What are the values of your work team/organization? Have you taken the time to take your group through the exercise of identifying values that you share and want to exemplify as a team?

Without doing so, your people will not be sure how to work and what to work on. That is a recipe for lack of effectiveness and confusion.

As a group do you value:

• Speed of work over quality?
• Honesty or efficiency?
• Customers over staff?
• Social time over buckling down?
• Individual contributions or collaboration?
• Getting the right answer or asking the right questions?

There are a million things that can be important to individuals on your team, but what values do you choose to share and exemplify as a team?

Why is this so important?

So that you, as the leader as well as the team, will know what to focus on and how you all agree to work together and get the job done.

For example, if your team agrees that ‘buckling down’ and ‘focus’ are top values for the team, then time spent socializing will be viewed as a waste of time and discouraged. If you all agree you value customers over staff, then the expectation is that staff will give up time and priorities to meet the needs of the customer, even to their detriment.

These values also help you to make decisions.

If you value collaboration over individual contributions then you will assign projects to groups rather than individuals. You will design your accountability based on collaborations and you will budget in ways that support collaborations. You will design your office space to encourage collaboration and you will reward different kinds of outcomes.

Does your team have agreed-upon values? Are they discussed and prioritized in your team meetings? Are they posted so that they can be referred to quickly? Have you, as a team, discussed how those values will be implemented? And are you, as the leader, consistently living and reinforcing those values, setting the example for the entire team?

If these things are not happening within your work group, now would be a great time to schedule a retreat and have this discussion and set this process in place. When a work team has shared values and those values are acted upon and supported by the leader people are clear about what to expect when they come to work every day, increasing the chances for the engagement you need from them to accomplish your goals.

Let me know if you need some help.