A while back during my corporate days I attended a leadership team offsite. We’d flown from various offices to be together. Had some lovely dinners together. And during the day, we defined our values as a new leadership team.

It was a great session. We broke into groups, brainstormed, dot voted. And what we landed on felt good. It felt inspiring.

And then I don’t think we ever looked at those values again.

They never helped us make a decision. They never helped us overcome team friction. They sat on a shelf and we kept just plugging away like we’d always done - no better than before.

It might be easy to take from that story that values don’t do anything. And that’s partly true, they are a tool, and you have to know how to use them. Values that you never use are pointless, but values you and your team actually live by are essential.

Employees who report a strong connection between their values and the company’s are 43% more likely than their peers to say that their work gives them a sense of personal accomplishment (72% vs 29%)1. And there is a direct line from that feeling of accomplishment to better engagement (and we already know that disengaged employees equals real money down the drain)2.

So yes - there’s good monetary reasons to have a strong set of organizational values - but it’s good (and healing) for you as well.

For me personally, I’ve navigated a lot of corporate ecosystems where the harsh fact was my values and the system’s values were at odds. I’m a queer, non-binary leader so you can probably imagine that me and corporate weren’t always fully aligned.

In a situation like that it can be easy to lose yourself to the overarching system. The inspiring leader we want to be can start to get lost. You may suddenly find yourself holding back, micromanaging, or otherwise engaging in behaviors that don’t feel like you. It can be easy to feel powerless too. But that’s a trap - because as a leader whether you’re a manager, a director or a VP or whatever - you absolutely do have the power to make a difference here, for yourself most importantly.

I sell interventions to leaders so of course I want to help you here, but you don’t always need an expensive engagement to do this. You can start getting you and your team’s values back into alignment and save yourself a lot of anxiety and pain on your own.

I’ve personally played around with a lot of methods for doing this over my life. I once had a CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapist) that pushed me through multiple value worksheets that strained my brain and made me question my whole existence and I was in my late thirties at the time.

That exercise and others really shone a light on what matters to me, not dissimilar to the experience I just had cleaning out my parents’ old house. Value sorting and precious heirloom sorting are very adjacent experiences.

That’s to say, this shit is hard. And it’s even harder when you are starting from a blank page with no idea where to even begin. In such situations, I always lean back on my roots: Information Architecture, because structure is soothing.

It starts with Sorting.

With a Value Sort, you start with a large set of values and try to cull them down. The goal in round 1 is to go from 50ish potential values and trim it to 15 or so. Then do it again. And again. Until you’ve gotten down to the 4-5 most essential values.

It’s hard work, because it’s about trade-offs. What matters more?

Craftsmanship vs Velocity

Intuition vs Evidence

Rigor vs Levity

Autonomy vs Alignment

None of these are bad values to have, but they are in tension with each other. Because values should help you make hard decisions. If you value craftsmanship over velocity, you must be willing to say “we’ll take an extra week on this delivery to hit our bar for quality” but if velocity wins the day, you need to be willing to sacrifice on some of the details to move more quickly.

Fun aside - I once ran this activity with a team going through some intense changes, and one of their core values was “authenticity” which they illustrated with a dabbing unicorn to reinforce what it meant to them: to be brave, and a little silly, even in the most challenging times. They still use that principle today.

To help you with this sorting experience, I’ve created a customized, organizational values cheat sheet at Knickmeyer.net you can download for free. There are more extensive instructions for how to conduct a value sort workshop as well. And if you’re super cool and love beautiful things, you can sign up for the wait list and be one of the first to own the card sort deck I use for my Friction to Flow workshop. It will look very cool on your desk and it makes the sorting activity more tactile and real in my humble opinion.

Let’s circle back to my story at the top. I stand by that team having created a really solid list of team values during that offsite. But we didn’t land the plane.

Now, as a more experienced value haver, I know you can’t stop there. You have to bring your team along on the next step: operationalizing your values and using them as the scaffolding around core friction points.

Here are some examples:

Of course, all these values and principles mean nothing if you don’t hold yourself and your team to these standards. So, a final recommendation for today’s deep dive: check in on them monthly in your leadership meetings. Don’t be afraid to revisit what isn’t working. This ensures the values stay consistently top of mind, and beyond the specific principles they’ve created together, they’ll take them to heart in every interaction they have.

When you do this hard work as a team, you’re helping each individual connect themselves to your larger purpose. The importance of the co-creation of this activity can’t be overstated. This is something you and your team must build together, or it won’t matter in the end.

Wishing you a rich and fulfilling week ahead on this day after Memorial Day. A very good time to reflect on values I think. If you’d like a partner to do that with, well, I’d love to talk.

All the best,

Ray Knickmeyer, Founder & Principal Architect, KSF