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Aligning Values with Your Work

As a person raised in an Asian household, there were a number of things that I learned. 
  1. Education is not an option. Going to college was not an option. Getting a Master's degree was strongly encouraged. Pursuing a PhD was on the master to do list.
  2. Work hard and you will be recognized. Somewhat true. But in the business that I'm in, you need to let people know that you are working hard.
  3. Place more of an emphasis on the team and not on yourself. Also somewhat true until performance review time. Somehow you have to make yourself look better than the person next to you. Kill or be killed I guess.
A company or organization that you work for should align with your values. I have poor reading comprehension skills, but I believe that in the book, Tribal Leadership, aligning with values is one of the higher stages of leadership. One of the issues that I have - yet am fully aware of and understand - is that I have targets to hit and that could mean boxing out a peer or proverbially screwing another. So based on the 3 things above, I might need a realignment -- or at least a set of new values.

I firmly believe that if everyone is trying to accomplish the same goal which is to solve business problems and make money while doing it, why does it matter who gets the credit? Unfortunately, this may be simple-minded idealism on my part.

What's interesting to me is that I've been writing a lot of content on our collaborative approach and style that we take with clients. To say that we collaborate internally is a truth. However, there is a point where you realize that you are just being used. Depending on how trusting you are, you either realize that after a couple of interactions or you never realize it all. My advice is to treat every request as you would an opportunity: Qualify it. Get intelligence on the value of it. Then understand your value proposition and make a decision to go after or not go after credit. A simple rule of thumb is that if the opportunity could not have been completed without your intellectual capital, then by all means, you should get some credit. If you don't do that, everyone is going to take credit for your thoughts and you'll be left behind.

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