Mini-Series
Values are easy when holding them is free.
The test of whether a team actually has values — not claimed values but real ones — is what happens when holding the value costs something. When the accountability conversation is with someone the team can’t afford to alienate. When the excellence standard requires cutting a popular player. When doing the right thing means a short-term result the team doesn’t want.
That’s the test. And three weeks of a series doesn’t build a team that passes it. A season of choosing the value when it costs something does.
Read this passage slowly.
The integrity of the upright guides them, but the unfaithful are destroyed by their duplicity.
Proverbs 11:3 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
The integrity of the upright guides them. Integrity — the alignment between what you believe and what you do — functions as a compass. It doesn’t require calculating the cost of each decision because the decision has already been made at the values level. The person of integrity knows what to do because they know what they believe, and what they believe guides them even when the doing is expensive.
The team with genuine values operates the same way. Not calculating the cost of holding the standard in each situation. Having already decided, at the values level, what they do when they’re tested. And when the test comes — when holding the value is expensive — they already know what they’re going to do.
What you’ve built in three weeks is a beginning. The values have been named, the behaviors have been identified, the commitments have been made. The season ahead will test every one of them. And the team that is guided by what it actually believes, in the moments when what it believes costs something, is the team that builds a culture that outlasts any individual season.
Hold the values when they cost something. That’s when they become real.
The team that is guided by what it actually believes, in the moments when it costs something, builds a culture that outlasts any individual season.
What is the value that is most likely to be tested this season — the one that will be most expensive to hold? What is this team’s commitment to it?
Forward-looking and specific. The anticipated test and the stated commitment in advance is the work of this session.
Hold the values when they cost something. That’s the test. That’s when they become real.
This session should build on the specific commitments made in session two and project them into the season ahead.