Valuing Values
Valuing values; why its imperative core values are chosen by your team
teamwork
[teem-wurk]
๐ฏ๐ฐ๐ถ๐ฏ
- cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause.
For the past 3 or so years, our team has been guided by 5 core values. They were chosen by the team. Wellโฆ. I chose a bunch of words and phrases I liked and wrote them out on a whiteboard at a team meeting and asked if everyone liked them. They all nodded their heads in agreement and they became our team values.
Only recently we discussed our values as a team and no one could really remember them. They remembered โhappy, talented plumbersโ as that is what we all aim to be, and what we are known as in the community. But the other four, absolutely no idea. Itโs not because they didnโt agree with what the values stood for, itโs because they werenโt chosen by the team, not really anyway. There was no buy in. No passion for the words; they werenโt our teamโs โwhyโ, they were what I felt at the time we all believed in and because no one objected I went full steam ahead with them.
Just recently, a special day in our McCarthy Plumbing Group journey occurred as we had an entire team ‘tools down’ day. Our Inaugural Team Planning Day gave us the opportunity to galvanise as a team, give everyone a platform to have a voice, re-engineer our values and set collaborative and personal goals for the next year ahead.
We essentially scrapped our current values and ripped through our banner with a Stanley knife (no that didnโt happen, although suggested!), and spent an entire day chatting about what is important to us. What we want to achieve personally, professionally and as a business together.
Everyone who joins our team knows we value a good team culture, so it was unsurprising that ๐๐๐๐ฆ ๐๐ฎ๐ฅ๐ญ๐ฎ๐ซ๐ led our new team-chosen values. We also decided, in our newly created buddy support groups, that we value ๐๐๐๐จ๐ฎ๐ง๐ญ๐๐๐ข๐ฅ๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ, ๐๐จ๐ง๐ญ๐ข๐ง๐ฎ๐จ๐ฎ๐ฌ ๐๐ฆ๐ฉ๐ซ๐จ๐ฏ๐๐ฆ๐๐ง๐ญ, ๐๐ฎ๐๐ฅ๐ข๐ญ๐ฒ, ๐๐จ๐ฆ๐ฆ๐ฎ๐ง๐ข๐๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง and ๐๐๐๐๐ญ๐ฒ. We also chose behaviours we would all work towards to ensure we lived our values in every aspect of the business.
I couldnโt thank our team enough for being so positive, innovative and embracing of the event; something many plumbers never get to experience in their careers, but something that will continue to be commonplace in a McCarthy Plumbing Group plumber.
I encourage every business owner that is struggling to get โbuy inโ from their team members, or if their team culture is lacking, to invest in having a โtools downโ day. Creating values, together, initially felt like taking a few steps backwards for me. But I now realise just how important it was to go back to the drawing board in order to have everyoneโs voice in shaping our growth as a business, together.
