Every week, at our Friday team meeting, we discuss our values. We call this our 7%’s. The idea is that everyday, as Team TCX, we aim to be 1% better than the day before. Therefore, by the end of the week we are 7% better than last week. According to Forbes, TCX “walks the talk” when it comes to its values. However, a consistent definition that everyone knows and understands, was lacking.
In December 2023, as part of an initiative to augment our onboarding process, we started the journey to redefine the definitions of our values to share with the team. Here’s how we did it:
(1) For one month we collected 7% stories from our team members. How did they talk about “creativity”? Why did they choose “courage” instead of “conviction”? What made them call out “character” instead of “compassion”? And when did they note an effort as “continuous improvement”? Gathering the data in the words of our team members provided the current state definitions as a foundation to the rest of the exercise.
(2) We performed our own research on the definitions for each value: Merriam Webster, Oxford, Dictionary.com, and Google each served up a variation on a definition. We culled a list from our research and put our findings to a core group of people to decide what resonated.
(3) A curated brainstorm was started with the same core group of people. Each team member was tasked with asynchronously adding words and phrases that didn’t appear on the list, highlighting those that they liked, and striking items that didn’t resonate.
(4) The resonate phrases were added to a very detailed prompt for ChatGPT requesting a paragraph to define the value. Through a back-and-forth conversation, and after a series of human edits were made to the results, the same core group of people were presented with definitions of our values to decide what resonated.
(5) Through several rounds of drafts we incorporated more of the human eye on our results and we always went back to the same conversational thread in ChatGPT. After less time than it would have taken any one person to draft the statements on their own, the team landed on seven succinct paragraphs that represent TCX to its core.
After reading the study by Kian Gohar and Jeremy Utley in Harvard Business Review and concluding that “Brainstorming with generative AI requires rethinking your ideation workflow and learning new skills, but if you approach it as a structured, ongoing conversation, you can access a staggering capacity to develop better and more-creative ideas faster.” we were inspired to share our journey in creating our values. Though we embrace technology from every angle, we know that there is no replacement for the human touch. From working with our clients and clinicians, to our internal processes and within our team, our people and our values are what sets us apart.
