Garry Shutler

Establishing team values

May 15, 2009 · 2 min read

One of the biggest things I took from the Progressive .NET tutorials was the idea of establishing a set of values for your team.

This was raised in David Laribee’s session Towards A New Architect where he asked whose team had a set of common values. In a room of 30 or so people, I think 3 or 4 raised their hand.

As soon as it was mentioned it made sense to me. A shared identity and core set of values can only benefit a team. To that end I’m going to run a similar session to the one I participated in in order to establish a set of values for my team.

I thought I might share the format I’m going to use so that others might do the same:

Set up a 1 hour session for discovering your team’s values

5 minutes explaining what we are doing and what we want to achieve:

DIVERGE, CONVERGE, SYNTHESIZE

DIVERGE, CONVERGE, SYNTHESIZE

Your team now has a set of common values.

Thank the team and tell them you are going to get them printed to put up on the wall. The important thing is that they are visible and prominent.

Important points

I’ll blog about what values my team at Open Projects have chosen next week.


Photo of Garry Shutler

Hey, I’m Garry Shutler

CTO and co-founder of Cronofy.

Husband, father, and cyclist. Proponent of the Oxford comma.