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Identifying values

It’s crucial for a strong leader to be familiar with their personal values. One needs to understand what values drive them before they can enlist others to help them achieve their vision.

Through Leadership Victoria, we’ve been  encouraged to do a lot of work around identifying and defining both personal and shared values. I recently had the pleasure of attending a separate workshop offered by Leadership Victoria; the subject of the workshop was Cultivating a Culture of Collaboration. The session was facilitated by Beth M. Page of DreamCatcher Consulting in Victoria, BC.

One of the exercises we worked through was the Values, Beliefs and Behaviours exercise from the Barrett Values Centre. Richard Barrett offers values assessments for numerous large organizations. He’s compiled a live, online values dictionary that contains nearly 6,000 values.

I’ve done similar values exercises in the past – but this one took it just the extra step further that I needed. Not only were we asked to identify our top three values and our beliefs that support each value but we examined the behaviours that we exhibit that support each value.

Why is this an important exercise? Because, as Beth pointed out by quoting Barrett, values tend to unite people while behaviours tend to divide. When we look at many world conflicts, often two sides will have very similar values (i.e. religious) but their behaviours can vary significantly (how they embody those religions).

Back to the values exercise.

The number one value I identified was integrity. My beliefs around integrity? We get what we give. It also encompasses so many other values that I feel are highly important. If you’re acting with integrity then you’re embodying numerous other positive characteristics. And then I had to name the behaviours that I exhibit that support this value of integrity.

The behaviours I listed were vague. As were the behaviours listed by nearly everyone else in the workshop. I wrote things such as, “I treat people as I’d like to be treated”, “I follow through with my commitments”, “I try not to take on more than I can handle” and, “I’m honest and accountable”.

Those statements really don’t say much.

Our facilitator asked us to get into pairs to discuss these values further. What she asked us to do was identify actionable behaviours that will exhibit the values we identified.

Easier said than done.

It was helpful to be in pairs to do this – the other person (we each paired up with someone we’d never met before) had some distance and after listening to what we hoped to achieve with each value, had enough distance that they were able to help identify specific actions that I could take to demonstrate my values.

When once I said that I “treat people as I’d like to be treated” my actionable behaviour became, “I’ll initiate one meaningful/intimate/purposeful conversation per day.” When I said that I “don’t take on more than I can handle” my new behaviour became, “I won’t take on more than 2 external contracts in my personal business at a time.”

Our facilitator pointed out that we need to make our values behavioural in order to demonstrate leadership.

And to make them behavioural we need to practice every day until it becomes habit (she suggested that if we do something every day for 21 days it will become ingrained in us). So if a behaviour I had written down was to make time to check in with myself regularly, the actionable behaviour could be to write in a journal for 10 minutes per day. Every day.

Take a few minutes to try out this exercise for yourself. You may be surprised by the values work you didn’t realize you need to do.

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At a recent Leadership Victoria Community Learning Day (we packed in a lot over two days this October), they gave us a tool called the Six Thinking Hats.

One of the great things about Leadership Victoria is that they provide us with a deluge of resources and tools that we can use. Of course, there are so many that we can’t possibly use them all. But that’s the great thing about the program; we can pick and choose and really make the program as useful and relevant as we’d like for ourselves.

The Six Thinking Hats is an invaluable tool for working with a team; it says, “it’s ok to be pragmatic, or optimistic, or emotional…” and divides these different roles that we can use to redirect or focus the meeting or our own thoughts or ideas.

The process of the Six Thinking Hats was coined by Edward de Bono to “help people be more productive, focused, and mindfully involved. And once learned, the tools can be applied immediately!”

Six Thinking hats – White Hat

The white hat is about gathering the necessary information. We can take a look at what’s available to us, what we already know, and what other information we still need to track down. The white hat is objective and fair, and only accepts proven information. Wearing the white hat can sometimes be a challenge to set aside our own feelings and opinions, and keep the discussion impartial.

Six Thinking Hats – Red Hat

The red hat offers a chance for members to voice their feelings. All too often in team/group work, we aren’t given enough of a chance to really check in and let the others know how we’re feeling about a project or phase, or even discussions that we’re having. The red hat lets us tell our teammates what we like and hate, are scared or are excited about. And the great thing about the red hat is that we don’t have to justify those feelings. A great opportunity for teams to grow based on a deeper understanding of all people involved.

Six Thinking Hats – Black Hat

The black hat, while perceived as being the negative hat, can be a tremendously powerful tool. This is where critical thinking comes into play. This is where team can really begin to challenge the process. It’s important, though, to keep emotion out of it; logic prevails with the black hat.

Six Thinking Hats – Yellow Hat

The yellow hat represents optimism. The team that wears the yellow hat will focus on values and benefits and the comments are positive and constructive. Logic is important and the reason why must be answered. This stage is great for reinforcing creativity and discovering new directions through proposals and suggestions. Opportunity abounds with the yellow hat.

Six thinking Hats – Green Hat

The green hat is the creative hat. Teams will likely wear this hat when they’re brainstorming. This is a chance to go beyond rational – by extending ideas into the impossible, we’re more likely to generate new ideas and solutions. The green hat won’t accept “but…”.

Six Thinking Hats – Blue Hat

The blue hat takes control of the team’s discussion and focus. It calls upon process and definitions and organizes thoughts and ideas. The blue hat is particularly useful when it comes to putting together proposals, reports and summaries.

It’s important to note that the Six Thinking Hats have no order and team members can put on whichever hat they feel is needed at the time to move the project or discussion forward.

While going through the different thinking hats as a group, we quickly learned how difficult it can sometimes be to separate our thoughts and emotion, our neutral, information-gathering hat from our pragmatic hat. We learned, too, that this process – while quite clear- will take a bit of learning to put into practice.

Our team tried out the Six Thinking Hats by actually making paper hats, one in each colour, and walking through a process.

Six Thinking Hats Example:

Here’s an example of how it worked. We each put on a different coloured hat and discussed an idea.

Green Hat: “We should design self-watering tomato plant pots.”

White Hat: “Well let’s talk about that. Is there anything like that that already exists? What kind of information do we need to gather to see if this is viable?”

Red hat: “I just have to say that I’m feeling a little nervous about trying to revolutionize gardening.”

Yellow Hat: “This is a great idea because so many people are busy but would love to be able to grow their own produce!”

Black Hat: “Is this really viable? How are we going to make sure the tomatoes don’t get too much water?”

Blue Hat: “We’ve got some great ideas. I’d like us to put our green hats back on and do a little more brainstorming to see if we can really come up with an innovative gardening technique.”

It’s nice to have a tool such as the Six Thinking Hats to have the confidence to step forward in a meeting to challenge the process, without having to worry about being the one who’s being difficult. A caveat such as, “I’m just putting on my black hat here for a minute…” is a great way to introduce a different line of thinking in a team or group setting.

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Learning your leadership styles

A crucial piece of our learning process thus far has been a module on learning styles.

On the surface, learning styles may not seem relevant or important to the leadership process. However, when you’re working with any group of people it’s crucial to understand how to best convey information in a way that will be easily understood. A solid understanding of various learning styles can only help team development.

There are 3 main learning styles:

Learning styles: Visual

Visual learners learn best through observing. These people prefer demonstrations and pick up on visual cues such as body language and facial expressions. When they read, visual learners tend to create a picture in their mind. Visual learners are the predominant group of the three main learning styles.

Learning styles: Auditory

These learners absorb information best by listening. Audio books, lectures and group discussions are particularly effective. While they don’t mind sitting still for longer periods, these people are quite easily distracted by outside noise and movement while they’re trying to focus.

Learning styles: Kinesthetic

Kinesthetic learners  need a hands-on approach to absorb information. Often identified as hand talkers, these learners need to move around frequently, or doodle in their notebooks when sitting for extended periods. Lab work and experiments, role-playing and colourful text all help kinesthetic learners absorb information more easily.

You can take a learning styles assessment to discover what type of learner you are.

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Our leadership team has so far only had one meeting. We’re still in the Forming phase of our teamwork development; we’re getting to know each other but we’re cautiously optimistic that we won’t run into any insurmountable challenges.

One of the many great things about the Leadership Victoria program is that they equip us to be able to handle any obstacles and challenges we’ll encounter over the course of our Community Action Project and nine months of learning.

In his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni discusses the five most common obstacles to teamwork.

Teamwork: the 5 disfunctions

Teamwork barrier #1: Trust

Teamwork must start here. Trust in each other is paramount to moving to the next level in performance. Trust is build through honouring your word, setting ground rules and sticking to them, and showing your vulnerable side. Clear, open communication will become a direct result; once team members trust each other, conflict will be much easier to address.

Teamwork barrier #2: Conflict

If team members don’t have trust in each other, or in the process, conflict is sure to arise. Lencioni isn’t saying that with trust, a team will never face a single obstacle. He’s saying that that when a team has trust the conflict that does arise will be much more easily dealt with. The conflict that does appear will most likely be addressed and dealt with head-on, in a clear and effective manner.

Teamwork barrier #3: Commitment

This point goes back to the five principles of leadership. Team members need to feel like they’re part of the process; in an optimal teamwork situation all members share the vision, are challenging the process to achieve the best possible result, and they encourage and can count on each other. In short, when the team trusts in each other, there’s buy-in from all sides of the table. When every team member feels heard, inspired and trusts in the others, then they’re truly committed to the cause.

Teamwork barrier #4: Accoutable

When a team is functioning smoothly together, each member is accountable. Each member trusts the others, they have experience in dealing with conflict in a productive, positive manner, and they are committed to the process. Not only are the team members individually accountable, they hold that same high standard for each and every member of the team.

Teamwork barrier #5: Results

This is at the top of the pyramid because without the previous four elements to hold the team up, it would be very difficult to achieve success, or even focus on attaining results.

Our own team is new. We’re learning to trust each other. That will become the basis of our working successfully together toward a common goal. And I have no doubt that as we grow together we’ll be able to uphold the remaining 4 elements of the teamwork pyramid.

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