Let Your Intuition Guide You

I posted a video to Facebook a few months ago that talked about aligning your personal purpose and organizational purpose.

It has been my experience that before you do any discovery about purpose at work, you must first know YOUR purpose. You can ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is my vision for success?

2. What is my definition and vision of my well-being?

3. What is the biggest thing holding me back?

4. What does success look like in the next 12 months?

Once you have answered these questions and you know what your north star is and the action required to get there you can start to cultivate a plan of action.

I have been honoured to work alongside many First Nations communities in British Columbia and listened to knowledge keepers about the First Nations Perspective of Wellness. This wellness wheel has an inner circle that is YOU and the responsibility that individuals carry to keep themselves well. All things must start with you. The first ring is my inner circle that includes mental, emotional, spiritual and physical areas of an aligned life. The second ring includes values that support wellness such as: respect, wisdom, responsibility and relationships.

An HBR article Make Your Values Mean Something by Patrick M. Lencioni state that it can be helpful to create four categories of values: core values, aspirational values, permission-to-play values and accidental values. Core values are described as the "deeply ingrained principles" that guide the organization's actions. Aspirational values are what "a company needs to succeed in the future but currently lacks". Permission-to-play values are "behavioural and social standards required". Finally, accidental values are those that "arise spontaneously without being cultivated by leadership and take hold over time".

When I have reviewed values as an employee and as a senior executive, I always make sure that there is a robust conversation about our intention to embed these values into everything that we do across the organization. Values are not words on paper that we say we live by when in fact, our company culture may not be aligned with those values. This can be seen in poor engagement, high turnover, incivility in the workplace.

Values are to be felt, that there is an emotional connection to them by every person in the organization. People need to see themselves in those values to feel aligned and authentic and to for pride of work to be evoked. When you are reviewing your values, spend time asking individuals at all levels throughout the organization if they resonate with them, what is missing and why. Only then, will you create values that everyone can live and work by.