Practical tips for aligning your values with your work
The last few years have taken a toll on many people’s sense of self. The pandemic has ushered in new ways of working, a new understanding of our families’ health and safety, and often new priorities for what we want out of our professional and personal lives. This can leave us feeling both highly uncertain and hungry for change: we realize we want something different, even if we can’t put our finger on exactly what.
Carter Cast, a clinical professor of entrepreneurship at the Kellogg School and author of The Right—and Wrong—Stuff: How Brilliant Careers are Made and Unmade, describes the disconnect between our stated values and our actual behaviors as an “integrity gap.”
These gaps often emerge gradually, when we find ourselves making incremental values trade-offs that begin to erode our sense of personal integrity.
For example, an MBA graduate may take a role that requires a heavy workload and plenty of work travel, vowing not to lose touch with good friends and committing to stay only as long as it takes to acquire specific job skills. They realize that the rigors of the job may threaten to affect their relationships and hobbies. Yet, they are willing to accept this grueling situation, knowing it is for a limited time.
Until it isn’t. The money is nice, and two years becomes three, then four, then five. Soon enough, their personal life does not remotely reflect their intentions.
[This article has been republished, with permission, from Kellogg Insight, the faculty research & ideas magazine of Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University]