A team culture bases on shared values

How can personal values and corporate culture be made to harmonize? Which values are recognized by a group as well as by individuals? What do we perceive as fundamental and what values do we aspire to?

As team lead, I also wanted to explore these questions. In this article, I describe how we identified our team values with the help of the Management 3.0 big value list and how this helps to grow culture.?

"Research confirms that clarity around values and personal alignment makes a significant difference in workplace behavior and is a driving force behind motivation, engagement, and productivity."

[Kouzes, Posner 2012] [Appello, 2018]

Human values and virtues are exciting topics because they are strongly influenced by culture. When different mentalities and attitudes meet, working together can sometimes become a particular challenge. The reasons for this can be many and varied: personal experiences, regional factors, or differences between various generations (even in the same region), to name just a few examples.

In my previous blog article about Personal Maps, I went into more detail about how my 2018 team was in the Forming Phase at the time. For us, the discussion of core values and aspirational values was a great exercise in our team meeting to share how values relate to our team.

This was our way of proceeding:

1. Everyone was given a large, printed list of values and first identified the 10 values that are most important to them personally.
2. Under the heading "What is important to us?" we compiled our values on a flipchart, the majority of which we agreed on.
3. We distinguished between core values and aspirational values.
4. We uploaded an overview of our common team values in our communication tool, in our teams group.

The core values identified in our team put into words:

• Trust, honesty and respect represent the most important core values in our view.
• We are characterized by openness and reliability.
• We consider virtues such as helpfulness and loyalty to be self-evident.

- We see all these core values as the basis for our joint work.

For us, particularly important values and virtues that we strive for and appreciate in everyday life were, above all:

• We willingly show commitment and enjoy demonstrating our dedication.
• Appreciation is of central importance to us.
• We value punctuality*.

Due to my imprecise questioning, we have established a special rule for the last point. To the question: "What is important to you?" a predominant part of the team answered almost as if in chorus: "Coffee!".?*We therefore started to tolerate up to 5min being late, as long as you needed this time to get a coffee ;-)

In the following team meetings, these team values became a regular part. We exchanged stories about the situations in which we were able to demonstrate certain values, and we also told each other when we were not able to live or experience the virtues, we were striving for in the way we would have liked.

So-called Value Stories are very helpful for the climate in the team. Photos can also help to capture great moments that represent certain values and thus provide a helpful basis for a value story. It works the same way the other way around as well: if you don't know which values to choose, it helps to tell stories that made you happy and derive values from them.

The big list of values as a template, a step by step guide ‘How to Value Stories’ as well as other helpful tips and variations can be found on the official Management 3.0 website: Value Stories. If you want to know more about ‘How to Grow a Company Culture’, I also recommend to have a look at the Values and Culture. article.