the back burner

work stuff

When we’re in the midst of confusing information scenarios (which is, like, ALL the time), whatever behavior pops out of us will reflect our values. If they’re our company's values, I think they’re going to be very consistent with a Biblical view of the local body of believers, of Christian brotherhood, and of conflict resolution. It’s important to take people back to that value-level of thinking/believing, since our value-behavior connections are VERY evident to our local partners and to our clients. All the times J and Bill N. have talked about “modeling the values,” and about “positioning ourselves for long-term relationship,” come back to me when I think about this.

Those values will also either make or break our virtual teams, it seems to me. (Virtual team = co-workers working together across physical distance, lots of long-distance communication.) They will either tie us together or divide us, prepare us for unified action or prepare us for chaos. There’s the variable of whether our values come from the same page, for one, and then there’s the variable of whether our values actually foster interdependence in their content. The BEST option, I think, would be for everyone in any given virtual team (a) to have the same values and (b) for those values to foster interdependence. That enables the team to communicate well and often (read: effectively).