For team leaders
Exploring value to strengthen leadership practice
Team leaders are individuals with responsibility for guiding others in their day-to-day work in service of the mission of the team. They sit close to the realities of workload, expectations, performance, and wellbeing. Many also carry a genuine desire to empower their team members, not just manage tasks, and to provide great service, not just get work done.
This role is less about control and more about creating conditions where people can do their best work, learn, and stay engaged over time as they serve.
If this is you, read on!
Why you should care about value
Much of what creates friction in teams is not about capability or intent. It is about unspoken expectations around effort, contribution, and what people hope to get in return.
Team leaders are often the first to notice when motivation fades or misunderstandings take hold. Without a shared language for value, these situations are hard to address directly. Conversations stay vague or default to performance talk that misses what really matters to an individual.
Value literacy (not to be confused with values) helps team leaders support clearer, more grounded conversations. It also enables individuals to lead themselves in their workscape, rather than relying on leadership for constant direction. When people can name what is valuable to them and how they contribute value, they can use that information to be more self-directed.
A team that is literate in value for themselves also has a stronger foundation for exploring value from other perspectives, including how they are valuable to the people they serve, whether internally or externally.
How you can use the value(x) approach
The value(x) approach gives you language, tools, and methods to explore what’s valuable for individuals when you lead them in a team. Here are options for your uplighting your leadership:
- Extend your leadership practice to include value-based conversations, without confusion with values, with our handy VALUE framework.
- Read the article ‘A Value-based Approach to Shaping a Workscape‘ to gain an overall understanding of taking a value-based approach in an individual’s workscape. Consider how you might encourage this in your leadership practice.
- Get your own set of Workscape Value Elements deck of cards and experience the Value Exchange Ledger™ method for yourself as a foundation for helping individual team members make sense of what value they want to claim, contribute, or create in their workscape. You can do this by yourself or you can engage us for a coaching session.
- Learn how to coach individuals in the Workscape Value Exchange Ledger method so you can better support their growth and address performance matters.
- Read the article ‘An Invitation to be a Value Creator‘ to explore how indiviudals might be a value-creating entity in their workscape while being a member of your team.
- Explore how to increase value literacy of your whole team in a team building and development activity.
- Check out other methods and explanations useful to the workscape context in our Resource collection.