The Power of Team Values and Principles

Introduction

As teams grow and expand, one of the most daunting challenges is ensuring they remain aligned, efficient, and empowered. To overcome this hurdle, it's crucial to establish clear rules that everyone can get behind. This is where the power of values and operating principles come into play, acting as a potent tool for individual teams.

Principles are the key ingredient to well-made decisions

When we speak of principles, we refer to the backbone of well-thought-out, consistent, repeatable, and transparent decision-making processes. Employees can lean on these principles to defend and guide their decisions within the business context. However, before establishing solid principles, we must agree on values.

Corporate values vs. team Values

While corporate values serve to unify an entire organization's culture and create a shared vision, team values cater to the specific needs of individual teams or departments. These values bolster collaboration, communication, and performance by addressing a team's unique challenges and objectives.

Both corporate and team values are essential for a well-functioning organization, as they represent the guiding beliefs, principles, and priorities. However, they differ in several ways:

• Corporate values apply to the entire organization, fostering a unified culture and shared vision. In contrast, team values are tailored to individual teams or departments, focusing on their specific goals, dynamics, and responsibilities while maintaining alignment with the broader company values.
• Corporate values aim to establish a consistent identity and culture aligned with the organization's mission, vision, and strategic objectives. On the other hand, team values are designed to enhance collaboration, communication, and performance within a specific team, addressing unique challenges and goals to create a cohesive and supportive work environment.
• Senior leadership usually establishes corporate values with input from stakeholders like employees, customers, and investors. They are communicated through various channels, such as company-wide meetings, employee onboarding, and marketing materials. Conversely, team members often develop team values with guidance from team leaders or managers, fostering a sense of ownership and engagement.
• Corporate values tend to be long-lasting, as they embody the organization's long-term vision and goals. Significant changes in these values usually signal a major shift in the company's strategy or culture. In contrast, team values are more adaptable, reflecting a particular team's specific needs and dynamics. They can evolve as the team grows, encounters new challenges, or takes on different projects.

What do team values and principles look like?

To put it simply, values are the core beliefs that a specific team holds dear, while principles are the objective guidelines that support and reinforce these values. For instance, a team that values 'honesty' might adopt the principle, 'We will always speak the truth regardless of the consequences.' Both values and principles play a critical role in holding team members accountable, justifying actions, and steering decision-making.

At Novi Engineering, our journey began with identifying what truly mattered to us as a team. This exercise involved engaging everyone in the engineering department to discuss our values and combine the results. Ultimately, we settled on five fundamental team values:

1. Ownership
2. Transparency
3. Trust
4. Clarity
5. Craftsmanship

With these values in place, we developed three principles for each value. This approach provided a clearer understanding of the expectations and behaviors that supported each value. For example, our principle supporting our value of 'Ownership' was: 'We take ownership of our situation. If we aren't getting what we need from our teammates or leaders, we take action to improve it.'

In the above ownership example, if an engineer found themselves waiting on a code modification, they could use the principle to take matters into their own hands and modify the code independently.

In Conclusion

When teams establish and agree upon values and principles at the team level, they enable quick and effective decision-making. These values and principles minimize internal politics and tensions by providing a reference for guiding and defending behavior. This approach becomes an invaluable tool for seamless scaling and the successful management of large teams.

For Reference - A full set of engineering values and principles.

Here is the complete set of engineering values and principles from Novi Engineering:

Ownership

1. We find owners for important tasks so that it is clear who is accountable for delivering the work and the autonomy to make decisions along the way.
2. We take ownership of our situation. If we aren't getting what we need from our teammates or leaders, we take action to improve it.
3. We work across team boundaries to fix problems that don't have clear owners so that issues that impact us get resolved.

Transparency

1. We follow transparent decision-making models so that everybody knows how decisions are made and how to get involved.
2. We make it clear when we've arrived at a decision so that everybody knows the decision has been agreed upon and can rely on it.
3. We explain not just what but why so that others understand our logic, tradeoffs, and learnings that we made along the way.

Trust

1. We consider the security implications of our decisions carefully so that we can protect our customers and all users of our ecosystem. We build using a 'security first' approach.
2. We build simple systems so that they are easy to understand and secure.
3. We trust owners to make judgment calls in their area of expertise so that we can make decisions efficiently. We give them our feedback but let them weigh the pros and cons in their area.

Clarity

1. We commit to clear roadmaps so that we are focused, and other teams can make decisions that depend on us.
2. We reconsider our decisions when new information comes to light, so we don't base our decisions on outdated information. These changes are communicated clearly to other teams so that they can update their roadmaps.
3. We create clear design documents and clear code so that we remove ambiguity at every phase of development. We help our teammates in this effort through review and by leaving the things we touch in a better state than they were.

Craftsmanship

1. We craft our products and systems with attention to detail so that our customers and community members understand that our bar for quality is high and that our product merits their trust.
2. We push to do things as fast as possible but not at the expense of doing them right so that we optimize for long-term success.
3. We build simple implementations first and evolve complexity over time so that we can see the core of our implementation in action before fully building it. We don't let the grand ambitions of our project get in the way of incremental progress.