Having Values in Alignment

Today I was thinking about my mission as I defined it within the past month. In a sense it articulates what I have been doing for a while now and articulates what I value most. One thing I haven't done is compare those values to the ones my employer has. What I find interesting is that while I couldn't name all four of these values in the past, today, without any prompting, and without looking it up, I was able to name all four.

My employer has four "core" values: Customer Satisfaction, Respect, Achievement, and Renewal. Customer Satisfaction seems kind of obvious. Respect, as in treating other people with respect, communicating openly and honestly, embracing differences, and valuing the environment and community. Achievement speaks towards meeting goals, taking responsibility and being accountable for success, and recognizing and celebrating achievements. Renewal is the act of continual learning, or what Stephen Covey might call "Sharpening the Saw."

What I wrote down for my "mission" as you might recall is: Share, Improve, Serve, Inspire. Achievement and Renewal in the above values match up nicely with Inspire and Improve respectively. Serve seems kind of ambiguous now that I think about it, but it does fall into the Customer Satisfaction as does sharing. Respect doesn't really match any of these, but it is something that is important to me--why I left it out of my mission, I'm not sure.

The more I think about it, the more the words Respect, Achievement, and Renewal really seem to describe what I am about. Customer Satisfaction is something that is job specific, it's not really specific to life in general, but Sharing is.

At the end of the day, I work for a company that values many of the same things that I do. I consider myself very lucky as not everyone can say that.