How a team player helps foster their company's values

You know your values now and you've found an organization with the ideals to complement yours. How are you going to help your team foster them and create your own valuable space? First, consider the team’s values. Keep in mind that every workplace, while putting their own unique trademark on the concepts, is going to want to embody in some way the traits of integrity, accountability, diligence, perseverance, and discipline.

So let’s discuss how to embrace these qualities in employees as well as how to help foster them in coworkers - in three easy steps each!

Integrity -

1. Be trustworthy - in your work and errors, and in your confidences among coworkers.
2. Don’t be negative about colleagues or the workspace.
3. Hold yourself to just as high - or even higher - a standard as you do everyone else.

Accountability -

1. Be responsible for your relationships.
2. Seek conflict solutions and understand the part you may play.
3. Choose your behaviors so that they promote unity and not divisiveness.

Diligence -

1. Ask questions when you need to.
2. Embrace deadlines and work toward them at pace.
3. Follow-up when your inquiries aren’t responded to in a timely fashion.

Perseverance -

1. Find ways to solve the unsolvable - or at worst, come up with an alternative.
2. Don’t put projects to the side. Always keep working on it even if priorities have to be shuffled.
3. If the workload is too much, enlist help.

Discipline -

1. At all times keep in mind your end goals - on your project, in your career.
2. Step away if the stress becomes too much.
3. Set a schedule and keep it.

Your values will guide your workplace performance. By embodying these traits, you’ll set an example for the rest of the team as well as stay on your own track for success. Remember that the workplace is diverse and multi-generational, so there are often disagreements and miscommunications, but focusing on these five traits and how to develop them within yourself will keep conflicts to a minimum and strengthen your team.

Mapping the winding path to your personal success

As talent recruiters, we talk a lot about goals. How do we set them and measure them? Are they right for us? Your goals are the little steps on your way to success; you’ll set them incrementally, getting you closer brick by brick to your final destination - which is, of course, success, what we’re here to talk about today.

First you need to define what success means to you. Why set a goal to do one thing when success is something else? Believe it or not, this happens all the time - because you’ve either allowed your goals or your definition of success to be determined by someone else. Is success retiring when you’re forty or waking up with a smile every day? Your goals on the way to that may look very, very different.

List what you want to achieve - and then list why. If you can’t define it well or can’t explain why you want it, congratulations, you have one nuisance to cross of the list. That isn’t your expectation, it’s one someone made for you that got into your subconscious. Another reason this helps on your path is the navigation of the actual route. There are a hundred ways to get to that year 40 retirement. Some of them will make you happy, some of them will make you miserable - and be careful what you wish for because some could land you in prison! If you know all the small things you want to accomplish on the way to retirement at age 40, you can put them in an order that will get you there. And cross off the felonies.

Life is hard - celebrate it. You’ll have failures and they’ll hurt. Some will be humiliating and some will be hard to forgive, but do your best to shake them off and learn. One of the best ways to rise above your failures is to talk about them. You learn more, you find out you aren’t alone in them, and you’ll create accountability so that they are less likely to happen again. Not to mention the help you will be to others, and that creates a level of trust in others that means they can rely on you and vice versa. Failure can actually expand your support network if you learn from it instead of hiding.

Don’t mind the detours. Take the scenic route, stop for photos and a hearty meal! Get lost but ask for directions. You’ll find your way out eventually and get back to where you’re going - or let’s be honest, sometimes your destination changes. But change it for the right reasons. Don’t question what you’re doing unless you know it no longer feels right to you. The path to success is winding and it has mountains and valleys; it’s sunny but it floods. Sometimes there’s construction; sometimes you’re out of gas or need maintenance. You’ll get where you’re going one way or the other!

A Selection of Some of My Favorite Company Values

There are Five Key Values any strong organization demonstrates in one way or another and will want to see in its candidates:

Integrity. From white lies to great risks, it’s better to be honest from the start. Don’t pad the resume and be forthcoming about your needs and skills. Your record will demonstrate your honesty and your employers will appreciate it.

Accountability. It runs parallel to integrity - do you take responsibility for your actions no matter the consequence? The answer should be yes - someone who is willing to be responsible for potential errors will make fewer in the first place.

Diligence. This is all about accuracy and paper trails and it can be boring and stressful - if you’re doing it completely wrong. We don’t need more forms, we need more practice to create strong, reliable products and concepts. It’s quality improvement, not mindless boredom and labor.

Perseverance. Now this is an easy one in a business, but it’s a hard one to practice in personal life - tired of repeating the same mistakes? Toss it and forget it! That’s how we handle at-home projects, but we can’t do that in business. We tinker until it’s ready for market. Show potential employers that you can stick out a difficult situation.

Discipline. This doesn’t look the same everywhere. A reporter’s discipline will be an ability to adapt, multitask, and think on their feet. An office administrator’s discipline will be skill in establishing and maintaining routines. Are you disciplined? Does your discipline match the organization’s?

Once you’ve identified your own values, you’ll be able to find the right organizations to help you flourish as a professional. The company’s values will match or at least coincide with your own. In order to make yourself attractive to the best companies who align with your core beliefs, establish yourself as someone who carries themselves with the Five Key Values. You’ll be a stand-out candidate and a stronger professional for it.