Team Values and Culture

This opening module kicks off a team values and culture workshop. Participants prepare in advance by reading the HBR article "Make Your Values Mean Something," proposing candidate value words or phrases with personal definitions, and preparing a "peak experience" story from their own work. In session, participants review the workshop agenda and goals, then discuss their homework in small breakout groups, exploring what "healthy pain" their values should create, how personal purpose connects to team values, and what would make the session a success for them. This module is built around one team's process of updating its own values statement, and the discussion structures generalize to any team working to define or refresh shared values.

This module examines how well-known companies define and live out their values, using SDL, Netflix, and Uber as case studies. Participants review SDL's core values (Cultivate a Beginner's Mind, "Yes, and..." collaboration, Feedback as a Gift, Success through Responsibility), then study Netflix's culture of honest feedback and "freedom and responsibility," and Uber's evolution from Travis Kalanick's original values (like "Always be hustlin'" and "Meritocracy and toe-stepping") to Dara Khosrowshahi's revised set (like "We celebrate differences" and "We act like owners"). Through homework, small-group sharing, and full-group discussion, participants identify companies whose values they admire, propose new value ideas for their own team, and prepare a personal "peak experience" story to bring into the values-creation process.

This module teaches Lencioni's Four Types of Values ??? Core, Aspirational, Permission to Play, and Accidental ??? and gives participants a shared framework and visual model (the "Values Tree") for identifying which values are actually shaping their team. Exercises are built around a specific client's existing value set ("Bytestyles": Always Day 1, Champion Diversity & Inclusion, Be Candid and Clear, Seek Truth & Be Pragmatic, Be Courageous and Aim for the Highest, Grow Together), which participants classify against the four types; the classification approach generalizes to evaluating any team's stated values. Participants also practice a storytelling exercise ("Peak Experience"), sharing personal work stories in small groups and analyzing how those stories reveal live values in action, and close by making personal commitments to the values identified.

This module teaches leaders how to define, audit, and maintain team culture and norms so that expectations are explicit rather than assumed. Participants work through the Culture Audit Discussion tool (adapted from HBR's "Leading Teams" by Mary Shapiro) to examine how their team communicates, conducts meetings, makes decisions, handles dissent, delegates work, and manages projects. They then use a Culture Norms List and a dot-voting "Norm Voting" exercise to identify which existing norms to keep, which to add, and which to drop, and discuss how to reintroduce and re-audit norms over time (e.g., when team membership or projects change). The module also addresses how values can conflict or be "weaponized," and how to build guardrails against this into team charters.

This module examines a company's own stated values and pushes participants to move past generic language into concrete, observable behaviors. Participants classify and discuss their current company values to surface where the team is aligned or in conflict, then study cases from Enron, Siebel Systems, Intel, and Webcor to see how vague or "cookie-cutter" values fail while distinctive, even uncomfortable, values shape real decisions and culture. Through breakout discussions, participants identify the "productive pains" their values should create, then define specific positive and destructive employee behaviors tied to each value.

This module examines three transformational leadership skills: being an "insider/outsider" who blends technical credibility with openness to new approaches, pursuing "separate but linked journeys" that reposition the core business while building new growth businesses, and using culture change to drive employee engagement by modeling desired values. Participants apply these skills to their own organization, mapping where they currently show up and where they're missing, then use a Venn diagram exercise to connect core and growth businesses by identifying specific shared traits. A closing discussion has participants assess how their culture has shifted (what's improved, what's gotten worse) and sort practices into Keep, Toss, or Create.

This closing module for the Team Values and Culture program helps participants pull together the frameworks covered across the program and decide which ones they will actually apply. It includes a storytelling-focused teaching segment and a discussion exercise where participants review a checklist of tools ??? including the four Types of Values (Core, Aspirational, Permission to Play, Accidental), Defining Values Behaviors ("Productive Pain"), Values in Conflict ("Weaponization" prevention), Transformational Leadership Skills, and Origin/Impact/Vision storytelling ??? and commit to which they'll use going forward.