Coaching practices for Values Clarification with My Team

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Values Clarification with My Team, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• We all kept saying the same word
• My team keeps fighting over what to do first and it always gets personal, but underneath it I think we just quietly mean different things by "important"
• My team goes quiet whenever something’s unclear, like asking a question would expose them
• I assumed we wanted the same things, but lately our differences keep surfacing and I can’t tell which ones are real gaps in what we value and which are just us never having checked whether we’re actually aligned.
• My partner and I keep clashing over things we both supposedly want, and I’ve been assuming we’re aligned underneath

Practices that may help

1. Clarify the concepts you are using
   Ask for precise definitions before arguments built on contested or ambiguous terms go far.
   Socratic Questioning
2. Define "important" explicitly as a team
   Before sorting tasks, align on what "important" means — which goals, for whom, over what time horizon.
   The Eisenhower Matrix for Teams
3. Values Clarification, Made Practical
   Values clarification is the work of naming what matters most to you, sorting the genuine priorities from the inherited ones, and using them to guide real choices. The methods — card sorts, ranking, value-consistent action — draw heavily on values work in acceptance-and-commitment therapy (ACT), which has clinical support; living in line with your values correlates with wellbeing in observational research.
4. Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem
   Name the uncertainty and interdependence out loud so people expect to learn, not just deliver.
   Psychological Safety, Made Practical
5. Align on core values — where they are shared and where they differ
   Map which values you genuinely share and which you each hold separately — without requiring convergence.
   The Shared Meaning System
6. Mapping shared and divergent values in a relationship
   Do the card sort alongside someone important to you and compare — do not assume your rankings match.
   Values Card Sort
7. One-minute goals: write them short enough to re-read in a minute
   A goal that cannot be stated on a single page is too vague to be evaluated or acted on.
   The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
8. Document key agreements in writing across the style gap
   For important decisions, put the explicit agreement in writing even when the verbal exchange seemed clear.
   High-Context and Low-Context Communication
9. Values Card Sort
   A values card sort is a structured exercise — originally developed in motivational interviewing — that forces you to rank competing values by choosing between them rather than claiming you hold all of them equally. The comparison process surfaces implicit priorities that self-report alone misses. Evidence for values-clarification as a lever for behavior change is observational to clinical; the specific card-sort format has good face validity but limited direct trial data.
10. Using values questions to deepen a conversation
    Ask "what matters most to you about this?" to surface values rather than surface preferences.
    Values Card Sort

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