Beyond The Service — Take Home Team Values That Add Character

Rowan Blair Colver
4 min readMar 15, 2021
Lucid Leadership by Rowan B Colver

Team Values Extend Beyond The Product Or Service.

The values of a team link all procedures together and they maintain a consistent character throughout the entire network. How people remember your services and their experience of you will reflect on the worth ascribed to your end result. It also becomes the tone for how others talk about your team.

We talk fondly of people we like and respect by preserving their dignity and focussing on the good things. If we do not like a person then we do not give them the same levels of grace, we highlight the bad and we judge in the context of worst-case scenarios.

We cannot control how others perceive us and talk about us. We can, however, control the character of our team by ensuring strong core values. Here we take a look at some examples. Rather than copying the list or choosing them all and more, a shorter list of core values can draw a wide circle that encompasses many by definition.

Care

When we care on a human and personal level, the profit and the sale are proportionally less important. When we treat the customer experience and the team experience as equally valuable to the success of the business, the team brand will become associated with the positive effects it brings about.

By treating the team and its customers as a family and close network that we nurture and whose quality of life we improve according to their own agenda as well as ours, we demonstrate that we care about the people as well as the profit. What’s more, the profit we make can be directed towards the whole in an equitable formula that rewards hard work and sustains custom.

Merit

A fair hierarchy based on ability and effort ensures that the right people are given the right jobs. We all have strengths and weaknesses, our confidence can be found in given areas and is lacking in others. The human being is a unique shape and choosing the right shapes for each position is a matter of gauging effectiveness and willingness.

Merit in its truest form takes these two factors and awards changes and promotions accordingly. If administrated without judgement, it only builds the team. We want the best people for each role and there are many roles that each require different skills.

Loyalty

Loyal customers are what every business wants. Teams who require work need people to ask for their service. We are not able to force people to use our team and our service. This means that we have to do what we can to ensure the customers feel a bond with our team. To do this we have to include them and treat them as if they are part of the team.

By acting loyally towards our customers we offer a bond. Unless we make them unhappy, a majority will maintain the connection. We have to offer rewards that go beyond the given service or product, when a concession for loyalty outweighs the risk of losing custom then it’s no longer a concession at all. It’s just all part of the service.

One Team Every Team

It’s possible that your organisation has people all over the world. Other times they might all be spread out across one area. However they are, however many teams you have, where ever they live, they have to act like one team. If they carry the brand then they represent the wider whole.

The cultural differences need to be respected and yet the culture of the team has to be maintained. Good team culture can make room for the differences in mentality found across the world and there need not be any clashes. The services on offer maintain the same level of virtue no matter what happens elsewhere.

Trust

We build trust by being transparent and not being corrupt. Transparent means that we don’t hide our agenda. It has to be clear what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how much it costs.

Corruption means breaking the rules for private or public gain. We cannot act like the owner of the revenue meant for the business and we cannot break any laws in the places we operate. Trust goes beyond the workplace, your products and services have to stand up to the rigorous testing that people will put them through.

Recommended Read: The Connecting Leader: In the Age of Hyper-Transparency, Interconnectivity and Media Anarchy, How Corporate Leaders Connect Business with Society.

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Rowan Blair Colver

Music writer and humanities educator from Sheffield in England. Democracy of philosophy, comments are welcome. ko-fi.com/rowanblaircolver