Very often, when talking about “company values” with various people I see eyes rolling and hear comments like “yeah, management told us to be “open minded and fearless “”, “some consulting group established them and we have them on our website”. In general, this topic seems to be controversial, to say the least, and the common denominator seems to be complete detachment of proclaimed values from everyday life in the company.
So is it possible to make values… well…l valuable? I’d say so. I’d like to share my experience with working with company values as an agility booster.
At one of the companies I worked in, there was a need to update the company values. Ones that existed were already a couple years old and in the startup world it’s eons. The CEO asked Agile Coaches (two of us) to deal with the topic. At first I thought it’s a topic more for HR/management, but after a while I started to think that it’s actually very interesting and might be helpful when done properly. I started to do research on the company culture, values etc and added some Agile thinking into that.
As every good agilist would do, we started from the question “Why?”. What could values actually bring to the table? Are there any issues that could be tackled with values?
We noted that there were at least a couple of things that were getting us further from a truly agile approach to our product development and are more on the cultural, than process side. After all you can have the best processes ever but without proper culture, that will not work. In this article I’ll focus on a very clear example – the feedback culture. As Agile Coaches we had plenty of examples of feedback working poorly between departments and levels of the company. It was all good on a team level, employees were very open and constructive when talking to each other but when it went to passing the feedback, for example upwards, to the management, suddenly openness disappeared. And we knew very well that our management consists of really open minded people who would really appreciate some good critique.
After listing issues we have on the cultural side, we started to plan the values workshop. With having in mind what issues might be cleared out, the agenda of a one day workshop was relatively easy to set-up. What was equally important was to create a proper participants list. As there were two Agile Coaches, we decided to have a group of around 20 people to manage the event properly. That led to setting the participant list in a way that every team, role, group or level is represented (the bigger the team, the bigger the representation)..
At the day of the workshop, the event started with a warm up exercise to get people in “talkative mood”, short presentation about the theory behind the culture and values to get the common understanding of those terms (in very short, Values supposed to be the guidelines in case of doubt on how to behave). The workshop consisted of a series of brainstorming exercises and each one of them was more and more concrete. For start: World cafe session where participants discussed and noted their thoughts about their ideas for a perfect company in a couple of areas (like Psychological safety, Communication, Decision making etc.). From those notes, participants (guided by Agile Coaches) started to find common patterns in thinking of different groups. Those patterns showed what were the most important things for the majority of participants. Next exercises further narrowed the ideas to distill a couple of words with a short explanation of what that means.
We ended with 4 values. Example is:
Openness
We are courageous.
We communicate directly.
We speak up.
We challenge norms and rules.
We seek new approaches.
Outcomes of the workshop could be seen almost immediately. As what happened there was not only writing down a few sentences, but all the discussions around it. Back to the feedback example: management had the opportunity to say clearly “we value your input, we are open to critique and expect it”. That resulted in an almost immediate boost of transparency (which is also one of the pillars of Agility) and helped in numerous ways to push the product development on the right track.
Another interesting outcome was that employees did actually “feel” the values. Even though not every person in the company was there, representation of their group or team was enough to pass the expectations. I have to admit here that personally I feel proud whenever in a meeting I heard one of the developers say something like “guys, remember about Openness – we speak up, please follow it”. And that happened quite often.
For sure I’d do a couple of things differently in another round like that. Like secure more time, as we needed a followup to tidy up the outcomes. I’d also prepare a better idea for a template on how the value should look exactly to avoid unnecessary discussions.
Besides that, doing a value workshop might actually work and bring something profitable to the company. It might also be a very valuable tool for an Agile Coach to help set up the right culture for doing not only agile processes, but also boosting up the agile mindset. To sum up all written above, I’d recommend few things:
- Start with “why?”. Treat it like a product, and don’t do anything unnecessary.
- Match the agenda to “why”. Even if you’ll find a perfect workshop template, do a checklist if that’s really answer your needs, if not “hack it”
- Invite participants that would properly represent an interest group. Imagine how you would react if you’d get some values dropped on you by management without even asking you or someone who represents you about the topic.
- Make the workshop fun and engaging, while connected to a goal. Start with a warm up, make the goal clear, use diverse exercises to keep the focus and commitment.
Please feel free to share your experience in the area of working with culture, values, especially in connection to agility.
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