Our personal values tell us what’s important. They are inherent in every decision we make, they set the standards by which we live our lives, and we use our values to evaluate the decisions we’ve made. Therefore, a team without a clear set of values is a team that lacks the foundation for making decisions. If the vision of an organisation or team talks to the WHY, its values talk to the HOW. Both are essential for a team to become successful because they guide decisions, set the standards, and influence the right behaviours.

The Approach

After introductions the team performed a simple exercise to help them understand the importance of values. Engaging in a short reflection exercise helped them to get more in touch with themselves and their personal values. Using post-it notes the team was presented with a simple question to help them identify their own values. Each team member identified their top five personal values. Next the team was guided to create their personal hierarchy with the most important at the top. By determining each team members’ values first they began to recognise how their own values have influenced their own lives. It also provided an insight for other team members as to why others in their team make decisions differently.

We then developed the team values in a similar manner. We identified those things that were important to each team member individually when working as part of a team, which were then group together. These were then discussed as a group and voted on in terms of importance. Helping the team understand the hierarchy of their values is essential because it provides guidance whenever there is a values conflict.

Once we determined the core values, the team articulated what each value meant to them.

Lastly, the team determined the behaviours they would ‘see’ and what they would ‘not see’ with regard to each of the values. Each team member gave permission to the others to hold them to account; this ensures everyone adheres to the spirit of their new team values.

The team was then challenged to come up with ways to bring their new values to life.

This organisation employs the Holacracy Model of management which organises individuals into Circles with approximately 7 members per Circle. The Circle Leads are responsible for providing leadership, line management, and mentoring to Circle Members who are often consulting on different client sites. Circle Leads themselves also consult on client sites and often head up an Educational Practice, which collectively, leaves them very time poor. There was evidence that, although the Circle Leads were highly technically skilled, they were looking for the right skills to get the best out of their team, to deal with difficult conversations, and to coach their teams to better results.

Through interviewing key members of the leadership team Setanta Consulting gained an understanding of the challenges their teams faced and the results they were after. It quickly became clear that the organisation wanted to provide more than just leadership skills for their teams, it wanted to provide participants with the skills to draw on their inner resources, to understand their motivations, to improve their communication skills and develop the resilience that is often necessary when working on challenging projects.

Using the organisation’s vision and values as a guide, we proposed a 10-week leadership coaching programme that consisted of 5 workshops targeting key areas of development and 10 one-on-one coaching sessions for each Circle Lead.

Developing leadership from the inside out is a core philosophy of Results Coaching and the first 5 weeks focused on laying the foundation of leadership within each of the participants. Because everyone has different strengths the one-on-one coaching sessions were individualised for each participant and concentrated on achieving their objectives for the coaching programme (both personal and professional.)

Building on the foundation achieved in the first part of the programme the remaining 5 weeks focused on core leadership skills such as:
– Developing a leadership philosophy
– Understanding vision and values
– Aligning the vision to strategy and strategy to operations for measurable results
– Creating high performance teams
– Coaching team members for better results

Coaching was a completely new experience for the vast majority of participants and the depth of understanding that was achieved through the one-on-one sessions surprised many. A “little scary at first” the participants embraced the approach quickly and started to experience immediate results. Through assignments that furthered the coaching, participants reported back on their achievements in dealing with situations they previously thought were outside of their skill-set.

Over 90% of participants reported an increase in confidence and an understanding of their values and motivations enabling them to overcome situations that would have presented as a challenge in the past. “It’s been brilliant! The focus on values / needs is a unique way of understanding what leadership means. It’s something entirely personal and helps you understand who you are and why you do things, good for helping you always keep in check with these as well as being aware why others do things the way they do.”

A heavy focus of the programme was on practical skills that can be immediately applied to driving issues to achieve better outcomes for all parties. “Aside from the overall learnings that I got from the program Cillín has given me lots and lots of practical techniques that I find I am using in everyday situations – both in and out of work. I have raved about this program to others and am really keen to continue learning and using everything that I have been exposed to.”

Core to our philosophy of providing a high ROI for our clients we measure our success on lasting behavioural change which can be reflected in the feedback from the Practice Manager who also attended the programme, “I have had ongoing feedback from my colleagues who also went through Cillín’s course, and coaching. We all continue to reference the ideas and learnings we took from these sessions, and share them within our own teams. Awesome outcome!”

This coaching programme was delivered to all Circle Leads nationally in 2014 and 2015.