The Identity of the IT Team of Sancor Seguros Paraguay
Actualizado: 6 dic 2020
“Identities are crucial for purpose definition and value creation. A team, a business unit or company has only really achieved an identity when people are eager to associate themselves with its symbols. Management can take an active role inviting groups of workers to create symbols that represent their shared identities.” Jurgen Appelo.
Sancor Seguros Paraguay is an Insurance company that develops its operations in Paraguay. The IT team is made up of four people:
Technical Support: Pedro
Systems Analyst: Edhelira
Process Analyst: Mónica
Infrastructure and Telecommunications Analyst: Erasmo
Its main function is to provide all IT services to the business.
In the IT team of Sancor Seguros Paraguay we decided to create a figure / image that represents our identity, for this we carry out the “Identity Simbols” practice of Management 3.0
Identity Simbols
Identity requires coherence and the coherence of a group is about the coherence of their behaviors. Actions arise from identity and identity arises from actions. Group identity and actions need consistency or they don't make sense. In an organization, multiple levels of identity also occur and include:
Individual identity
Team identity
Identity of the department
Identity of the business unit
Corporate identity
Successful teams are teams with a great and shared culture and values. But I have no idea how we can celebrate teams. And if we build together a totem to share our values, to celebrate our successes and our failures, to remember remarkable events?
In order to reinforce our identity as an IT team, we decided at Sancor Seguros Paraguay to develop our own Totem / Symbol.
The recommended steps to develop this practice are the following:
Find an excuse to ask teams, departments, or divisions about a symbol of their identity. Maybe it’s because you need icons on the intranet, or on the website or maybe because you’re creating a brochure for new employees and maybe because each will be presented at the company’s annual event.
Don’t let them get away with a name such as “QA Department” in 12-point Times New Roman. It might be useful to collect some good (and bad) examples and distribute them for inspiration.
Verify that all group members are willing to associate themselves with the chosen symbols. Otherwise, reject them. (The symbols, not the people.)
Start using the symbols in all internal communication.
How Did We Use This Practice
We built our totem in five steps:
What makes us special ? What are our values ? We use a big list of values for Management 3.0 available on Jurgen Appelo’s website (http://noop.nl/2009/10/the-do-it-yourself-team-values-kit.html)
What are the stories we want to remember ?
What pictures best symbolize our team ?
What are the works we want to expose ?
What are successes and failures we want to ?
Using the previous questions, we draw, our tótem.
Each member of the team began to craft their own totem.
Then we put all the drawings on the table
Finally we made one together based on the totem that a team member had made.
My Learnings As Facilitator
Identity requires coherence. The coherence of a group is about the consistency of its behaviors. Actions emerge from identity, and identity emerges from actions. The group’s identity and actions need coherence, or else they are meaningless.
The possibility of being able to create an own symbol that represents the team generated a climate of empowerment and a sense of belonging that I am sure will deepen with the materialization of that totem in the IT area.
As a facilitator, it is important to check in and check out in each session, using for example feedback wall to understand how the session turned out for the participants.
As a facilitator, it is important to maintain two stages in this dynamic, the first allowing all team members to express their ideas ("diverging" stage) and the second stage ("converging" stage) where we all agree on the improvement of identity to the team based on the results of the previous stage.
Link Web Page Management 3.0 https://management30.com/
Link Web Page Management 3.0 Identity Symbols https://management30.com/practice/identity-symbols/