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What Values You And Your Team Hold Dear?

Ilona Codes on July 08, 2019

Software professional, development teams and organizations each have various (and sometimes) different values that they care about the most. Thes...
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Ilona Codes • • Edited

My answer:

  • The most important is empathy for others. Be it users, customers, or your coworkers.
  • Don’t work with jerks. Culture is the most important, and no matter how good their technical skill is, if they repel and ruin the emotional state of others, it’ll be a substantial net loss to the team, organization, business, and the end customers.
  • Value of teamwork and collaboration over cowboy/solo/firefighter developers.
  • Honest feedback with care about the person.
  • Shorter cycle times: how long does it take from the idea to impact on business or customer.

Your turn!

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Charles • • Edited
  • Humbleness
  • Accountability
  • A good balance between adaptable and detailed people
  • Build Psychological safety
  • Open feedback (everyone has a copy of radical candor)

Of course we eat our own dog food, and measure most of those using our platform (bunch.ai, check it out, there's free accounts) to keep on eye on whether we hold true to our values. That's a great tool for retros and making sure we keep those values as our team grows.

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Avalander •

How 1) and 2) are compatible?

How are they not? A jerk doesn't have much empathy for others, so they shouldn't be the first choice when it comes to working in a team that values empathetic behaviours.

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Alex Fedorov •

Exactly my thoughts!

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Marco Ravicini •

I worked on different teams and therefore I can only contribute the values I take along:

Empathy, Respect, Simplicity, Diversity and Inclusion and a Culture of Failure.

Though the term "Culture of failure" is a bit weird. It means for me that there should be a culture where failure is an option and is treated in a good way. Accept it, apply the retrospective prime directive and then look how we can learn from the failure and try to avoid it next time.

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bob.ts •

Our Company's Core Values:

  • Puts Team First.
  • Is Authentic and Clear.
  • Is Dedicated to Growth.
  • Does the Right Thing ... not the Right Now Thing.
  • Approaches Problem Solving Passionately.

I can honestly say that anything I would have said can fit somewhere into these.

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DeChamp •
  • open communication. If you have a problem, let it be known so we can move forward.
  • Work as a team, not as individuals on a team.
  • Know the difference between under and over engineering, aim for the middle
 
avalander profile image
Avalander • • Edited

The answer is, of course, it depends. It depends so much on the specific situation that I don't even know where to start writing about how I would handle it, but here are a few questions I would ask myself, in no particular order.

  • Have any of their coworkers complained about their behaviour? How often?
  • Have they been given feedback on how their behaviour impacts their coworkers?
  • Is their manager actively supporting them to improve the problematic areas?
  • Have they been offered professional training/coaching to address the problematic behaviours?
  • Is everybody else being fair to them? i.e., would they complain the same if anybody else performed the same behaviour?
  • Is there any issue in the environment that's causing the unproductive behaviours?
  • Have they been located in another or several other teams and the same issues have showed up?
  • Does the issue seem to stem from an inherent trait in the offender, or a latent conflict between them and the complainer? If the latter, have we tried to resolve the conflict?
  • Is it mostly me who sees a problem with that person's behaviours, mostly others, or both?

From that list you can already guess that my first choice would not be firing them, but trying to solve the underlying issues that might be causing them to behave in a way that is disruptive for everybody else.

 
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Avalander •

We agree on that, there should be clear and accessible policies defining what behaviours are unacceptable and people shouldn't be fired on the sole basis that someone else thinks they are a jerk.

However, I think it's reasonable to summarize a team's values with be considerate, don't be a jerk, I wouldn't expect Ilona to post a dense HR document defining what it means to be a jerk in their context.