Our company explored a few value propositions before deciding to become The Delta Studio, a startup studio focused on building ventures. We realised that involving the entire team in the definition of the culture of this new endeavour, was incredibly important. Contributing to the definition of this new brand would ensure that our entire team would be aligned, motivated and would feel a sense of pride and ownership in The Delta Studio.
In order to define our values as a team, we decided to run a values workshop where everyone could participate in defining the values of the business. We explored a few different ways to structure this session; there are variety of amazing articles online that have suggestions for how this should be done. Ours was a combination of a few, and we were really happy with how it turned out.
1. Introduction | 10 minutes
This was quite an exciting event for us as a business, as it was an opportunity to clarify to the team the vision of The Delta Studio and what we would be focusing on going forward.
To start off our session, we spent 10 minutes giving the team an overview of the positioning of the Delta and what our value proposition to Corporates and VCs would be. We also explained how this was an opportunity for us to define the type of business and culture we wanted to have going forward, and how we wanted everyone to be a part of that.
1. Eliciting Our Top 15 Values | 10 minutes
We provided everyone with a list of 500 potential values, and they had to determine which ones they felt should be a priority in The Delta Studio. Every team member had to write down 15 values on separate sticky notes.
The facilitator has to push everyone a little in this step! With two minutes left, most people still hadn’t finalised their 15 values, so we had to extend it by a few minutes, but in future we’ll just keep in mind that we need to encourage everyone to work quickly.
The reason sticking to the 10 minutes is important, is that you don’t want people to over think this step, the values should be those that immediately resonate with your team. So the pressure actually results in a strong diversity of “gut” felt values that truly represent each team members individuals value set.
2.Strip Your Values | 5minutes
After everyone had picked their 15 values,they then had to pick their top 5 from this list and move the remainder of these values down to the low-priority pile at the bottom of the board. The team now had some time to truly reflect upon the 15 values, and decide which ones were the most important to both the team and the business.
3. Pitch Your 5 Values | 10 minutes
You’ve picked your top 5, now it’s time to explain why you think they are important. We handed out larger sticky notes which the team could fill with their argument, or a few phrases to support the priority of their value.
4. Group Values | 3 Minutes
Group similar values together on the board. We actually didn’t originally do this, and realised when voting that we had to group them as so many were similar.
5. Vote on Values | 5 Minutes
Everyone was handed 8 small dots to vote on their favorite values with. They also had a big red star which was a “super-like” dot which counted as two votes.
6. Tally the Vote | 5 Minutes
We went and added up all the votes on each value and found our top 9 values (we were looking to pick between 7 and 10).
7. Present the Vote | 5 Minutes
At the end of the session we reflected on the final 9 values we had selected, and confirmed that everyone was aligned and happy with the outcomes of the session.
Reflection
We were really happy with the values that came out of the session. The management team had actually defined their values before the session, and it was interesting to see how some of these came through in the final value set generated by the entire team.
What would we change for next time?
In hindsight we would add another 10 minute session where we would distribute the values among the team and try to generate some ideas for value statements to accompany these values, unfortunately we ran out of time.
