Team Values

The older I am the more important I think that values are one of the most important things in order to build a great environment for a glued team. I couldn’t be more agree with the Peter Druker’s famous quotation “ Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, I think every culture must have a subset of principals which must be based on a set of values. Once you have theses, then you will be able to use them as a cornerstone in order to take decisions alone and/or jointly.

For this reason, we decided to take action in this matter and we did a “values workshop” to choose our main values.

Values workshop

First of all, I printed a list of values (you can find them here at Management 3.0 webpage), then I did another list of values based on this first list but a little bit shorter (with 50 values and translated to Spanish), which is more usable for us, I printed 4 of this.

After doing a brief introducction about what was the goal of the workshop I shared with the team the list of values I said before. Then we followed this steps:

1. - Individual choice: Each team member had to choose (in silence) 3 to 4 values which they feel more represented by. They could choose from the list or obviously they could choose a new one, the lists of values I printed were only to help them as an icebreaker.
2. Put into context: We did two groups (4 people each) and each one had to explain to others their 3–4 values and put them into context. This is very useful because force people to do a little of story telling, this also help them to add feelings (which enrich the story ), and becuase helps others to a better understand.
3. Colective choice: Next step, they had to choose 3-4 values which are more representative inside their group, based on the individual values. Once they agree, they had to write them down in Post-Its (one value for Post-It).
4. Put in common: We were feeling very confortable, for this reason insted to chose a spokesperson for each group we decided that everybody had to talk. So on this stage, one by one stood in front of all the team, stick the Post-It on the wall and explained one value and put it into context.
5. Team choice: Finally we drew a bullseye on the wall, with two rings: the inside for core team value and the outside for secondary values. This was the most insightful part, because we catalogized the final list of values as core and secondary vales. To do that, we group values that looks similar for us and we started as nice converstation about which values were more important for us.

Finally here you have the result:

• Core Value: Coherence, Colaboration, Proactivity and Adaptability.
• Secondary Values: Commitment, Kindness and Resolution.

Bonus track: As an optional activity before the workshop we proposed to materialise our core values, I mean to make them physical… Currently, we are thinking to buy some stuff which could represent these values and make a little pedestal with all of them where all team members could see.