Values Guide the Future
by Henry Fersko-Weiss
Just the other day, after what has become an atypically big snowstorm for where I live, I went snowshoeing. It’s something I love doing when I get the chance. Even with snowshoes, I would sink 6-8 inches beneath the surface with every step. If you stay out long enough the going can get challenging. But, it’s worth the effort. After a couple of miles, all thoughts drop away and I entered a world of snow. The absolute stark beauty of the barren tree branches, the snow-covered hills and path, as well as the repetitive motion of the snowshoeing let me connect to the deeper places inside myself.
As the year comes to a close we at INELDA find ourselves deep into a different challenge, which feels at times as if we are trekking our way through demanding terrain. We are examining and reconsidering the values, vision and mission of the organization, which are the foundation of everything we do. At this point in our process, we are still working on expressing our values in a way that will capture their essence. Some companies don’t even bother stating their values. But we are dedicated to living our values as an organization, which is why it is so important for us to state them publicly and for each person working at INELDA to allow those values to dictate their behavior.
Values are the foundation you build on. The way the company is structured, the nature of the internal and external communications, the way projects are decided on and built, the strategic plan for the future, the choices we make when we hire a staff member or choose someone for our Board of Trustees—every decision needs to be considered through the multiple lenses of our values, vision and mission. This requires digging deep into our thinking on values, making them crystal clear, and building mechanisms to help us rebalance if the values are breached—which will certainly happen at times. Values speak to a process, to striving to reach closer and closer to the ideal they represent, not to some state of perfection that you arrive at and never leave. For this reason, they are alive and we have to continuously keep them in the forefront of what we do.
Of course, the proof of whether or not we are living our values, will come from the actions we take and how we listen to all of you who care about what INELDA does. In this issue you will learn more about our Advisory Council on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion that has begun its work and the Focus Groups we will run starting in January. These actions come out of the values we have been exploring. Refining the values even more will lead to other actions that support our efforts to live them as we plan for our future development. When we have finished this work on values, as well as reworking our vision and mission statements, we will broadcast them and post them to our website. You can help us stay true to our values by letting us know when we miss the mark, and giving us the opportunity to correct our mistakes.