team is to put things in view and, as a group, decide on their values: what is important to a team, what is good and what they want to be.
As I described earlier, it can help them focus when they need to decide where to go, they can use it to discuss work agreements, or people can make decisions because they know what to expect from the group.
I will explain with more detail about the remote workshop that I organize for each team. The goal was to let them know the values of their team. I used the Value Stories sections taken from the Management 3.0 practices. https://management30.com/practice/value-stories/
The dynamic was as follows:
On a MIRO board along with personal maps that we worked on in another session I gave them the list of values, then I asked each one to share stories in their team about things that happened in the last months. Think about personal values: what is important to each team member. And then as a team, decide on your team’s values.
Let’s take a closer look at the different steps.
As a person, I believe you become who you are because of all the things you experience in your life. The same is true for a team, it becomes who they are because of the things they experience in their existence as a team.
I asked the teams to share stories, whether personal or work, things that happened to them in the past month. It’s hard to tell a story, so I asked them to put the story on the cards first (post-it), it worked quite well and the new team members started talking about how welcome they felt on the team. When you share stories, you can find out what your personal or team values are. Some of the teams discussed about some of the conflicts they had.
The next step was that everyone should think about their personal values. Based on the list on the Management 3.0 site, which contains a useful list of about 50 values, I left them next to each photo in Miro, I also added a post-it to make clear to people who can also add your own values. To avoid people feeling limited when deciding their values.
After everyone decided on their values, the next step was to share these values and mark them on the image. I asked them to color their personal values and then asked them to briefly explain the personal questions submitted and to reflect on how these values return to their work. The response I received from some of the team members afterward was “I found teammates with the same values as me, which I did not expect” “now I understand my teammates better” and “it is good to know that it drives the persons”.
The next thing was to decide on the values of the team. The indication was: the next step is to decide on the values of your team, they have 20 minutes to discuss and organize it. Some of the teams grouped the values according to their personal values in common and thus write them on a post-it and place them near the center for the figure of their team. Another team voted for points after grouping them. Other teams waited silently until a team member commented that each member should pick a value and vote.
During the session, the question arose about how many values are we allowed to select? There is no limit really, but I could suggest that 5 would be good to start talking, in the end, the team decides “for this exercise most of the people were between 5 and 10 and the teams obtained from 4 to 6 values per team.
The final step of the team values was to ask the teams to visualize the values. Words are powerful, but I think that when you can turn words into symbols, sometimes they can be even more powerful, a little graphic facilitation, we take the phrase an image as saying more than a thousand words as the basis. ” The conversion of the values into symbols of the same form was carried out by the team itself.
A team has Strength as their most important value and for them, the image of Yoda was the perfect visualization!
We did the values and names session, visualize the values , and create a team name. I asked the teams to complete a survey after the Meeting. One of the questions was: “How happy were you with the team’s value session?” The answer was 1, 2, 3, or 4. Where 1 was not so happy and 4 extremely happy. 85% gave a 3 or 4 in response.
Now Well … does the dynamic end with this unique session on team values? No, teams must regularly talk about their values. Perhaps discuss them in a retrospective session: do we continue to live up to our values or do we change? Because I also don’t believe that your team’s values are set in stone and will never change. I think having clear team values and a real team name makes it stronger! So the next time you are involved in a new team, think about the team values and the team name.
My focus was on emphasizing that it is very important to create a safe and trusting environment, in which each person feels totally confident to share what motivates them and why, and even more important that everyone understands that there are no wrong answers.
I must emphasize that the learning that emerges in the team, we learned their values and how they see life, what they believe in, how empathy was generated between them, how there are affinities that were not known, and then as a team values can be created that represent them all and allow them to live with them and achieve success in everything they undertake.
Success depends on people becoming more virtuous in living with their values
Do you want to learn more about Culture and Values? Would you like to try this practice with your teams? I invite you to define values in your teams and achieve results as good as those I have experienced.
Tell me how it works for you!
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