A Matter of Values

Last year, I was the President of the Delta Rotary.  We had a guest speaker from Ghana, a small country in Africa.  The speaker told us of that country’s civil war and subsequent descent into lawlessness.  Complete with pictures taken before, during and after the war.  It was unbelievable what I saw, and heard:  fellow humans acting as if they had lost their humanity.  Indeed, they had.  And seemed worse then animals.  As I reflected on this throughout the day, it occurred to me that one of the things that makes us human and enables us to act in a “civilized” manner was our values.  The people of Ghana, at least those I saw and heard about, were people without a sense of values.  Indeed, they had been reduced to animals whose only concern was self-preservation.

What does this have to do with effective teams?  Well, just as values serve as a code of conduct for a society, team values also serve this same purpose.  A team’s values are like an internal compass that guides behavior, often on an unconscious level. Values help the team make decisions, especially when such decisions deal with issues that are ambiguous. If time is not invested in developing an agreement on the key values of the team, decisions are difficult to make.  As we shall see in a later column, decisions are complex, and ensuring that decisions are adhered to requires adhering to certain principles or values.

Values that are shared and agreed upon help the team as it works through its key objectives to accomplish its goal. While vision describes the inspirational dynamics of the team, values describe the code of conduct.  In addition, values help keep the team members aligned with each other.

Examples of values are:

• Achievement

• Innovation

• Inclusion

• Competition

However, because values are so all-encompassing (for example, see above), getting team members to agree on values can be a futile exercise. This is because values are so broad that the same value will connote many different meanings.  For example, a value of competitiveness connotes to me a healthy race with another team to the finish.  To my fellow team member it may mean win at all costs, and the ends justify the means.  If we don’t clarify what we mean by these values, we are headed for a major showdown.  And rather than wait for that to occur at an inopportune moment, it behooves us to deal with it now, at the team formation stage.

So how do you get consensus on values?  This step by step process has been useful for the teams I’ve worked with in the past.

1. Think back to a team to which you belong or belonged, that you feel or felt very proud to be a part of.  Note this does not need to be a “work” team.  You can include any other type of team, for example, a church team or voluntary organization.  Describe where and when it took place and what the outcome was.  For that team, what were the values that you believed should guide everybody’s actions?  What were the standards to which everyone was accountable?

2. Have the team members read their list, and ask them to write their values on a flip chart page.  This produces a list of about twenty values which will probably read like the founding of a new religion.  The cynics will say this is too much “motherhood and apple pie” as to be all but meaningless.  And if you stop at this point and simply publish the values as such, the cynics would be correct. 

3. Instruct team members to review the list, and place a check mark to the three values they cannot live without.  That is, if this team does not adhere to these chosen values, it would cause the team member to leave the team.  In essence, you are doing a forced choice exercise to help the team determine what is truly important as it goes about its work.

4. Now you have a list with checks and can quickly determine which values are most important, i.e., those with the most check marks.  Now the fun begins. Circle the top five values and tell the team these are the values we will adhere to.  These are the ones that will cause a member to be ostracized from the team if the value is violated.  Observe the reactions.  If there is a gasp for air, encourage the member(s) to elaborate.  The key to making this process work is to allow for individual discussion.  And listening.  Keep the discussions going until members reach a consensus on the top five values. 

5. Instruct the team members to define each of the values.  How would they know the value is being used.  How would they know the value is being abused or violated.  What they think should be the consequence of breaking the value.  This discussion is key because it gets at how people actualize the value, i.e., how they put it into practice.  Once consensus is achieved on this step, you are finished with the values setting exercise.  It is not easy to do, but it is extremely critical in order to align the team and focus its energy on achieving its objective. 

As a side benefit, all this discussion helps the team increase their sense of cohesion, learn how to deal with conflict, and learn how they tend to work with each other.