6 min read

Let’s stick together: Purpose & Values

Super glue

When people talk about the attributes of a successful team, there are certain words that pop up again and again. Words like unified, connected, united and cohesive – all of which describe a state of sticking together. But for teams to build this kind of lasting bond, they need something that acts as the glue.

In my experience, the glue that will really hold a team together – the stickiest, tackiest kind that holds everything in place through good times and bad – is a shared sense of purpose. A real evolutionary reason-for-being that goes beyond making money and instead makes a difference, to the organisation, the community, the world.

Finding this glue isn’t always easy. Often, teams spend so much time thinking about what they do (in project meetings, with clients, when planning for deadlines), that they don’t pause to think about how they do it or, more importantly still, why they do it.

The past year has presented all sorts of challenges and there are still lots of unknowns ahead. Some teams may be feeling disparate or have members who feel isolated and disconnected. Bringing a team together to dedicate time and attention to focus on its higher purpose is a great way to reset, rethink and refocus on the things that matter most.

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At We Are Clean we run three-hour workshops dedicated to exploring purpose and values. We work in a clean systemic way and start with the individual, putting the attention on their experience, acknowledging what’s been happening for them.

The traditional approach to identifying values and purpose is top-down, but one of the limitations of this stance is that people often say what they think they should say, rather than what they really feel or mean. Aiming for a formal statement of intent can put too much focus on syntax. You can end up with a large group trying to negotiate a series of words in a sentence, power struggles can happen over the choice and order of words and often the person who shouts loudest has more sway. It is a method that can end up reaffirming established norms and power dynamics.  

Our way turns this approach on its head. We find that taking a more gentle, curious approach, starting with the individual, allows for a fun and creative disruption to those old ways of working. It leads to the emergence of a set of values and a purpose than has more meaning for each member of the team and makes for the stickiest kind of glue.

Read below about a recent session we facilitated with a global team coming together after the pandemic.

If you’d like us to facilitate a workshop for you and your team, please get in touch here

Case study – Purpose and values

One recent session We Are Clean ran was for a company where a merger had taken place in the middle of the Covid crisis. We facilitated a three-hour workshop to bring the team together by focussing on their purpose and values.

We began by pairing participants up and asking: ‘What has it been like for you going through a merger in a pandemic? Once everyone had had a chance to think through how things had been and to express this freely to their partner, we asked: ‘What’s it like being in a room together today?’ This brought everyone firmly back into the shared space of the present moment.

Next, we worked in small groups and asked participants to draw their answer to the question: ‘When you’re at your best, you’re like what?’ There were pictures of tall trees, high-flying kites and spaceships shooting off to the moon. Then we asked: ‘And when you’re at your worst, you’re like what?’ These images included an overloaded truck, a sunken ship, and an explosive volcano.

Participants shared their drawings and we asked them to think about how these states might be noticed by other members of the team. We asked: ‘What would we see or hear when you’re in a good state or bad state and how would you move between them?’

And then: ‘If I notice you in a good or bad state what would you like me to do? How can I support you to move between those states?’ It might lead to a team member giving a colleague the permission to say: ‘You look a bit fidgety; do you need to walk around the block?’ or ‘I notice you keep looking out the window, do you need to take a breather?’ Equally, it might be a way of recognising when things are going well, by saying something like ‘You’re on fire today, you’re like that space-ship aren’t you. It’s great to see.’

We encouraged participants to share the metaphors in larger groups, developing and embedding their own metaphor, allowing others to understand them better and getting to know other people’s ways of seeing themselves too.

Next, we moved on to thinking about the team as a whole. In small groups we asked for drawings of what the team is like when it’s at its best. One team sketched an airport with multiple runways and planes coming in to land, another drew a huge woodland eco-system and a third drew a picture of a big family feast.

Our final question, the one that leads to that all important shared sense of purpose, is: ‘And if it’s like this, and the team is at its best, then what happens?’ The team that had envisaged itself as an airport said it became a thriving hub sending things out into the world and attracting outsiders in. The ecosystem team saw that it could communicate successfully through its network of roots and the team that depicted itself as a family feast saw that it could nourish and provide for whoever came to the table.

The metaphors that had evolved allowed everyone involved to develop a shared understanding of how the team could really flourish. It also enabled individuals to get inspired by their peers and to develop a shorthand they could all use to refer to their shared sense of purpose in the future.

Instead of pointing out individual shortcomings or describing the failings of the team, any one of them could say ‘What’s happened to our shiny exciting airport, there are no planes coming in today.’ Or ‘let’s all make sure we’re in tune like those trees in the woodland.’ Everyone knows exactly what is meant and the metaphor creates an image that can be closely examined, learnt from, and reintegrated into the system.  You come out with some tangible actions that have been generated by a conversation, rather than imposed from above. It’s a unique and effective way to find that unifying purpose that will help a team stick together through good times and bad.

If you’d like us to facilitate a workshop for you and your team, get in touch here