Design Team Strategy #3

Team values: the foundation of any strategy

TL;DR: In this article, we explore the importance of team values in creating a cohesive and effective strategy for a design team. Team values are the guiding principles that shape a team’s culture and determine how its members interact with each other and stakeholders. Defining them is a collaborative process that in our case involved revisiting our stories of value, brainstorming our proposed team values, agreeing on a final set through an affinity diagram, and, finally, creating posters for each to make them salient and memorable. While design principles are important to a design team’s work, they are not the same as team values. Team values serve as a framework for making decisions, setting priorities, and guiding behavior.

This is the third in a series of articles dealing with the development of a comprehensive strategy for a design team:

1. The strategy house: how to define a design team’s mission
2. Pillars, objectives, and OGSMs: how to define a design team’s most important topics
3. ☞ Team values: the foundation of any strategy
4. Designing together: the importance of shared principles for design teams
5. Crafting a vision that inspires

Created with DALL·E. Prompt: “An abstract visualization of the concept of ‘values,’ digital art.”

In the previous two articles of this series, we’ve had a look at the roof and pillars of the Strategy House model. Now comes the most fundamental part, the one without which a house won’t be able to stand, at least not for a very long time: the foundation. In the case of the Strategy House, the foundation is made of a team’s fundamental values. In this article, we will explain what such values are, why they are important, and how we defined ours.

Defining Team Values

Team values are the fundamental, guiding principles that a team uses to make decisions, solve problems, and achieve its goals. They are the shared beliefs and attitudes that shape a team’s culture and determine how its members interact with each other and with stakeholders. O’Reilly and Chatman (1996) found that values are a key element in shaping organizational culture, and can influence behavior and decision-making among team members. In the world of design, team values may include…