You are part of a great team. And as you try to catch your breath from all the change and accomplishments over the last 12 months, you can feel the weight of your 2024 calendar page being turned and 12 crisp, untouched months wanting your attention. The question is, will the next 12 months leave their mark on you, or will you leave your mark on them?

Because you are who you are, you know now is the right time to pause, check in with your team and put some important plans in place to make 2025 (and beyond) the best ever. You are not alone — great leaders everywhere are thinking and feeling the same thing.

I’ve spent my career working with new and experienced leaders and over the last few years there has been a marked increase in how many leaders I’ve helped refocus their team — and sometimes company. The beauty is the refocusing/refreshing approach I’m suggesting here works if you have just been hired to lead a team or if you have been a leader in your organization for years. And while I’m going to frame the solution as if you lead a team, be confident this same process works if it is used companywide.

Let’s Talk Values

To rebalance and potentially transform your team, you must give everyone a shared focus they can believe in, and trust. Help your team go beyond “what” they do by helping them collectively focus on (and be proud of) “why” they are doing it. Your team or company values are a magic ingredient that can refocus and consistently inspire your team in weeks (and help teammates to inspire each other).

In today’s business culture, getting your team involved is the fastest, most impactful and most inspiring way to get lasting results. So, as your first step to align your shared values and refocus your team, I encourage you to use the following questions. Are each of your team or company values:

• Reflective of your teams’ goals — why your company and team do what they do?
• Supportive of how your team works together and does what they do?
• Specific and realistic?
• Easy to remember?

A challenge I see over and over is that too many hard-working, smart employees can’t share what their company values are without looking them up on their website. If that is the case, they also don’t know how to use those values to confidently collaborate, make decisions and help them be successful.

When employees have a shared understanding of what their company and/or team values are, it’s like each of them have their own business coach giving them good advice. And in a world where more and more of us are working remotely and autonomously, shared values hold us together, they help us align our work and establish a promise of expectations for how we will act, make decisions, and guide our behavior.

Imagine how much more synergy, greater passion, faster decisions and less stress is possible when everyone knows they are all growing together and focused on the same finish line.

To be clear, you are not saying your team is a mess if you start a rebalancing exercise. Even the tires on our car slowly go out of alignment. We don’t blame the tire — it just is what it is. Same here. And your values may only need a small adjustment. If that’s the case, don’t try to overhaul everything. Instead, with your team, discuss how each of your values impact your team and concentrate on making sure everyone recognizes how they should be using them.

Rebalancing is smart because we know things change year over year. Our market changes, perhaps we have a supplier or two, and we might have one or more new members of our team.

Alignment Is a Good Thing: Get Your Team Involved

Making your team part of the discussion, process and decisions increases their commitment. Their experience also will bring additional insight and relevance.

From the start, you must be crystal clear on why you are launching this project. And your answer should be inspirational and relatable to everyone on your team. For example, you can discuss how shared values help team members:

• Manage priorities and collaborate.
• Feel confident about their decisions.
• Give them more autonomy.
• Gain new skills.
• Lower stress and anxiety.

If you have a small team, the project should be easily managed. If your team is large you may want to assemble a dedicated Project Team. If you need a Project Team I recommend including employees from all levels. The first goal should be to work together to determine if your current values are sufficient. If after having explored the four questions listed above, they determine your current values are sufficient then great. If they determine the current values are not, then the additional question they need to explore is, “What needs to be added and/or taken away… and why?” Then they can move on to detailing what your values mean.

As a leader, if you are using a Project Team, it will be important for you to stay involved but let them do their part. Your responsibility may simply be to keep them focused on their goal, inspire them, enable them, support them with messaging and help make stalemate decisions. The team must also always know this is a priority for you. If they feel this project is dropping off your “Important To-Do List”, your values project will go flat.

How Much Time Should Be Allocated?

Even in the simplest realignment, I encourage you to expect this exercise will likely take a few weeks. I was recently working with a leader who had six direct reports and another 40 individuals who reported into them, and his team values needed a complete overhaul. He kept his values exercise as one of his and his teams’ main priorities at his weekly executive team meetings. Even with that focus, their values-defining project took about three months, which included getting input and endorsement from the larger team.

How to Create — or Update — Your Values? The Process

The more time you can invest into this project, the better. And while simplicity will be your strength, do not cut corners. Again, the process is important and must be seen as a priority by everyone.

For me to outline this planning stage in the detail you deserve is too much information for this article, so instead, I am giving you the high-level steps here and I have written an in-depth process for you and posted it on my website. In addition, you can always contact me if you have any questions. 

High-Level Plan: A Sample Process:

• The Overall Goal/Purpose: This can be directed by you, but if you have a senior team make sure they have input. What are the overall objectives? How should everyone expect to use the values and definitions that will result from this exercise? One key element early on is to be sure to introduce the project to all your employees. It’s important everyone understands how this positively impacts them and their input. This supports the process and buy-in when you roll out your new or updated values.
• Have the Right People Participating: Who will be leading this project? In a larger organization, it is often best practice to have a cross-department Project Team established to manage this exercise, although a senior team can fulfill this role.
• Discovery: Whether your team is small or large, share with everyone how the Project Team will gather and evaluate everyone’s ideas and feedback. How will information flow up, and how will consolidated information and findings flow back down to each individual? In the best-case scenarios, hearing from customers/clients and suppliers is also recommended.
• Evaluation: What will be the evaluation process and how will employees be included in the evaluation process? Also, how many times will proposed values and language be shared for input and feedback?
• Proposed Values: Be sure to share early drafts of the values and what they mean. One opportunity I recommend if you have a large team or multiple teams/departments is to have an intentional meeting to give a small cross-section of employees outside of the Project Team a chance to provide preliminary feedback. This gives the Project Team an opportunity to make revisions based on the feedback before sharing more widely.
• Launch/Re-Launch: Let this be a time for celebration and an opportunity to remind everyone they were a key part of the process and that these values were defined by them. As part of the launch event, everyone should also be introduced to what their shared values mean and how to use them moving forward as a guiding light that will give everyone confidence in safe and effective performance and guide their code-of-conduct in all internal and external decisions and behaviours.

Conclusion

There are many ways experts recommend to intentionally reenergize and rebalance your team including encouraging open communication, providing opportunities for growth, delegating or sharing responsibilities, recognizing contribution, fostering collaboration and even team volunteer opportunities. Each of these (and more) on their own are powerful. What I like about a values exercise is that the process encourages all of this and more, and the result gives everyone a clear, unifying path forward that they have been part of building and of which they can be proud.

Bruce Mayhew is a professional development trainer, executive coach and keynote speaker. He has spoken at a number of INTIX Annual Conferences and will share his expertise at INTIX 2025 in New York City. Mayhew specializes in soft skills like leadership and new leadership development, motivation skills, generational differences, difficult conversations training, change management, time management and email etiquette. Learn more at www.brucemayhewconsulting.com.