Two common themes that usually stand out when looking at high performing companies are shared goals and shared values.
All Teams should have a shared goal. Shared goals provide direction. The way forward. It means the team is aligned with a common vision directed at achieving specific results or outcomes. Without shared goals a team is rudderless. How do they know what’s in and what’s out? At a management level shared goals allow you to monitor the state of the team and circumvent any problems or issues when they arise because everyone knows what they are doing. Or do they? What happens when goals aren’t enough?
“Values tell you what to do when you don’t know what to do” – Tom McCoy, former EVP at Advanced Micro Devices
Sometimes you need more than a goal to help you. Shared Values promote good team citizenship and give guidance when making decisions. With the team singing from the same song sheet of values then any decisions they make will be in concert with each other and team members will be more engaged. When considering new team members, shared values define the team culture so it’s easier to determine if potential candidates will be a good fit for the team.
So what should your teams shared values be and how do you find them?
Shared values will obviously be different for each type of team and below I have identified some I think would be relevant for a software development team. I pulled these from a large list (see examples) and I think it’s worth having a pool for the team to discuss.
Collaborative | Integrity | Client Value | Innovative | Transformational |
Respectful | Ownership | Empathic | Ethical | Relationship Building |
Openness | Speed | Courageous | Democratic | Information Sharing |
Simplistic | Fun | Lead By Example | Humbleness | Responsible |
Enthusiastic | Passionate | Evolutionary | Diverse | Perseverance |
Urgency | Egalitarian | Autonomy | Kinship | Reliable |
Optimal | Welcoming | Transparent | Accountable | Results Driven |
Quality | Rigorous | Determined | Reciprocal | Improvement |
Excellence | Creative | Open Minded | Moral | Honest |
Resourceful | Productive | Focused | Social | |
** Some of these mean the same thing but one word can mean different things to different people. Your mileage may vary.
A useful team exercise is the following:
Gaining consensus on this may take some time and you might need several iterations of the above exercise before the team is ready to publish it’s shared values. Ultimately, if you can can promote team member engagement then the results are sure to follow.
Everyone loves Spotify, right? We hear of Spotify being the Nirvana of Agile Development because they have all sorts of wonderful processes that fit right into the”Agile” landscape. Well, in my department we had heard of the Spotify Health Check. This is a way of measuring and visualising how your team is doing. It gives the team a sense of where you can improve on things such as teamwork, health of codebase, team mission and learning.
We tried it. It’s quite a convoluted process and the team soon drifted away from it so we thought we would try something else. Step forward our Team Happiness survey.
The Team Happiness survey is a set of 7 questions that we answer once a month. Each question has a “how much do you think you do…” flavour, with the answers being “least” to “most”. The survey is done using Survey Monkey and is totally anonymous. The results are collected and weighted to produce a trackable score and we can then use the results as data in our Retrospectives.
The idea came from “Creating Great Teams” as part of how they monitored the teams after they had self selected. We’ve taken their health questions and added to them to get our own model. Here are our questions:
Thinking of the previous month at work. On a scale of 1 to 5 (1 least, 5 most), how do you feel you…
1) Are doing meaningful work (purpose)
2) Are allowed to focus on one thing at a time (productivity)
3) Have direct influence on how we work (autonomy)
4) Work in a team where people support each other (support)
5) Work in a team where people challenge each other (challenge)
6) Have been able to learn new skills (mastery)
7) Can be creative at work (creativity)
So far we’ve had a few eye openers (to do with team mission) and somethings that aren’t a surprise (such as multi-tasking and focus). I’ll keep you posted on our progress with this.