Values and Team Performance

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects of leadership and management. It addresses some of the most common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction, so let's dive straight in to this week's episode. Hello and welcome to this final episode of the Leader's Kit Bag in the four part miniseries Around Core Values so far in the previous three episodes we've focused on the importance of values for you. Getting clear on your values, how they impact those that you lead. In today's episode though, we are looking at you and your team and we're exploring the importance of investing the time in helping your team to understand their values and then sharing them as a group. Connection Human connection really does sit at the heart of what it means to be human. We are fundamentally social animals. Our ancient ancestors only survived when they were part of a tribe. We had to be part of a group to be safe and able to fend off attacks from saber toothed tigers or to organize a successful foraging party. And while we may not need to do those activities anymore in the modern world, we do still need to be part of a group. We need to be part of a group to thrive at work and in life more generally. Arguably, connection Human connection is more important now than ever before as a result of the fast paced, digitally connected world we find ourselves living in. This is exactly why connection is one of the key Connections keynote presentations I regularly give to audiences and companies. It really is so important. So when we invest the time in helping our team to understand their values and then sharing them, it drives performance, it increases collaboration, and it makes for a much nicer and happier working environment. And happiness isn't just a nice to have. There is a huge amount of research that says happy teams perform better. When we share our values with our colleagues, we are better able to understand their behavior and they are better able to understand ours. For example, if you know that one of the key values for John in your team is around family and you know that he's got very young children and elderly parents, perhaps with dementia, then you understand why two days a week he will always leave the office absolutely on time because he goes to visit his poorly mother. And if you know Sally in your team, one of her core values is about growth and progression in her career, then you understand why she is sending you emails at 9 o' clock at night. Because it comes from her value set. So we can understand people's behavior much better. And fundamentally, understanding a little bit about the values of different people in our team fosters a stronger sense of connection. We naturally connect much more with people who are like us. So when you understand that you share a value of faith with someone in your team, you understand them a little bit better, you're going to feel more connected to them. And who are the people you most want to help in life? Who are the people you most want to go the extra mile for? It's the people you are most connected to. So if you are sold on the importance of values, if you're sold on the value of exploring values with your team, you can click on the link that accompanies this episode and there is a free downloadable toolkit for you that will help you and your team get clear on your values. And there is also an exercise you can run yourself to help your team understand their values. But if you need some help with it, do head over to the training page of my website and on there you'll find details of a values workshop that I also can run for you, if that's what you need. That's it for this episode, folks. Look after yourself. Look after those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And as always, until next time, lead on.