Work and life philosophy- who are you?
Let’s discuss your philosophy, we all have a philosophy for different things in our life, like parenting working, dating marriage. We have a set of ideals for everything and some of those ideals or philosophies are very different from the next person. You may even have different ideals than your partner and that can be very difficult to navigate especially in a marriage and add children to the mix and it can be downright scary. Those examples take compromise and communication but some you may not be willing to negotiate, like when it comes to human rights and how to treat your fellow human...I have no time to discuss the ideas of hate or people using things like religion or something else to justify it.
I will not get into such a deep topic as human rights today but instead, I would like to discuss something adjacent to that and that’s the philosophy I have for work and my co-workers. I have discussed on the Podcast in the past that I work at an automation company and this week we have an independent certification done within our company. This audit involved looking at our company from top to bottom and verify we follow a certain set of standards d procedures. I am in our upper management group so I had to have a meeting with the auditor to discuss my processes as well as my philosophy on how I run my specific area of the company. I was not nervous about this because I know I follow the procedures to the Betsy of my ability and I am pretty comfortable in meetings like this, especially over zoom.
After the initial pleasantries, we state to discuss procedure and examples of documents and forms I use and how they are filled out and recorded. After that boring part, we started to discuss my thoughts on my department and what I see as challenges, and where I see opportunities for improvement. during that discussion, I spoke about my relationships with customers and how part of my measure of success is their happiness with the services we provide. I also discussed the relationships I try to build with the people we serve and not superficially but on a real personal level. I like to get to know them and understand them and reach out to them to see if they need help before they reach out. I try to build a relationship and be proactive to make us even more valuable by making sure we are speaking to them when they are not seeking us out. the auditor made a note that this was very impressive and that most companies he deals with do not have this philosophy and seemed very impressed. Now, this is nothing I made up and I hope this doesn’t come off as me bragging or anything, I really wanted to discuss this to show that you need to put people first in most aspects of life. I try to put people first, I fail at this more often than I care for but I do try, this also goes for the people I work with. there are some I don’t care for as much as others but I still try to get to know them on a reasonable level and connect with them.
I say all of this to relay this simple message, have a philosophy in life and bring that to your work. Do not let processes or bosses let you change your core values to conform to the business model, it is important to be a good person and to care for others. In my case, this seems to be positive, the auditor of our company said so and that’s great to hear but not the reason I try to put forth these values but instead I do it because it’s the right thing to do. I try to preach these values to the people who work for me and hope that I can influence them and others I come into contact with.
To wrap this up we had a final meeting with the auditor on the last day and he reviews his findings with the whole upper management team. He points out the violations in the company, his thoughts for improvement, and highlights of the company. I won’t get into all of his findings for obvious reasons but one of the 3 highlights he brought up was my department and singled me out because of how impressed he was with how I presented my philosophy for the department and how I want o build relationships. It was nice to be recognized but putting people first is a much better feeling and it took me a while to get to this point but it was well worth the effort.
Larry