Values to Velocity

One of the great joys of starting a business is the learning and connecting process. The best part of the last six months has been talking to so many smart, funny, insightful leaders. It’s really helped me evolve and tune in my perspective on how best to help teams in this unique point in time. As I coast into September, that’s coming together into what I’m calling my Foundational Offering for leadership teams:

As won’t surprise anyone reading this - time is an increasingly limited resource. Even with all the technology in the world, teams are expected to do more with less all the time. The pace of change leaves them no time to process but they desperately need to. They need space to understand how they are actually feeling, to understand themselves and each other, space to define how they really want to work together. It’s the infrastructure of resilience.

Values to Velocity is a focused, 4 hour engagement that provides these exact building blocks.

Change affects everyone differently. And well designed teams should always have a diversity of change styles playing off each other. Fundamental to building resilience is understanding these differences, the variety of ways we each handle disruption and how we can leverage those differences to balance each other out and cross to the other side of the bridge.

We start by highlighting those differences in action, digging into our individual styles, blind spots and the ways we can work better together. This leverages a custom tool I built called The Wingspan Assessment that uses our core values to unpack individual change approaches. We can look at a team’s collective spread to really see the diversity in action.

Most corporate values exercises fail in the long run because they stop at the whiteboard. But even so, values are what drive our behaviors, reactions and instincts. When we move from the individual to the collective they help us build critical connections and identity as a team.

This is an inherently creative exercise. By getting hands-on and illustrative with how we think about what matters to us, we don’t just create a poster that gets ignored. We build a promise and a shield that protects us from swirl and confusion.

This is what the afternoon builds towards and it’s tempting to jump straight here, to defining the rules and rituals without the introspection. But when we examine our reactions to change and our values first it ensures the rules we agree to are actually grounded in who we are and who we aspire to be.

First, we diagnose the friction. What behaviors do we need to leave behind to best exemplify our values? Then, we can craft the playbook that ensures we can cut through swirl and anxiety - focusing on the most tension-filled interactions a team engages in:

The point isn’t to get this perfect in 4 hours. It’s to build (to use a product mindset again) a minimum valuable product or prototype. Something a team can pick up and test and build on.

We end with accountability. Where teams make specific 7-day promises that ensures the momentum doesn’t stall when we leave the room.

I designed this specific offering with the busy and exhausted leadership team in mind. The group that is feeling a little (or a lot) overwhelmed and maybe even unmoored after a difficult change like a layoff, restructuring, leadership change, or strategic pivot.

Often, a team like this doesn’t have the luxury of a lengthy “storm, form, norm” multi-day or week transition period. But they can benefit greatly from a focused afternoon that gives them the opportunity to breathe, reflect, and build the foundations of a better way of working in the new normal.

If that sounds familiar - let’s talk.

Cheers Friends,

Ray Knickmeyer, Founder & Principal

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