Background
During a time of deep reflection with my coach we decided it would be a good idea to map out my own personal values. To understand exactly what drives my own emotions in work and understand where my reactions come from. My coach explained to me that our emotions and reactions are driven by our personal values. When we get upset its because one of our values has been infringed.
Problem
I was looking at the work I was forecasted to work on I saw I was going to work on a 4 month long Tesco project. I was going to be embedded in a project team within Tesco itself. I didn't know any of the team I would be working with for 4 months. So I thought that this would be a good exercise to do with the Product Manager in the team as a way of getting to know each other and to understand one another better.
Solution
I used the same fame work that my coach used with me to choose values from, The Barrett Values Centre. I laid out the values from this in a Miro board (a tool central to Tesco) and asked the Product Manager (A) to choose her top 10-12 values and explain why she chose them. I took notes of her explanations behind each one. I also explained my own values to her too.
Once the session was over I laid out my values next to hers and started to map out connections between them.
Outcome
Once I laid out the values together side by side, I highlighted her top 3 values based on what she told me. I then started to add connections between them.
This is what it looked like:
I then started to link our values based on the notes I took of her reasons for choosing her values and my own reasons for my values.
I started by linking values we shared (using the black lines).
I then highlighted her top 3 values (green boxes with dark green outline) and started linking them to similar values of my own.
Then using the light green lines, I linked values that were similar or had possible links between them.
Then finally I linked values that potentially clashed with each other.
Conclusion
This exercise really helped get to understand the product manager better. and she understood me better. It helped me recognise when she was stressed and I could offer help. It helped me recognise what similar values we had so when we had conversations we could start from a point of agreement. They also helped me when playing back research to reference back to her values in the findings and helped with points that I needed to persuade her to action some recommendations.