In a recent visit to a summit which was hosted by SalesForce (The company) and I was impressed as to how much their presentations and product demonstrations were tied in to their company core values. Salesforce as a company makes it a point to communicate what has been done by their company staff and executives to achieve their level of success and further more, illustrate what is still left to do.
It is not a wrong assumption to say that most IT professionals have come across core values of a company at least once during their professional career. In most cases we were led to believe that our environment and culture were tightly bounded to the core values as they were presented. However, in my experience, most people either forget or probably don’t know what core values their company has. Furthermore, I have observed that not only individuals don’t know their core values, but also, they struggle to understand why are they there and what purpose are they fulfilling.
I tend to use company core values in Agile Transformations that perform and facilitate. As I develop custom training for any organizations, the core of Agile Principles and Product Management which I utilize for teaching an Agile class is tightly coupled with a company core values. In instances which the organization does not have core values (And yes, it does happen), one of the first steps I take with that organization is to help the leadership team come up and agree on a set of core values. I am telling you, it makes your job as an Agile Coach much easier.
As an example I’d like to refer to what most Scrum and Agile books and articles refer to as “Executive Support”. Well, once you have the right context from the executive team as to how they view and look at the core values of the company, or help them come up with their own definition, I believe you have accomplished most of the task which you may have labeled “Get Executive Sponsorship Locked and Loaded”. What is awesome about this is that you can even start your segue in to opening up coaching opportunities with the executive team as well.
Once core values are communicated as an attached entity to the newly developed or reformed agile process in any organization, two things will happen. First, you have demonstrated that there is enough executive sponsorship around the new process and transformation initiative. Second, you have fully engaged what has been the core of the company values, with the newly refined and developed process. This should set you up with the right head start and momentum in the right direction, to continue engaging and helping your current teams and organization.
I’ll be posting some more material related to types of core values and ways to exercise and help your clients coming up with the right set of core values, in the near feature.
Remember, Process makes success repeatable.,
Cheers,