Values at Work

January 12, 2012 By David Griesing 2 Comments

I’m learning that input sometimes comes through the blog, but just as often from outside of it.

One reader was confused about what bystanders, and making excuses for not acting in the ways that we should, has to do with bringing more meaning and purpose into our work. Since that’s the point of the last post Knowing What To Do , let me take another stab at it.

When your principles are vindicated through your work, both your work and your life are enriched. But this doesn’t just happen. It requires preparation.

Before you can take a stand on important things (and derive all of the personal benefits that will come to you from doing so) you need to know what your values are, and have some prior experience testing them out in real time. When you have prepared yourself beforehand, you have a far better chance of knowing what to do when the situation demands a principled response from you: when a woman has fallen in your path, when your children are being victimized, when a truly serious issue is presented in the course of your work.

It’s about being ready.

On the other hand, when we don’t take the time beforehand to think about what we value the most, it can be nearly impossible to “think straight” when confronted with the emotional turmoil of a truly consequential situation. My example was child abuse, but there are similarly serious kinds of dishonesty and victimization that happen everyday in the workplace.

In addition, when we have not gained the kind of experience that comes from acting on our values in small ways, it can be nearly impossible to know “what to do” when confronted with a serious set of circumstances that demands a strong and unequivocal response from us. Taking a stand in a situation where less is at stake can always prepare you for the situation where the stakes are higher.

When we don’t have these kinds of preparation, we make excuses for not acting like we should (such as thinking it’s enough to protect just your own children when there is widespread abuse) and worrying about things that are beside the point (like Conlin’s wife’s feelings). In the last post, I was arguing that if the parents in the Conlin tragedy had been ready, they would not only have acted more effectively for the children involved, but also felt more empowered as human beings when they did what the circumstances required.

The same kind of clarity and empowerment are necessary in our work if we want to be truly happy doing it.

Dilemmas both big and small that challenge us to respond in a principled way present themselves at work all the time. When we understand beforehand what is important to us (like honesty, respect, helping others, valuing relationships), and test those commitments by acting on them regularly, we have a far better chance of knowing what to do when something truly serious arises in the workplace, when emotions are high, and maybe our job or the jobs of our colleagues are on the line.

When we know what to do, and our decisions about work are connected to our deeper motivations, we gain a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.

Knowing What to Do

January 10, 2012 By David Griesing 5 Comments

Getting your work-life balance right means becoming the person you want to grow into on-the-job, while getting closer to attaining the goals you most want to realize. That’s what changes a job from little more than a paycheck into a vocation, a calling. When you can see the evidence of what you value the most in the work that you do, a deeper sense of happiness and accomplishment comes into your life—maybe for the first time.

Connecting your values to your working life requires a whole new set of decision-making muscles. Above all, it means living with, and acting on, those values that are most important to you before you are faced with truly difficult choices.

People who have never road-tested their values in their own lives usually don’t know what to do when they are confronted with a situation that calls upon them to act in the most basic human ways. It is when a woman has fallen down in front of you and is bleeding on the sidewalk. Do you stop to help?

For too many of us, the choice is to walk around her and then make up an excuse for not acting: I couldn’t stop, I had to get to work, to school, or the gym. I wouldn’t have known what to do if I did stop. Someone else will probably help her. I’d rather not get involved.

There is a name for this kind of paralysis, this not-knowing-what-to-do and its associated excuses. It’s called “the bystander effect.”

There was a gut wrenching demonstration of this dynamic chronicled in the Philadelphia newspapers just before Christmas. What floored me was the realization that I’d heard all of these kinds of excuses before, indeed had heard them over and over again when I was growing up—although the stakes were never as high as they were for the victims of this story.

Bill Conlin, a Hall of Fame baseball writer for one of the City’s papers, was pushed into early retirement a few weeks ago after a chorus of middle-aged women and men (some of them members of his own family) accused him of molesting them when they were as young as seven years old. This kind of abuse, and another prominent individual’s involvement, are now numbingly familiar. But I broke out in a cold sweat when the story started talking about how many people knew what Conlin was doing 30-odd years ago, and their willingness to talk today about what they did and didn’t do with their knowledge at the time.

Those now talking include the kids who were once abused as well as the parents they told about it. As Kelley Blanchet, Conlin’s niece and one of the children he molested, told the reporter: “People have kept this secret. It’s not just the victims, it’s the victims’ families. There were so many people who knew about this and did nothing.”

Well not exactly nothing. The adults generally found their own private solutions.

Kelley’s parents kept her away from her uncle after the abuse, and her father actually confronted Conlin. But when Conlin denied that he had done anything and then started crying, Kelley’s dad found himself first pitying, and then believing him. Taking his word over their daughter’s, Kelley’s parents never alerted the parents of other children who frequented the Conlin house or even other family members about what had happened.

And there were lots of little boys and girls who flocked to Conlin’s house to play with his little boys, Billy and Peter, 30 years ago: like Barbara Healy’s children Kevin and Karen.

When Kevin came home one day complaining about Conlin’s touching him, Barbara told him to stay away from the Conlin house, but not to tell his father (“who had a terrible temper”) about what had happened. However Barbara never stopped her daughter Karen from going over to play with Conlin’s youngest son Peter because “I thought [Conlin] was just interested in boys.”

Years later, Karen and one of her girl friends told her mother that each of them, along with a third girl, had been repeatedly molested by Conlin in his home and elsewhere. Shocked, Barbara Healey picked up the phone and called the mothers of the other two girls. Collectively they agreed that one of their husbands should confront Conlin, but that the other two husbands should never even be told “fearing that in their anger they might harm him.”

This time when Conlin was confronted, he neither admitted nor denied the reported abuse, merely acknowledging that he heard what the father had come to say. These parents didn’t consider calling the police at the time, in part, as they recalled, out of loyalty to Conlin’s wife (“We didn’t want to hurt her,” they said).

Around the same time, another girl also told her parents that Conlin had repeatedly molested her, whereupon her father sought him out and challenged him angrily. “I just remember my mom holding my dad back and the two of them screaming at each other,” she reported. But again, her parents never alerted other parents, and the authorities were never told. Like the others, they chose to mind their own business.

These parents all kept their children away from Conlin after the reported abuse, but never considered the lasting consequences the abuse would have on the children themselves. As they now readily admit, there was a strong desire to just put the unpleasantness “behind us.” As Kelley Blanchet recalls: “no one ever talked about it. No one got therapy. Everyone just went on with their lives” as if nothing had happened.

These parents also never worried (or never worried enough) about the other little children being drawn into Conlin’s orbit to sound a wider alarm. (As I write this, other victims have already come forward.) On the other hand, even though Conlin plainly used his own little boys as bait to lure children like Kelley, Karen and Kevin into his home, their parents recall worrying at the time not only about Conlin himself (and whether certain fathers would hurt him) but also about Conlin’s wife (because she would presumably be either shocked or embarrassed to learn what had been going on).

It is laudable that these parents have come forward today to recount what happened and to express remorse (as many of them have) that they didn’t do more at the time. Unlike classic bystanders, these parents responded—they just didn’t do nearly enough.

What may be fairest to say about them is that they didn’t know what to do in an era when adults were often believed over children, an adult’s feelings were thought to be more important than a child’s, men were often too angry to be of help, and prominent adults (particularly sports figures) were given too much latitude.

But is it being too hard on them to say that these excuses are all unworthy of adults, when it comes right down to it?

What do you think?

Think of how different it might have been if these parents had taken the time beforehand to understand that because, in a sense, your child is every child, no parent can protect only their own children when they are reasonably certain that other unsuspecting children are likely to be violated in the same way.

How different might it have been if these parents had taken the time beforehand to understand the importance of speaking truth to power until the harm that the powerful are causing is stopped, and not merely re-directed?

These aren’t realizations that just “bubble to the surface” when a seven year old is looking up at you through her tears to tell you that someone has just molested her. In the heat of such moments, no one can think straight. You have to have done your thinking beforehand. Then the processing will already have been done, available to be summoned up at those difficult times when it is needed the most.

That’s how you know the right thing to do.

In an extraordinary observation made a couple of months before his own demons came home to roost, Bill Conlin-celebrated sports columnist wrote about the sex abuse scandal then engulfing former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. At the time, Conlin questioned whether those people, who were now saying that they would have intervened if they had witnessed Sandusky’s abuse, would actually have done so.

“Everybody says he will do the right thing, get involved, put his own ass on the line before or after the fact,” wrote Conlin. “But the moment itself has a cruel way of suspending our fearless intentions.” As he wrote these words, he clearly was recalling how the parents of his own victims had done so much less than their moment required.

Evil always depends on good men and women doing nothing, or not nearly enough.

In fact, it’s counting on it.

Inaugural post

October 30, 2011 By David Griesing 4 Comments

The most important thing that I have in this world is my life.

One reason my life is important has to do with what I can do with it—the wonderful things I can accomplish when I make the most of it—both for myself and for others. We all have an opportunity to make something truly extraordinary out of our lives. But at the same time, this opportunity is constrained by the limited time that we have been given to realize it.

We spend a lot of our limited time working. We work because we have to, to make money, to give ourselves and those who need us a place to live and a measure of material comfort. But there are more life-changing opportunities to be realized through our work than what it can buy for us.

Work can be an opportunity to learn how to use our talents to become more productive. It can be an opportunity to test our capabilities and, by doing so, gain an increasing sense of personal power: to discover the difference we can make when we’re firing on all cylinders. It can be an opportunity to fill the shoes we were born with.

Work is also an opportunity to join our productivity with that of our co-workers to make something of value. What our work produces can have value in the marketplace, namely, the goods and services we have come to either need or want in our consumer-driven society. But our work can also produce value at a deeper level. Our work can help to make the world the kind of better place that we want it to be.

Many of us expect little more from our work than a paycheck, some pleasant interaction with our co-workers, and a vague sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. We don’t expect our work to give us a higher sense of self-regard because of how capable we are becoming by doing it. We don’t expect our work to further objectives we care about or to help change things for the better.

Given the limited time we are given to realize the opportunity in our lives—and the huge amount of our time that we spend working—we should all be expecting more from our work. And when our work isn’t meeting our expectations, we should start thinking about creating the right kind of work for ourselves.

This blog is committed to thinking about what we should expect from our work, what we need to do to clarify those expectations in our lives, and how to create for ourselves the kind of work that meets those expectations when we can’t find it elsewhere.

Work Today
On September 22, the U.S. Census Bureau released figures showing that one in three young people, ages 20 to 29, were unemployed. With a national unemployment rate hovering around 9%, the actual number of Americans who want to work but can’t find jobs may be closer to 20% of the workforce (or roughly 60 million Americans!). The lost opportunity is simply staggering.

I am writing this from Philadelphia, which now enjoys the unfortunate distinction of being the Poorest Big City in the United States. According to the same Census figures, 27 percent of Philadelphia’s residents, and more than one third of its children, are living below the federal poverty level. In some of our neighborhoods, the unemployment rate approaches 50 percent. Philadelphia also has the lowest percentage of college graduates. With only one in ten of those students who entered our public high schools in 1999 completing college, there are far too few low level jobs available for the rest. It is like waters building behind a dam.

A discussion I had a few years back made these statistics more personal. I wanted to write to City gas utility customers about a plan I had for lowering their gas costs for things like cooking and heating. As the discussion went on, my thinking changed rapidly from what to say to how.

While I knew that a third of Philadelphia’s residents cannot read at all, I learned that even more have such minimal skills that they can read little more than the labels on products in the grocery or drug store: Heinz ketchup, Tide detergent. In other words, as many as two thirds of our residents may be unable to comprehend two straightforward paragraphs. So much for sending the utility’s 500,000+ customers my carefully reasoned attempt at communication.

At this point, my mind wandered to political campaigns in India, where the principal communication with millions of its poor and illiterate voters involves little more than the display of recognizable symbols, like a clock (the National Congress Party), a hand (the Indian National Party), or a lotus flower (the Baharatiya Janata Party). I realized that if India’s economy is “emerging” from this primitive state, our’s may be “slipping back.” In what would have been a first for Philadelphia’s natural gas utility, it occurred to me that I could have used a stove with dollar bills jumping out of it to get our customers’ attention, but where I would have gone from there with them remains a mystery.

Shockingly widespread poverty and low literacy disable Americans from becoming productive. For a nation preoccupied with worker productivity and gross national “product,” the lost opportunity this represents (and its associated costs) are unacceptable to me and likely to many others who are reading this. But poverty and illiteracy, that is, particular social problems, are not the aim of this conversation. The aim here is to care about, and then do something about whatever realities you find unacceptable in the world today as an integral part of your work.

Many seeking jobs here in Philadelphia (and elsewhere) are not in the pool of permanent unemployment occupied by people who are unlikely to find or keep a job in America’s economy today. These are unemployed Americans who read and hold high school diplomas and college degrees, and already have valuable skills and job experience.

This waste of our working potential is a further crime, but unfortunately we are far from being out of the woods. Lawrence Katz, an economist at Harvard, recently said: “The labor market has shown absolutely no recovery. There’s no scenario in which the labor market doesn’t continue to need help three to four years from now.”
Beyond what I have already said about the priority of realizing the promise in our lives through our work, today’s employment market may provide an additional argument for those of you who still need convincing. Its harsh realities may provide the final catalyst for you to start thinking about the nature and quality of your work in a whole new way.

If you cannot find any work with established employers—let alone fulfilling work—then it may be time to start thinking seriously about creating the right kind of job for yourself. (Necessity is the mother of invention. And we are, after all, a nation of entrepreneurs.)

Once you start looking to yourself for a job, why not give yourself a job that is both productive and fulfilling. There is lots of work that needs to be done to improve the world as you see it, and much of it will make you a happier and more fully realized person while doing it.

From this vantage point, the current employment challenges will involve some different mechanics than the usual job search: how to bring your energy, talent and imagination to the work that you create for yourself, and how to “make a living” while doing it.

Work That Makes You Feel Good About Doing It
Philosophers since Aristotle have committed a lot of words to describing the kinds of experiences that make us feel fulfilled in our lives and in our engagement with the world around us. They have generally concluded that we gain a sense of wellbeing when the way we live has both meaning and purpose.

Recent data is confirming their traditional wisdom. Industrial psychologists have begun to prove empirically that workers need to feel that their work has purpose and meaning for them to also find it satisfying. At the same time, professionals in a range of health-related fields are demonstrating the measurable benefits to both body and mind that result when the way that we work and live has these two components, making us feel productive and fulfilled. (We’ll be looking at several of these studies in a later post.) The first element that must be present for us to gain a sense of well-being from our work is dynamic in nature.

As suggested earlier, work has meaning and purpose when it involves your becoming someone who is smarter, more efficient or more energized, and as a result, more capable than you were before you started doing it. This kind of work likely produces something of value for the business you are in (and you get paid either a little or a lot for doing it), but it also adds to your self-confidence and skill. Accordingly, this kind of work tends to increase productivity in two directions: yielding not only higher returns for your workplace but also for you in terms of personal empowerment.

Work that has purpose and meaning also brings you closer to meeting important personal goals. While this includes financial independence and being able to provide for those who depend on you, it also involves accomplishing broader objectives that you care about. They can be internal to the workplace, like collaboration. Or they can extend beyond it, to external objectives: Protecting the environment. Maintaining a level playing field for all when it comes to opportunity. Providing access to safe housing, to adequate healthcare or nutrition. Mandating transparency in the political process or in the financial markets. Believing that everyone deserves a basic quality of life. These are the kinds of commitments that reflect your values: the principles that influence important decisions in your own life and in your engagement with the wider world.

Your work can vindicate your values, and make the world into what you believe will be a better place, in several ways. The nature of the work itself is one. What you’re making, or the service you’re providing, can have this sort of upside. In other words, those who buy your products or use your services may become smarter, healthier, able to communicate faster or travel more comfortably, have warmer houses or produce less pollution than they did before because of your product or service—and you may feel good about that.

Another way your work can further your values is how it’s being done. Does the place where you work improve the community where it’s based? Does it treat its employees, customers and suppliers fairly? Does it play a socially responsible role in its industry?

The value-charged goals we have as individuals are either met or disappointed in our workplaces today. We are either becoming more capable and more powerful as individuals when we do our jobs or we’re not. When you come to the realization that your work is making you feel neither productive nor fulfilled, it is time to think about creating the kind of work that will brings you returns in terms of job satisfaction and personal wellbeing. This kind of work is an opportunity that each of us has to make a living while living a life that is worth living.

Taking Everything Too Seriously (or Not)
Because our discussion here will often be about serious things like work and values, becoming happier and more productive, and even finding the so-called “meaning of life,” there will always be a risk that I will start taking myself too seriously (or one of you might find yourself unintentionally doing the same) while we’re in the middle of this conversation. After all, the stakes are high and time’s a-wasting.

While these are all things that matter and need to be talked about, I would also like for us to have this conversation without breast-beating, pontificating, I’m right/you’re wrong, I’m smarter than you are (or all of those people are over there)—that is, without the edge in the voice that tends to creep in whenever we leave the realm of small consequences for the realm of big ones.

How exactly can we do this?
There are several possible ways. You could leave this conversation to get a dose of balance, sanity and humor by taking your search engine to another page entirely. (I’ll recommend some interesting destinations from time to time.) You could also just close your screen and find some domestic source to restore both balance and perspective. But I’d rather that you take a moment to get a grip right here and quickly rejoin our conversation. For this purpose, I will always try to provide at least one place on this page (and eventually more) where you can go to get “Back in the Moment” and balance the seriousness and passion of our quest with a smile.

The animated Introduction “Connecting Your Values to Your Work” provides a slightly different angle for looking at what we’ll be discussing in these posts—as well as some basic information about why I wanted to have this conversation in the first place. It’s the same water, I think, but with some bubbles added to give it a lighter finish when it’s needed.

The words of Francois VI, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld and Prince de Marcillac—or just “La Rochefoucauld” as we have come to know him today—are also helpful in this regard. Among his Collected Maxims and Other Reflections (1678), La Rochefoucauld included the following:

Virtue would not go far if vanity did not keep her company.

When we are in touch with them, our principles do require some arrogance, along with more-than-a-little vain posturing and righteous indignation if they are to help us prevail and make a difference in the world. It is a way that you speak truth to power. But at least for purposes of our strategizing together in this discussion, there is a more productive balance to be struck. Thanks in advance for helping with that.

Values at Work

Knowing What to Do

Inaugural post

Search this Site

Follow Me

Recent Posts

Navigate