As a leader, you would have faced scenarios at several stages during your career where you do your best to be the team’s glue and yet feel like you are failing.
You may have introduced a tool to monitor and track progress, get daily updates and sync-ups, hired a coach or representative to facilitate communications, and still see frictions among team members that affect productivity.
From the surface level, the root cause of such problems may appear as a lack of clear communication or transparency. But deep down, misalignment in individual values can cause severe problems in the way the team functions, ultimately affecting productivity.
If such problems seem familiar to what you are facing in your team, it is high time to assess how your team must be balanced in your core values to ensure effective communication and coordination.
What a Values Imbalance Actually Looks Like
An individual’s values are combinedly shaped by the background they come from, their academic qualifications, and their work experiences. These factors play a huge role in determining their core values and beliefs while at work.
Interestingly, the same values may hold different priorities or meanings for different members in a team.
The meetings that feel productive but go nowhere
The way members share their way of doing things to get a task done can ideally mean the same, but can be perceived differently by each member, indicating a lack of alignment in their values and beliefs.
For instance, a team leader announces in a meeting that the work must be done properly in time to honor the deadline. One person remembers “in time to honor the deadline”. Another person hears “do the work properly”. Either way, both are correct, but it is just that they weigh priorities differently.
One team, very different definitions of “done”
Each person has a unique belief about what it means to produce quality work and deliver results on time. That is why two employees with the same job title, resources, and skills expertise provide different results.
The leaders may choose the best of such results or even reject them, considering their own quality evaluation parameters. Hence, being aligned with meeting exact work expectations is important.
Quiet disengagement that doesn’t show up on surveys
No one discusses values misalignment. However, if someone feels their values do not match those of their team members, they start to quietly disengage and move to a team or company where they are valued.
Values misalignment is an invisible yet prominent contributor to dropping engagement levels and quiet quitting in companies. Your feedback surveys often report misunderstandings and communication issues among team members, but do not analyze individual value beliefs. By the time misalignment is detected, it is too late to get back your best employees.
Why Leaders Keep Misdiagnosing This
Whenever employees provide feedback to their leaders, they try to justify why they are right and how others are not in line with them. Most annual reviews, peer ratings, and manager impressions highlight the same employee thoughts, but do not analyze the bigger problem.
Engagement surveys, feedback surveys, and performance analysis mostly discuss the results but do not show why such results have come. They do not capture how employees make decisions, what drives them to work every day, or what makes them lose motivation.
As a consequence, leaders suggest training programs, one-on-one sessions, and invest in relevant tools and workshops, which can do some damage repair but not eradicate the misalignment.
Values Alignment is a Performance Issue
Not being aligned with a team’s core values often affects every stage of work. When work and productivity are affected, people start doubting their value in the company. Here is a sequence of events that are bound to happen:
Affecting decision-making
When teams are misaligned on expectations and priorities, especially not knowing what value to withhold during different phases, discussions are never-ending. Disputes keep cropping up due to a lack of clarity, with arguments on why one’s idea alone will work.
At an individual level, their arguments are justifiable. But such arguments often indicate a lack of a uniform working approach within the team.
Poor output in spite of expertise
Even the most skilled employees hesitate to give their best effort when they find their values being challenged within their team. As a result, they feel unvalued within the team.
Instead of voicing this disbelief and trying to identify value gaps, most employees choose to remain neutral or less active at work. In most cases, employees are unaware that misalignment can be addressed at the team level, and hence choose to disengage or quit.
Growing conflicts and lowering morale
When conflicts related to value beliefs become very normal in the team, the overall team culture begins to change. Such teams are perceived as toxic, although each individual’s belief may be right. But what is seen outside is their inability to resolve conflicts and operate smoothly.
Such actions are often the biggest triggers for large-scale attrition in teams, growing disengagement, and sometimes even making the best performers of a team leave after years of service.
What It Looks Like When You Actually Solve the Right Problem
Having structured and clear data on what drives individuals to work helps leaders frame collective common values that favor all members of the team.
Insights into individual values and behavioral patterns help in many ways, such as:
- Faster decision-making, as everyone is aware of each other’s value priorities.
- Work progress happens as expected when people see the gaps that they must close to achieve the desired results.
- Retention and engagement improve when people find their work contributions valued by everyone.
Above all, leaders can identify the blind spots that have been acting as unconscious barriers to let their own reportees open up to them at the right time. When leaders resolve their own value misalignments with their team members, the team functions more effectively.
The Bottom Line: How to Start Seeing What’s Actually Going On
The solution to address values misalignment is to start by gaining clarity. Understanding individual values, decision patterns, and potential blind spots is crucial to determining how a team is functioning and deciding on workshops or training to address relevant issues.
Revaluate180’s structured team assessments are ideal tools to gain clarity on values and behavioral patterns that make individuals work the way they do. Such structured data gives leaders deep insights into how their team is wired, why conflicts arise, and does not rely on guesswork or gut instincts.
With the right evidence-based data and inferences, leaders can make the right decisions to support their team members without any doubts. This clarity can make a huge difference in the productivity and engagement levels in your team.
