Finding unexpected commonality

Here’s a new edition of, “Now what not-digital project is UX Designer Ashley asked to work on?”

Earlier this year, InterVarsity went through a fairly major reorganization which included bringing HR, Technology, Communications, Project Management, Internal Staff Support, etc. all together.

From an outside perspective, these are natural fits with one another. But previous to the reorg, all these departments had split among other executive lines, and therefore had developed disparate systems, cultures, and processes which now had to be brought together. Because of this, each department was unsure of how they now belonged.

Leading Structural Change

Our former Chief of Staff, now Chief Operating Officer has lead structural changes like this by using The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni and the Table Group, which is a 4 step guide to creating organizational health.

A graphic that describes the 4 step process to organizational health: Build a cohesive leadership team, create clarity, reinforce clarity, and over-communicate clarity.

Zooming in on #2: Create Clarity

As I said before, there was a lot of anxiety in the system. Some groups bristled at the decidedly not sexy ‘Operations’ title. Some groups were afraid of how their workflows were going to change. Some groups thought what was important to them and to their previous leader who was now gone would be jettisoned.

When there are a lot of unknowns, the only way forward is to make the unknown known — which is exactly why Step #2 is Create Clarity.

Create Clarity

There is a worksheet in the book that the leadership team works through, and one of the questions is, “How will we succeed?” The Operations Leadership team had tried working it up, but weren’t happy with where they were.

There is where I come in. I was asked to lead a process that would identify the values for the Operations team.

How do you get real values?

I had a faint idea of where to start (sadly, the book isn’t of much help here other than telling you that you need to answer this question). I knew first that it’s easy to let values be accidental or purely aspirational. I wanted them to be actual. Which means you’re really talking about behavior.

Values → Behavior, and sometimes vice versa.

Sometimes you’ve identified a value and then draw out the behavior that occurs as a result of that value, and start asking people to behave that way. For example, when I started running critique, I knew from the start that I valued humility from everyone and that meant no one was exempt, including myself.

Sometimes the behavior comes “first” —in that the value underlying that behavior isn’t explicitly named on a wall, but the behavior happening repeatedly belies that value. For example, I really value learning, particularly by reading. Do I make my team members read books? No — I will send over development resources in their preferred medium…plus a book. I can’t help it because deep down, that’s my value 😅

So how did I do this?

I was given a list of team members from different departments who were the culture carriers, referenced in Edgar H. Schein’s classic Organizational Culture & Leadership book.

I gathered them together for a 2-hour workshop that I designed which had these outcomes:

1. Get to know one another
2. Identify your personal values
3. Identify your team’s values
4. What do we see across everything?

Getting to Know One Another

I started with my favorite icebreaker — a Miro template that includes an element of choice to allow participants to choose the question they will answer.

Identify Your Personal Values

I asked participants to list strong value moments for them, and what their own values were, whether they were accidental, actual, or aspirational, and how it showed up.

Identify Team Values

Next, I asked if their department had any explicit values and how those showed up.

With the 6 departments’ values listed out, I then asked for the team members to share stories behind them.

One that stood out in particular was when one of our Data Analysts was sharing more deeply about context and communication. She shared how sometimes they were asked to just grab numbers, but how they were careful to not just send the numbers over, but to craft reports that shared the context under the number.

I will never forget this moment, when the video producer said to the data analyst, “It’s not just us?” I asked her to explain more, “Well, people love to tell us exactly how the video should be, even how long it should be! But we often send a proposal back over for what we think would best serve their needs.”

And that was how our first common value was discovered. Whether you’re a data analyst, a UX designer, an HR coordinator, if you’re in the Operations team, you leverage your subject matter expertise to not just do what was asked, but provide what’s better.

Identifying our Values

These are the moments every facilitator lives for—we started seeing how underneath all of our disciplines, even though there were real differences, there were actually four common values and common behaviors that were already there that just needed to be unearthed and deepened. I asked for everyone to share their ahas:

🥁 After some more individual processing time and synthesis…

1. Christ-Centered → We follow Jesus and we’re here to bring students and faculty to him through our unique skillsets. Behavior: We incorporate spiritual formation as part of our team rhythms and regularly pray for each other and for our movement.
2. Creative Practicality → We’re creative and innovative solutionists, system builders, and storytellers — whatever it is we’re making, it will be well-designed and practical. Behaviors: We do incredible work without missing deadlines or going over budget.
3. Collaborative Community → We are joint creators, and we have a good time doing it! Behaviors: We learn about each other’s jobs and know who to reach out to for what input and celebrate one another’s strengths in our teams channel. When it gets hard as it always does, we’re respectful and seek the best for one another.
4. Catalytic Partnership → When you work with us, you know that we have the best interest of you, your audience, and InterVarsity at heart. We make things better because we worked on them. Behaviors: When we receive requests, we’re going to be thoughtful in responding not just with what you want, but what we believe you need. At the end of projects, we specifically ask how our partnership catalyzed something better than what you could have done without us.

Reflection

As I said earlier, explicitly stated values are rarely actual, they are often accidental or aspirational. After living this experience, I feel more acutely what a shame that is because unearthing these values for my teammates was an incredibly invigorating experience. I feel more excited than ever to be on a team that is actively trying to live these out.

Ashley Crutcher is the Director of Experience Strategy at InterVarsity located in Madison, WI. She tweets at @ashleyspixels and enjoys cuddling with her furkiddos, crocheting/knitting, ringing handbells, and thinking too much about everything.