Developing team values and ethics is primary responsibility for leaders.
Team Values
Values in teams are the specific beliefs about what is right and wrong around us. Team values are about the culture we should encourage, the standards we should have, and the principles that should underpin the team’s efforts. They are the essential building blocks of teambuilding.
Over time all other things may change – an organization’s people, strategy, finances, and beneficiaries – but its values should not. If these are allowed to degenerate, a team no longer has any unifying core, it will fragment, staff turnover will increase and results will plummet. Think about how values should inform your leadership style. And hold true to them: values are the things upon which you should never compromise.
On a high-performance team, everyone knows the shared values. Policies don’t always tell you what to do. The boss often isn’t there to help you decide. But the values guide your behavior. For a team, shared values are their moral and operational compasses. Shared values are the core beliefs that guide the behaviors of a group. These values are not just words posted on the website; they are actively used to make decisions, especially the toughest ones where difficult tradeoffs are involved. Sometimes the values are a few single words. We recommend no more than five or six (for memorability), with explanatory sentences for each word. Sometimes the values are brief sentences.
Developing shared values – To develop your team’s shared values, follow these steps
- Examine any explicit shared values of the organization to which your team belongs.
- Assemble a group of ten to twelve volunteers (or your whole team if it is small enough) willing to help draft your team’s shared values.
- Have the volunteers share the first draft with others: team members, internal and external customers and suppliers, and other departments of the organization.
- Reconvene the original group of volunteers and redraft the shared values as appropriate, repeating these steps as often as you must until a clear consensus is emerging around your team’s shared values.
This process takes time and patience, sometimes weeks, or even months. The value is as much in the dialogue—the talking and deep listening, gaining buy-in and commitment—as in the final product itself.
Team Ethics
Ethics is two things. First, ethics refers to well based standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Put another way anytime you ask yourself “what you should do,” the question involves an ethical decision.
Secondly, ethics refers to the study and development of one’s ethical standards. In other words, ethics are standards or rules you set for yourself that you use to guide your efforts do what is right and wrong, or what you should do. For example, if a friend asks you to copy your homework, you must choose whether or not you will tell the teacher. A decision you make is ethical when you choose to do the right thing.
Team Ethics and Value – A team works together to accomplish a common goal. A leadership team takes that definition several steps further and incorporates the various goals of the individuals that those leaders are guiding. Thus a leadership team is quite important in itself. However, there are specific elements of a leadership team, such as ethics and values, that must be understood and implemented.
Implementing ethics and values – It is not only critical that you understand the value of ethics in leadership, but that you also understand how to implement these principles. There are four key steps that you can take
- Brainstorm a value statement: You should take your time with this step and gain input from your employees, management staff, shareholders and anyone else expected to adhere to the values.
- Develop the value statement: Take all of the input you received and create a value statement that incorporates the majority consensus.
- Implement your values: It is not enough to just erect the value statement; you must incorporate it into the daily operations of your company. Take time to lay out expectations that coincide with the values.
- Evaluate: Periodically, you should survey your employees, management and shareholders to determine how effective the implementation of the values has been.
Team Ethical Issues – Various issues faced by leaders, based on well-known ethical values, are
- How do groups achieve justice (in the distribution of work)
- responsibility (in specifying tasks, assigning blame, and awarding credit)
- reasonableness (ensuring participation, resolving conflict, and reaching consensus)
- honesty (avoiding deception, corruption, and impropriety)?
Developing Strong Work Ethic – A strong work ethic is vital to a company achieving its goals. Certain factors come together to create a strong work ethic, which are
- Integrity – Integrity stretches to all aspects of an employee’s job. An employee with integrity fosters trusting relationships with clients, coworkers and supervisors.
- Sense of Responsibility – A strong sense of responsibility affects how an employee works and the amount of work she does.
- Discipline – It takes a certain level of commitment to finish your tasks every day. An employee with good discipline stays focused on his goals and is determined to complete his assignments.
- Sense of Teamwork – Most employees have to work together to meet a company’s objectives.
- Emphasis on Quality – Some employees do only the bare minimum, just enough to keep their job intact. Employees with a strong work ethic care about the quality of their work.
