Values, Vision & Entrepreneurial Leadership: Lesson Four
Shaping the Edges… Starting With Yourself
In the context of possibility, transparency and calling, we can now consider how personal values can define shape vision and leadership. But first, the values.
‘It’s at the edges that a shape is formed,” said my friend, the very wise Mr. Storm.
But what are the edges? I think the edges are our values. “What do you care about?” is what I often ask a leader when I begin working with them. It’s relevant to all, as evidenced by the back-to-back meetings I had one day with a CEO of a big company right after I had done an “informational interview” for the college-aged son of a friend. What we care about shines a light on what we value, no matter our age, our title or our career stage.
After working in big companies for more than two decades, I was thinking seriously about starting my own company. At the time I was commuting between Seattle and Orlando. At the beginning of each leg of my cross-country journey (every weekend for months) I would take out a file and look at my attempt to write the values of the company that I was coming closer and closer to starting.
So many things that mattered to me in my professional life. I tried to figure out what would be so great about this new adventure that it would make me leave a satisfying, high-paying and relatively fulfilling job to start something with no predictability, no security, no guarantee of success, no path to long-term wealth creation and no health insurance.
In that exercise, I wrote down a lot of things. I wanted to work with people I respected. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to do important work. I wanted to work with (but not for) big organizations. I wanted to be in a place that saw my strengths as strengths and not as the extreme when they converted themselves to weaknesses.
My lists were long. Eventually they started to converge upon themselves.
And then one day I had an epiphany — it wasn’t just what mattered professionally. It was what mattered personally.
Suddenly the exercise changed shape. I took all the scribbled scraps of ideas and organized them into three categories:
- The people with whom I spent my time
- The work that I actually did
- The product of how I spent my time.
No one told me to do this. There was no recipe. I didn’t read any business book. I just stopped, looked out the window from the airplane at the top of the clouds and had this moment of clarity. It wasn’t that complicated. No one else had the answer — I was just as qualified as anyone to say what mattered in my life.
This entrepreneurial exercise was incredibly liberating. No one else had any say over what I decided and no one else could judge whether it was right or night. I had total control over my list and realized that for months, I had been trying to judge my “values” against some unknown set of guidelines that stemmed from conventional thinking and big organizations who had molded me professionally for 20-some years.
Instead of a twist on convention or someone else’s definition of “company values,” I just had to say what mattered most to me. I cared about three things. After that, my “values” literally wrote themselves.
1. Inspirational people. My best professional chapters came when I worked for people I respected and admired and enjoyed. These were people who were alive and vibrant and fun and clever. They cared. They had a point of view. I have a short attention span and lots of opinions so the prospect “long boring meetings” are hellish to me. It isn’t the length of the meeting — it was the company.
2. Big ideas. Not the color of the packaging. Not the incremental innovation for next year’s business plan. While these were big changes for the companies that made them, there seemed to me to be a significant difference between a big change and a big idea. I wanted big and bold and daring.
3. Work that makes a difference. I cared a lot about making a little mark on my corner of the world — whether by helping a leader lead or by improving the culture or understanding within an organization…. or by finding a way to make a better world…
As I looked out the window of the plane I felt an amazing sense of peace. These were exactly what mattered to me as a person, but also as a business person. They were the very foundation of who I am. These were my edges. They were, like the “bumpers” that can be raised on the sides of a bowling alley when small children roll a giant ball slowly down the alley, the very things that keep the ball from the gutter.
And here I am.
Fifteen years later. No gutter balls. I have lived in the truth of these three values and I still have a company, a job I love, clients for whom I would go to the ends of the earth, and never once did I think I made the wrong choice by leaving big corporate life for a small start-up with no safety net. It hasn’t been easy but I don’t have any regrets.
If these three things are true, the work is always right. These are what I value most. It is these characteristics that constrain me as person and shape my edges. They are my truth. They are my purpose. They are my values.
An exercise in values is not about creating something that doesn’t exist or something that isn’t truthful or genuine or real. It’s about articulating in the simplest and most straightforward way the truth about what matters most that already exists within you.
Don’t over-think.
Don’t compromise.
Don’t write by committee.
Find the essence of what matters most.
Start with writing down the stuff that matters. If the three categories help you structure it, great, or just start writing and then do the organizing.
Those become your leadership values. Eventually, you will do a similar exercise for your enterprise so people in the organization can get their hand prints on your shared values. But for now, start with yourself.
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This is the fourth lesson in a series of nine by Jane Melvin, the founder and president of Strategic Innovations Group, Inc., a strategy and creativity consulting practice. These lessons grew from content she originally created for an online course in an MBA program.
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