Know yourself and your team first: how we did it and are happier. And, how you can do it too!

Human conflict is hard

Organizational conflict, team conflict, client conflict and generally just interpersonal conflict is hard. This session hopes to help teams of humans define their own perimeter of values by sharing the story of how one small Drupal agency in Minneapolis did it with help from data and some other humans who had helped before.

Session description

Do you know what you stand for? Do you know what your company stands for? What it values? Why it even exists? Why do you get up in the morning and do what you do? TEN7 is a full-service interactive strategy and web development firm in Minneapolis and in the summer of 2015, we set out to define and document what we truly believe as an organization so. We hired Employee Strategies, a team of amazing humans who truly wanted to help us figure it out.

We went through a process for defining our Why statement, what our values are, what constitutes behavior that we deem acceptable, and what doesn’t. It’s helped us be clearer in our communications with each other; it’s helped us know what kinds of clients we want to work with; it’s even helped us during the hiring process.

In this session, we hope to cover:

• why we did what we did
• how events unfolded
• what methods were used and to what means
• what tangible things we were left with after the process was completed
• what we learned about each other and ourselves
• what data we gathered at the beginning and what data we have now
• how we use these things in business, marketing, picking clients, talking to each other and even using Slack.

This will be a touchy-feely session in which we hope to share this process so that others might consider it for themselves in the hope that work lives are improved elsewhere. Ivan Stegic from TEN7 and Eric Zakovich from Employee Strategies hope to co-present this session.

What level of knowledge should attendees have before walking into the session

No knowledge of anything besides a willingness to be self-aware and a desire to want to learn and help themselves and their team.

What will your session accomplish and what will attendees walk away having learned

We hope that attendees walk away with the desire to improve their own relationship with their team and all humans that they work with. We hope that leaders take inspiration from our success and implement some form of change in their organizations to make their fellow humans happier. We hope that leaders realize that they can't do it alone and that they seek guidance and help from other professionals who have done it before. We hope that attendees become curious about their own DISC profiles and how they relate to others on their team. We hope more introspection occurs. Also, World Peace.