Getting Personal @ Work
Bruce Gibson
coachingbyBruce.com
We are each in our own way in a personal relationship with our work. Like all relationships in our lives, this one could be a source of frustration or of fulfillment. Every day, we wake up and show up because we are getting something back that we value. This could satisfy external priorities such as money and benefits. It could satisfy internal priorities such as such as mission and purpose.
Our values—what we value—are the key to whether your work relationship is fulfilling or empty. Author Mark Manson explains that values are the fundamental component of our psychological make-up and our identity. We are defined by what we choose to find important in our lives. We are defined by our prioritizations.
A satisfying relationship with your work requires that you and the company you work for value and prioritize similar things, that is, you share the same values. If the values for both are extrinsic—e.g., you value money and the company pays good money—then that relationship could work just fine. If the values for both are intrinsic—e.g., you value kindness and zest and the company delivers humanitarian trips—then that too could work. A mismatch of values or priorities can sabotage that relationship. For example, you may value daily joy and social connections in your life but work in a no-window environment at a company who sees employees as no-name widget makers. That is not going to offer fulfillment. This is what Harvard Business Review authors Sally Blount and Paul Leinwand call a crisis of purpose: Workers feel lost, and over time, a lack of direction saps motivation. People begin backing away from the challenges required to achieve the firm’s articulated goals.
However, when an alignment of values is present, Dale Carnegie writes that “Highly engaged, values-driven employees working in encouraging, healthy corporate cultures have a dramatic impact that is felt inside and out.” According to the VIA Institute on Character, workers who are able to use character strengths at work have more positive work experiences and report their work is a calling in their life.
To assess your current situation, we first need to get everything on the table – your personal values and your company’s values – so that we can see where they align. Let’s look inward first.
Personal Values and Character Strengths
Your personal values and character strengths are the key to you being your best self. You can consider character strengths as the “active ingredients for positive living” (Snyder and Lopez). When you know your values and character traits, you can put your stake in the ground and stay true to your own identity. The VIA Institute on Character has identified 24 character strengths that make up what’s best about our personality. They believe everyone possesses all 24 character strengths in different degrees.
Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence
Bravery
Creativity
Curiosity
Fairness
Forgiveness
Gratitude
Honesty
Hope
Humility
Humor
Judgement
Kindness
Leadership
Love
Love of Learning
Perseverance
Perspective
Prudence
Self-Regulation
Social Intelligence
Spirituality
Teamwork
Zest
By surveying your responses to questions about these 24 character strengths, the VIA Character Strengths Profile designates “signature strengths.” These are character traits that are the most dominant, the ones that define who you are. Expressing signature strengths of character feels comfortable and natural, not requiring substantial effort of significant degree of willpower.
How do your values and character strengths align to your company? Do complimentary values reveal themselves? Is there a gap between your value identity and the stated priorities of your company? Let’s find out.
Company Values
HR writer Ross Brooks states that company values not only shape the identity of your organization but also act as a guiding light for your employees. Company values aren’t just a collection of words that you think potential customers would like, they represent the essence of your business.
Yet, according to the Harvard Business Review, many enterprises struggle to define, much less live, their purpose. How can employees come to work every day ready to further the business if the only published purpose is to maximize shareholder value? HBR authors Blount and Leinwand pose the following questions that leadership must ask to ensure that a company’s purpose can create strategic clarity for employees: Does it speak to your unique value? Can employees three, four, and five layers away from the C-suite say what your company does that adds unique value? Can they explain how that relates to what they do?
Here are examples of company values statements that easily map to one or more of the VIA character strengths:
“Treat your customers like human beings…” – L.L Bean
“Listen to all ideas…” – Intel
“We must be good citizens…” – Johnson & Johnson
“Openness, honesty, integrity, courage, respect, diversity, and balance…” – Disney
“No child is denied treatment…” – St. Jude Children’s Hospital
If your personal character strengths include fairness, kindness, humility, love of learning, social intelligence, perspective, honesty, bravery, and hope, then you could clearly align with these companies and trust that your work environment would call upon you to use your strengths.
Putting your values and your work in harmony
Living in accordance with your values and character strengths and using them to achieve a higher purpose leads to meaning. In a research study of how the application of signature character strengths at work impacts positive experiences, authors Claudia Harzer and Willibald Ruch write that your work is an opportunity for engagement and meaning when you can use your individual character strengths to perform the work. Once you identify your own values and character strengths as well as the priorities of your company, you can then assess for overlaps or gaps. Simply put, the more signature strengths applied at the workplace, the higher the positive experiences at work (Claudia Harzer, Willibald Ruch).
In a research study of the contribution of character strengths at work, authors Gander, Proyer, Ruch, and Wyss compared the character strengths of a person with the situational circumstances of his or her workplace. As expected, the amount of positive experiences at work increased with the number of signature strengths that could be applied.
Positive work environments should enable the display of positive traits, like character strengths, which in turn foster positive experiences (Peterson 2006). Of course, having a character strength and also having a job does not mean you are in an environment that fosters a positive experience. The application of a character strength depends on two conditions:
You need to have the strength and to a certain degree to be able to show strength-related behavior (Fishbein and Ajzen 2010; Saucier et al. 2007).
Situational circumstances need to allow or call for the demonstration of a strength, as trait-related behavior needs conducive circumstances to be displayed (Saucier et al. 2007; Ten Berge and De Raad 1999).
The search for this harmony, the intersection of your character strengths and the circumstances that call for you to use your strengths is the focus of Positive Psychology. This field of study is the scientific exploration of what is best in people and of indicators that allow for flourishing—what makes our lives most worth living (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000).
Three topics at the center of positive psychology (Peterson 2006; Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000) map to our quest of complimentary personal and company values and the resulting satisfaction:
Positive subjective experiences (e.g., happiness or satisfaction)
Positive individual traits (e.g., character strengths or talents)
Positive institutions (e.g., families or workplaces)
Working in accordance to your signature strengths has a positive impact on your health-related working behavior and experience (Warr 1999). Do you work in an environment that calls for you to use your strengths? Or are you stifled in a situation that frustrates your values and character strengths? These are important realities for you to face and consider, as your health and fulfillment is at stake. In some circumstances, you may be able to look at your current company through a new lens and find complimentary purpose. This could revive your work experience. In other cases, you may decide to re-evaluate your employment over time.
Your values reflect who you are and can be a guiding light toward being a better person. Embrace your values and let them create a clear vision of what fulfillment looks like for you. Here is a bold idea: Rather than you serving as an enabler for your company to deliver profits and achieve its mission, flip that entire relationship; pick a values-compatible company and make it a tool that serves YOU to achieve YOUR fulfillment and success in life.
Works Cited:
Blount, Sally; Leinwand Paul (November–December 2019). Why Are We Here? Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/11/why-are-we-here?utm_source=linkedin&utm_campaign=hbr&utm_medium=social
Brooks, Ross (2018). 10 Companies with Core Values That Actually Reflect Their Culture. https://peakon.com/us/blog/workplace-culture/best-company-core-values/
Gander, F.; Proyer, R.T.; Ruch, W.; Wyss, T. (July 2011). The good character at work: an initial study on the contribution of character strengths in identifying healthy and unhealthy work-related behavior and experience patterns. Springer-Verlag 2012.
Handrick, Laura (May 2018). 25 Core Value Statements from 2018’s Top Organizations. https://fitsmallbusiness.com/core-values-list/
Harzer, Claudia; Ruch, Willibald (June 2012). The Application of Signature Character Strengths and Positive Experiences at Work. Science+Business Media B.V. 2012.
Manson, Mark. “Who the Fuck am I?”: The Ultimate Guide to Personal Values. www.Markmanson.net
Saucier, G.; Bel-Bahar, T.; Fernandez, C. (2007). What modifies the expression of personality tendencies? Defining basic domains of situation variables. Journal of Personality, 75, 479–503. doi:10.1111/ j.1467-6494.2007.00446.x.
Seligman, M. E. P.; Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55, 5–14. doi:10.1037//0003-066X.55.1.5.
Snyder, C.R.; Lopez, S.J. (2009) Handbook of Positive Psychology (2nd edn.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ten Berge, M. A.; De Raad, B. (1999). Taxonomies of situations from a trait psychological perspective. A review. European Journal of Personality, 13, 337–360. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-0984(199909/10) 13:5\337:AID-PER363[3.0.CO;2-F.
VIA Institute on Character. www.viacharacter.org
Warr P (1999). Well-being in the workplace. In: Well-being: the foundations of hedonic psychology. Kahneman D; Diener E; Schwarz N (eds). Russell Sage Foundation, New York.