Keeping a team together using shared values and principles

One of the defining characteristics of a real team — as opposed to a collection of individuals — are the goals of the team, and the agreed way the team will work towards those goals.

Teams form and then adapt over time — new skills might be needed, or people might not fit in with the way the team work. Some will seek different challenges on other projects and move on.

All teams go through change and battle scars may accrue over time as a result of change or disagreement. A set of agreed values and principles can be a way to keep the team together, and aiming towards their goals with less conflict. Getting important and difficult work completed to a high standard is not without pain and disagreement — repairing any schisms that grow in a team needs to be prioritised.

Members of the team, or silos within it might have unwritten values in their minds— and these may conflict with how the rest of the team see the way they should work. These differences need to be identified and silos broken down to bring the team back together.

How to get an agreed set of team values

It can seem overwhelming to set the team a task of coming up with a set of values which define them. A method I have used is to start with the examples of some successful teams as a jumping off point.

I show an example of what I expect a value to look like — something like…

Positivity — if something doesn’t look right, we propose a better way to do it

Values could be any behaviour the team want to encourage, and should be a mix of aspirational goals and some things the team already do, that they want to continue doing and improving. These are things the team want to do more of, rather than things they want to do less of — this will discourage the discussions from becoming negative or confrontational.

• Ask the team to name some successful teams — for example sports teams, companies that have a good ethos, or teams within the organisation that have admirable qualities.
• Get the team to look at the example teams from the list, and call out a few values which they exhibit — this can hopefully be completed in five minutes to get everyone thinking in the right way.
• Write out all these admirable values, and keep them visible for the next activity.
• Now split the team into small groups and ask them to come up with three to five values that the team should aspire to, and a short accompanying description. All members of the sub team should agree on these.
• Once the small groups are happy that they have some agreed values, these can be replayed back to the whole team and noted down.
• I would allow an opportunity for anyone to say they do not think the team can accomplish a particular value, or that they do not think they can abide by it. I’ve seen some values which are constrained by the company the team works for — it’s not worth having a value on the list that the team wants to achieve but cannot.
• If the facilitator thinks that the team might be reluctant to raise their concerns to the group, then the next step can include an anonymous way to reject a value from the list.
• After all the sub-teams have had a turn, voting can take place if the list is too long. This will allow less important values to drop off the list — for now. I think an ideal number would be 8–12, but this will vary for each team.
• I’ve made a rule in this kind of voting, that a sub team has to vote for values proposed outside of their sub team to get a consensus across a mixture of the proposed values.
• Any outliers could be discussed, and perhaps re-voted upon — but this process doesn’t need to be exhaustive, as this is only a starting list — and it can be changed at any point in the future if the team realise something should be on the list or shouldn’t be there.

When the team has an initial set of values, the next meeting could be arranged to agree some principles around how the team will work together and meet the values they’ve defined.

Making sure to differentiate between the behaviours the team wants to encourage (values), with what the team will do to try to meet these (principles) — a good starting point might be to grade the values from those the team meets well, to those the team thinks need more work.

The team could then start to think about principles to meet the values they’re not so good at. If the team becomes stuck, it might be worth switching to a value they do meet, and propose a principle to improve that behaviour further.

A value the team may have is:

Teamwork — we will help each other complete work which may be outside our speciality (being T-Shaped)

If the team wanted to work towards this they could come up with a principle which would explain how they’re going to try and improve

We allow anyone in the team to comment and be a part of our work. Our systems, code, content, design are accessible to the whole team to see and participate in

The team could be split up into smaller groups to work through a multiple of values and propose some principles, or an all team discussion could take place to propose some. A whole team discussion would allow a more open dialogue about their values and principles . If you want to encourage quieter team members to speak, it’s often better to split down to small groups, if you want everyone to be involved and feel that everyone will participate then the whole team can discuss things as one group.

The meeting to come up with this initial batch of principles does not need to be exhaustive, but is probably worth dedicating a length of time to above and beyond the usual retrospective a team would run to improve themselves.

Again, as with the values, these are a living document which should be changed and amended as the team changes — and the team may feel like they can no longer achieve them. It is important for the team to reflect on how they are working together, and can use the values and principles to aid this — there will be issues which fall outside of what is covered by them, don’t be tempted to add more values each time this happens. Our aim is not to have an exhaustive contract of values which the team keep adding to — it is to have a memorable amount of key values which will help the team improve and work as a real team.

A good way of keeping track of how the team is meeting their values and principles, is to apply the Spotify Health Check model to the them and look for trends over time — of which aspects are improving or getting worse, and focus effort accordingly. With a list of values and principles, it might be that some fall off the team’s radar, and need to be brought back into view.

The values and principles are primarily for the team to use to keep themselves on the right track, but they could be shared more widely to demonstrate to stakeholders or other team how they work. This should be carefully considered, as you want the team to hold each other to the values they have agreed, not outsiders using them as a stick to beat the team with.