Workshop: Core Values Creation | What does your team or community value?

22 Jan 2020

Use this exercise to get a group of people with a common interest (e.g a team or community of practice) to create a set of Values that are important to them.

Goal of the workshop

• High performing teams have common values, and thinking about them will help teams improve.

An example of a value might be ‘Respect’. Team Members believe that people are always doing the best they can do at any given moment, they respect all points of view, including those of their Stakeholders.  

Materials you need:

• Print out the template (Or make your own)
• Large quantity of Post-its
• Marker pens (Sharpies are best)
• Optional: Background music (play only during the silent bits)

How to run the exercise

Note: It’s sometimes good to give people time before the session to think about what values are important to them, especially for people who are reflectors.

Values can be tightly coupled to one another i.e. there is significant overlap between/among the Values and that’s ok, the nuance is helpful.

Introduce and generate

• Stick up the blank template and hand out the Post-its and pens
• Introduce the exercise and why it’s good for teams to create their shared values.
• Ask the team to write down the values that are important to them. Ask them to do this in silence and on their own. One value per Post-it.
• Give them 5 mins, but check with them if they need more time, or move on if everyone stops writing

Facilitator tip: Look out for people who seem to be struggling, give to suggestions or examples to feed their thought process.

Group and theme

• Once everyone has finished writing their values, get them to place them on a blank wall space (Preferably next to our Values template).
• Tell them not to worry about where they place them as we’ll group them in the next step.
• Now, ask some of the people to group and theme them. They can rename groups to give them better titles should they choose. This process is called affinity mapping.

Facilitator tip: It’s often a good idea to let the rest of the team have a break whilst the grouping exercise happens so that the grouping process is not rushed, the more they are consolidated and summarised, the better the results.

Playback and understand what’s really core

• After grouping, ask the people who did the grouping to quickly walk the rest of the team through the groups so that we all know what’s there (Note, they’re not to present a case for why it should be a value, it’s just provide anchoring as to what has been collected)
• Next we need to get an idea of how important the values we’ve collected are to the people in the room.
• Before we open up a verbal debate, get the team to form a line or train of people in front of the groupings.
  • Ask the first person in the train to take one of the groupings and place it onto the Values template based on how much they value it (closer to the core means its more important).
  • They then go to the back of the train.
  • The next person moves another group or reposition another group originally positioned by someone else.
  • And the process continues until people stop moving stuff.
  • Note: Tell them it’s okay to place groupings outside of the template - this means it’s not important enough to be a core value.
  • Now open up the conversation and allow people to make changes or reach consensus.

Visualise and act

• The final task is to stick the final version up in a visible place in the team area and act on the values.

Final thoughts

You may find from discussion that some of your values are aspirational i.e. we don’t do this or we don’t always do this. Change the conversation into…

• Why not?
• What steps could we now take to act on this?
• What could we do differently?
• Do we need to stop something?
• What do we as individuals need to sign up to?
• Are there example behaviours or actions that help us understand how we may act on these values?