Defining Your Personal Core Values

What do you value?

In my experience, companies that have really great cultures also have strong, well-communicated, and understood values. Any company can post good-sounding words on a website or on office walls, but if the employees and leaders in the company aren’t living by these values, they are meaningless.

Values shape our personal and professional lives as well.  Whether we have taken the time to define and write down our personal values or not, we are guided by them in the decisions we make.  I like to think of them as guardrails, keeping us on the road and going in the right direction.

Values are guardrails keeping you on the right path

Our values are formed through our experiences with family, social organizations, work, and faith. They aren’t stagnant, they will likely change or evolve over time.

Boy Scout with Merit Badges

For me, other than my parents, the first significant influence to start forming my values was Scouting America (formerly BSA). We never talked about values, but they were clearly identified as the Scout Law:

“A Scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent.”

Twelve words that identify how a Scout is to live, and how they make decisions.  Every Scout learns these and recites them often, as well as discusses how to apply them.

In college, as a Naval ROTC Midshipman, I learned another set of fourteen leadership traits:

Bearing, Courage, Decisiveness, Dependability, Endurance, Enthusiasm, Initiative, Integrity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Loyalty, Tact, and Unselfishness.

Coming to John Deere, I was exposed to their five core values:

Integrity, Quality, Humanity, Commitment, and Innovation.

Several years ago, I was challenged to write down and define my personal core values, and going through this process has been instrumental in making difficult decisions as well as standing up for things that I believe in.  They are:

• Integrity.  A leader must be above reproach.  They do what they say they will do.  They keep their promises and are dependable. 

• Joyful Service. Serving others should be a main focus of any leader’s work.  There is no work that is beneath a leader.  Serving with joy helps us remember that all work we do is given by God and is important and meaningful.

• People First.  Putting others’ needs first shows respect for other people, regardless of who they are.  If you put people first, everything else has a way of working itself out.

• Initiative.  Leading others requires you to lead yourself first.  That means finding things that need to get done and doing them without being asked.

• Growing.  “If you aren’t growing, you are dying.”  We should constantly find new things to learn and new ways to stretch our abilities

What are your values? Share your experiences and the values that guide you in the comments below. Let's start a conversation about what truly matters in our personal and professional lives.