Situation:
How many times you were focused in your team on a product to develop, a service you offer, and so on while you and your teammates were working together but not really collaborating at a deeper level?
How to collaborate when you do not know your team's values, principles, and what is actually important for you as a team?
It is for me like wanting to have apples from a tree that you do not even plant, has no roots, and do not take care of. How this shall work?
How are values influencing our thinking process and our behavior?
We are not born with values, we create them in time, depending on our life experiences, environments, and so on. Some of them stay with us our whole life since the moment we created them, some are changing and some are new.
Our values are associated with emotions, which can be formulated positively (towards something that attracts us - dopamine is released) or negatively (running away from something - cortisol is released).
Values defined negatively can take away experiences and options in life for you. This is why it is important to rephrase them into positive ones.
This is also one of the steps in the below example.
Values examples: autonomy, clarity, fairness, friendship, certainty, trust
Use Case: a team who worked together for some time and needed to define their values, principles, and related behaviors when working together, in order to get the team dynamics and interconnections to work.
Steps I did to guide them through finding their values, principles, and related behaviors using Playmobil Pro:
🎲 Collect positives: split the participants of the workshop into small groups of 4-5 persons and ask them to pick up from Playmobil Pro figure(s) and accessories which can create their view upon one situation that would exemplify how they would like things to happen while they work.
🎲 Share: each participant shares in 1 min the story while the other ones are noting on sticky notes each idea that they get from the story.
🎲 Collect negatives: after the round is done in each group, ask them to pick up figure(s) and accessories which can create their view upon how they would definitely NOT like things to happen in work situations
🎲 Share: each participant shares in 1 min the story while the other ones are noting down on sticky notes each idea they get from the story
🎲 Re-phrase: the sticky notes produced from the above sharing will be re-phrased in positive phrases.
🎲 Cluster: from all the sticky notes collected, each group is eliminating duplicates, clustering them into values, principles, and related behaviors. If the difference is not yet clear, another round of sharing is done and then the clarity of the clusters will be in most cases visible.
🎲 Re-arrange: after each group finishes, ask them to come in the big group and share the outcome of each small group. Eliminating duplicates and re-clustering is also done after sharing in a big group.
You can visualize them in circles or as a tree with roots (values), branches (principles), behaviors (apples), or any other metaphor that fits that team. You can also draw lines to interconnect them or play around to create the visualization that works best for that team.
How to make this tangible?
It is good to create such visualization and for some teams, it can be enough. But I wanted to guide this team to get also the tangible outcome of what exactly can they do with these in daily work. So they created test cards in small teams out of the final visualization.
This supported them to follow up on their experiments, measure how this work for them, and adapt when they want to change something.
How to create test cards or how test cards fit all personality types you can find in related articles.
How to create deeper experiences?
Probably one of the things that miss in most teams with or without team values determination is personal values determination which, of course, stays at the base of the team values determination.
If this would be done prior to team values determination, clarity would come up faster in this kind of work session.
How you can determine your values you can find in resources with free or paid tests.
One-phrase summary:
Determining your values and team values can be a proactive approach to avoid conflicts, broken collaboration, or unuseful endless discussions on certain topics. It is up to you how you manage this, my way of helping teams is a playful one that creates an enjoyable experience for them.
Resources:
Proactive Team Building: Establishing Team Values to Avoid Conflicts and Broken Collaboration