The Good You Do: Lead with Integrity and Ignite Change

There’s one powerful and transformative story you need to share immediately with your teams, friends, strangers — and yourself. It’s your story about how your work aligns with your values and sense of right and wrong.

People are seeking confidence, connection, and understanding in our uncertain world. That world includes you and your work. When you share the story of how you and your work are contributing good to the world — even in some seemingly small way — you offer others clarity, inspiration, and reassurance. It is an important and necessary act of integrity and leadership.

In times of chaos and uncertainty, sharing a story about doing good is an act of compassion. It’s something you can generously and often easily offer to others and to yourself.

Your work has value. It makes you useful. When you articulate how it reflects your principles, you amplify that value.

Think of sharing your story as speaking up with intention and conviction: a powerful act that affirms and inspires all the different ways in which people can do good and create positive change right now.

Here’s why and how.

Why You Benefit from Sharing Your Story about Your Values at Work

Given current national and international destabilization and division, are you puzzled about what to talk about in social settings? Are you afraid your conversation about the things pressing on your mind will be potentially alienating or will descend into angst and pessimism?

In this time of uncertainty, you can and should share stories about your work. Not in a transactional, buy-from-me-while-the-world-burns kind of way, but in a way that allows your passion to shine. You have agency in, and control of, your story. You have hope in the future, based on the solutions you’re offering, to your community, like Luke, or to the world.

Most importantly and most likely, your work is in alignment with your inner sense of right and wrong. Your work exemplifies what your moral compass values as good (versus bad). Mahatma Gandhi said, ‘Your values become your destiny’. Your work is how you find and then defend your values, such as truth, kindness, and equity.

Sharing stories about your work enables you to share complex truths. Like how you believe change is made, and how you and your listener can contribute to making change. Your work is also likely how you go up against power, however subtlety. Making change and pushing up against power requires power. And when we talk about our values, we both appear and feel more powerful. These times call for value-based leaders who can communicate their values tangibly, through story.

By sharing an authentic story about how your work manifests good into the world, you are sharing your best, human self. Let yourself be heard and understood.

Why Your Listener Benefits from Hearing Your Story about Your Values at Work

You have a powerful vision of a better product or a better system, and a better future. In this time of complexity, artificial intelligence, and big data, people crave examples of good and successful solutions.

Although a story about your work may seem to be self-centered, if shared with intention and respect, your story is really an invitation to your listeners to see themselves in your story or a similar story, or to remind themselves of when and how they are achieving a complementary vision. Like Luke’s story sparked my memory and empathy. Your story will be a tangible example of hope. By sharing a passionately and intentionally constructed story about your work, you offer your listeners both strategy and possibility. You enable your audience to see solutions and their part in them.

I caught myself on a Friday evening sitting at the dinner table with my kids and wife, complaining about work: “So-and-so didn’t do their job; this thing is annoying; and we can’t get that other thing accomplished.” I noticed the kids intently listening. I thought, Is this what we want to portray to our kids as adult life? You leave in the morning, you’re all hectic to get the kids out the door so you can go to this place you secretly hate and clearly don’t enjoy, and then you come back home, and you complain and ruin dinner too? Is that it?

The answer for me was “No”, and my mindset shifted. I asked myself, What can I do to take my Ph.D. in chemistry, my corporate experience, and my interest in social innovation technology and channel it all into something positive?

That’s when I connected with Anne McNeil. Anne was looking at using waste products from other industries to do something good with them. The paper industry is declining because people are using less and less paper, so there’s an abundance of wood pulp production capacity. Anne chemically functionalizes the surface of wood pulp, and it develops a really high affinity for pulling contaminants out of drinking water.

Anne and I thought we could make a product out of this, a device you could stick under your kitchen sink and flow your water through, and it will pull all the bad stuff out. You’re left with healthy, clean water for yourself and your family.

It just felt so right, because it’s the opposite of what I was doing before at big corporations. But I need all the same skill sets to successfully bring this product to market. Anne and I partnered with the University of Michigan and launched Sequestro to commercialize this novel PFAS sequestration technology. It’s PFAS water filtration — removing harmful forever chemicals out of drinking water.

The kids have noticed the excitement I now have in talking about my work. They’ve said, “It feels like you want to contribute; to talk about things in positive terms. You now talk about all the opportunities.” And this year, my daughter for Science Fair built a water filter out of sand and charcoal.

Juergen Koller

Juergen’s story also resonated with me. Although my dad liked his work, the 1950s through 1970s television depictions of trench coat-wearing and briefcase-carrying fathers, regularly commuting to and from office jobs to suburbia, seems to have had an impact on me. Early into my adult life, I stated that I wanted to marry a man who didn’t do the same thing every day. (And I did!) Because Juergen was heartfelt in reflecting on and sharing how he discovered what he values in work, and because his storied resonated with me, I completely trust him — and want to learn more about his wood pulp powered water filters!

Did any part of Juergen’s story resonant with you?

If you were able to tell each person you met one story about you and your work that would help them understand you better, what would that story be?

What are some examples of how you put your values into practice through your work?

When has it been difficult for you to practice this value?

I heard Luke’s and Juergen’s stories a couple of weeks ago, while working with NextCycle Michigan. Just days after returning home from Saginaw, my husband Tom and I hosted two new friends for dinner, Nathalie and Jim. I’d only met Nathalie twice (the first time at an historic preservation conference); I’d never met Jim; and Tom had never met either of them. I was worried about conversation.

The four of us talked about our work and what we believe in, and how what we do simplifies our belief in good, even if we don’t use so many words. Nathalie did ask me to appear on her nascent podcast.

The new podcast is a culmination of all the things that I’m interested in which, when I boil it down, is about place-based narratives.

Like, what are my books about art and my blog about Jersey City really about? What is historic preservation about? What are my paintings of buildings about? A building is just a shell if there aren’t any stories, right? And that’s the same with people.

I’m realizing my interests are in people that are making local change through connection and connecting.

Basically, what I want to do is explore the intersection between community, place, and storytelling, and I want to do that through the lenses of people that are practitioners, or community leaders, or local change makers. I want to show how people connect and strengthen their communities through their work.

Nathalie Kalbach

Does Nathalie’s reflection on connecting all the different parts of her work resonant with you?

If you were to draw a Venn Diagram of your professional and personal interests, what would be at the central overlap?

When have you shown up most fully at that center of your Venn diagram? Tell me about that time…