Our first in person Growers Gathering! with 13 community members coming together to connect, learn more about each other, try out some team tools, enjoy a bun, pick up a book — and focus some conversation on a question…
Shared below are some key takeouts, reflection prompts, recommended resources and links to digital versions of all the team tools we tried out together. All feedback warmly welcomed, likewise suggestions for additions, or nods to things we’ve missed.
Suggestions, questions and reflections…
👉 Values can struggle to stick if they feel too top down in their definition. We recognised the different levels of ‘values awareness’ within our different organisations. From Sophie at COOK (hugely values led, has been since the beginning, it’s likely that everyone knows them) to Jess at Secret Cinema (still to be defined) and Lori and Tanya at Freshwave (recent merger sees a number of orgs with different values needing to be culturally combined). Irrespective of where you are, it’s powerful to find ways to make conversations about values real within the organisation.
🐷 All Pig, no Bull. Sophie from COOK shared a lovely example of lingo, that uses storytelling to bring a value (or principle) to life internally. Churchill’s pig….
👉 When it comes to launching development programmes, we heard about the value of values to hook into the behaviours we’re keen to see from participants. Philippa from CapitalOnTap shared how their value of #JustPilot had been useful to encourage experimentation with new skills between modules in a manager programme. And whole programmes can be purposefully named around key values and other cultural cues.
👉 And with manager programmes in mind — Nick from YCN shared the example of challenging managers when practicing giving effective feedback to connect the feedback that they provide to organisational values. Always a good stress test of whether values are recognised, mean anything or are just ‘words on a wall’ (or a bit of PDF that no-one looks at.)
👉 Megan from Unmind shared the watchout of erring into ‘culture fit’ rather than ‘culture add’ territory if we place too much emphasis on values alignment when recruiting (especially if values have been defined around individual outlooks). There’s good thinking around this point in our eCourse on Conscious Inclusion (yours to explore with your Growers access to the fuller YCN platform).
💪 Visual strengths cards (Digital version on Miro here) ❤️ Talky Feely cards (Digital version on Miro here) ❓ GROW questions (Digital version on Miro here)
Note: There’s a nice little primer on the GROW model here.