Four Steps for Team Values Development
Leading a team of people in any industry involves many similar skills. A locker room, just like a board room, is a cauldron of emotions and expectations. As a team leader, your job is to get everybody on the same page and rowing together. You don’t need every teammate to have the same background or skillset or personality style… but you DO need them all to share and agree on a similar set of values.
Values are the foundation for the success that your organization will have, and a lack of shared values will ultimately lead to the downfall of successful teams. So how do you get everybody on your team to develop the same set of values? As you may have guessed, there is a simple four-part process that I believe will help you. There are Four Steps that are crucial for Team Values Development – for creating a culture and ultimately the consistent positive results that you desire.
As I have shared in my conference keynotes and workshops, great leaders understand that RESULTS are a symptom of connecting with a compelling common goal and connecting with your teammates. If you want great results, part of having a shared goal is having shared team values… and the four steps process for developing that shared set of values is to: Clarify, Magnify, Glorify, and Amplify
1. Clarify
Leaders need to begin building their team culture by defining , clarifying, and then implementing team values to establish the behaviors that they want to see repeated. As the saying goes, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.
If you, as a leader, are not crystal clear on what you will emphasize as important in your organization, then nobody else on your staff will be clear either. Winning teammates understand the all failure is the result of vagueness!
2. Magnify
Once you know and have clarified your team values and essential cultural behaviors, then the next step is to communicate them and publish them and catch people doing them! Focus is the key – it isn’t what you know that makes your team successful, it is what they know and take action on that makes the difference.
Find ways to maintain a white-hot spotlight focus on the vital metrics you identified as central to your brand. Make those things appear HUGELY important – because is everything seems important, then nothing is.
3. Glorify
What gets rewarded gets repeated. When you catch your people doing the “right thing,” use that as a teachable moment to validate them and inspire others to emulate their behavior!
Turn your teammates into heroes by telling stories about the time they provided great customer service or when they went beyond their role to help out a teammate in need.
4. Amplify
Speakers were invented because they help to spread music to a larger area. That is the last part of the team development process. Once you have a message and an example to share and reward, make sure that you find a way to amplify the message. Spread the idea so more people (those who are further away) can be influenced by it.
In addition to telling stories to inspire and define your culture, leaders with teams that are distant or virtual need to amplify the message via blogs and newsletters and promotional materials that tell their staff and their customers more about what your team believes in. Spreading the word informs others of your cultural crusade, and solidifies your values in the minds of your existing workforce.
This basic formula to Clarify, Magnify, Glorify, and Amplify the values and desired behaviors that you believe are foundational to your success will help you to cultivate the culture you seek.
In my my book, The 10 Commandments of Winning Teammates, prioritizing team goals and sharing team values is one of the many lessons that the main character learns… These Four Steps for Team Values Development are crucial - and while they may not have overnight results, they will eventually build yourstaff into winning teammates who will provide the results you want to achieve…
