The ValuesCrafting Journey

Discover How You Can Align Your Actions With What Matters Most

Especially for people in positions that influence the actions of other people, this is the story behind ValuesCrafting and my own journey with values-based living, writing, and consulting. My struggles to help organizations embed the changes they aspired to in their values may help you achieve your own personal mission.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read about the journey. If it resonates with your interests, please subscribe and share to receive the next issues as they are published. We truly appreciate your interest. 

Warmly, 

Susan

The ValuesCrafting Journey

My journey to writing ValuesCrafting began years ago. If you’re interested in ValuesCrafting, you're likely already on your journey to living authentically. So, the good news is that this newsletter can hopefully help you accelerate your progress.

I don't claim to have all the answers, but my experiences have taught me valuable lessons. By sharing them, I hope to offer guidance and support as you forge your own path towards living authentically, aligned with your core values.

It follows that people who live by their values naturally carry them into the workplace, where the collective principles of all members shape the organization's culture.

I trust these thoughts will help you and also serve your clients and employees on their journey to reach their potential.

Want to know what I learned?

I worked with an organization called Michigan Modernization Services. The service involved a management and human resources consultant and a technology engineering partner visiting small manufacturing companies.

Our goal? To suggest improvements that would help the company improve competitively. We delivered the improvement suggestions as a report and made several follow-up visits to ensure their implementation.

What I learned while providing this consulting experience has informed and underpinned my writing and consulting career.

This process didn’t work.

Despite our best intentions and the quality of our recommendations, small companies and the individuals who managed them were ill-equipped and inexperienced in implementing the recommended changes.

They could not envision the changes in action and what that would mean for their business. They could not clearly show employees what their activities would look like in the improved workplace. Overall, yes, but not clearly enough for employees to picture the changes in their own jobs.

Most importantly, beyond reasoning and reassuring, leaders had difficulty recognizing that if they wanted the employees to change, they needed to change how they managed employees. They needed to make the employees’ experience compensate them for their change efforts.

Changes in Leadership

Another factor severely limiting an organization's or its people's ability to change was change itself. Everything changed—all of the time. Leaders, department heads, and company direction changed, often when new customer requirements changed, or the competitive environment posed challenges. Some invested people left and took their newly gained knowledge elsewhere.

So, implementing the desired values in the culture was a constant uphill battle. In fact, the changes only lasted in many organizations as long as the current management team, despite prodigious efforts to embed them in the organization's foundation and culture.

Change in Approach

My commitment as a consultant became to offer hands-on services. These included coaching, training, and providing examples of change in action. I offered these services during a period of extensive follow-up. In many cases, this follow-up lasted years.

This early experience guided my life and practices through years of consulting, writing, and developing our company's culture.

Demonstrating Your Values

In the process, I discovered a crucial gap exists when you are committed to demonstrating your values in your everyday work and life. While descriptions of values are commonplace, practical guidance on translating them into actionable steps is hard to find.

This can leave people feeling stuck, even after identifying what's important. It is even more challenging if you are in a position of influence and must help others demonstrate their values.

This is precisely the problem ValuesCrafting set out to solve. ValuesCrafting was created to bridge this gap and help people demonstrate and leverage their core values to create a more fulfilling and purposeful life.

For those in helping professions and managers who influence others, our goal is to provide materials that empower individuals to say, 'These are the specific actions I’d like you to take.' For example, asking someone to demonstrate more empathy can be abstract and challenging to translate into clear, actionable steps.

It's easy to tell an employee to be more kind to team members, but how can you translate the request into expected actions the person will understand?

Do you share these experiences from when you worked with teams and organizations? If so, what did you do to try to overcome them?

Why Subscribe to ValuesCrafting?

Do you want your work and life to reflect your values truly? Susan Heathfield, a business owner, HR expert, and values-based management consultant, offers actionable tips each Wednesday.

ValuesCrafting will help you and the people you influence put values such as integrity and respect into actual practice in life and work. You will occasionally receive a true story showing people applying their values in a typical job or life situation. You can turn your core beliefs into daily actions that fulfill you.

This is why I am offering ValuesCrafting to you now.

Subscribe to ValuesCrafting Today

Subscribe to ValuesCrafting today and start living your best life, aligning your actions with what matters most. The ValuesCrafting newsletter is free as it aims to spread important information to as many people as possible.

You won’t have to worry about missing any of the issues of ValuesCrafting. Every edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox every Wednesday.