Heart at Work
Embracing a piece of wisdom from my financial accounting professor - "Don't ever check your values at the door" - has become a mantra in my professional career. The workforce constantly challenges our values, often revealing them in unexpected ways. For example, I didn’t realize how much I valued creativity and play in a work environment until I was in a job where I was expected to be serious and professional, posturing to be older and more experienced than I was as a recent graduate.
We started the Novalia Collective because we wanted our work to authentically align to our values. Despite having rewarding career experiences, there were parts of our identity and values that we did have to check at the door because it didn’t match with what was expected. Even as we navigate our work today, we constantly have to revisit our values to ensure we’re doing work that is meaningful to us with partners who also share in our core values.
We’ve realized that when we assess and deeply understand our values, we are better equipped to make difficult decisions and stay the course through turbulent times. On Wednesday, February 28, we will be hosting a virtual workshop, Heart at Work: Embodying Your Values at the Workplace, where we will guide participants in exploring their values, understanding how they manifest in their work, and envisioning the person they want to become this year. Looking ahead to the workshop, we connected with two past partners, Linda Nguyen and Matt Scott, to learn more about how their work aligns with their values.
Helping Community Heal and Grow
Linda Nguyen, Board Member, Vietnamese American Roundtable (VAR)
What about your current work aligns with your values?
As a second generation Vietnamese American, I’ve struggled to understand my culture and be in community with others. Being a part of something bigger than myself, while serving the community has given me purpose and provided an opportunity to learn and grow. The values that I resonate most with are compassion, growth, honesty, integrity and community. These are values that align with the non-profit where I serve as a board member of, the Vietnamese American Roundtable (VAR).
Having compassion and integrity are integral in serving a complicated community such as Vietnamese Americans, because of our complex history of violence, displacement, and intergenerational trauma that many families experienced. Being part of a movement to help my community heal and grow has provided me more meaning than I anticipated.
What are some values that inform how you show up to your work?
The values of community, compassion, honesty and integrity help guide my work in many ways. Being disconnected from my community most of my life and now being able to serve has provided me another chance to connect, learn and grow. I am often challenged and stretched, contributing to my growth, when working with others to plan and execute a community event or educate others on important local issues affecting them. During my adolescence in the 90s, I don’t remember hearing about community based organizations like VAR, whose mission is envisioning a strong and unified Vietnamese American community working to improve their quality of life. I was often embarrassed about my culture for various reasons, so it pleases me to see our culture be more accepted and understood.
In challenging times, how do these values keep you grounded?
I started this volunteer journey in the middle of a global pandemic and didn’t want to feel helpless. I had a yearning to do something that would bring me meaning, connection and joy. So during challenging times, I remind myself why I choose to serve my community, and how much privilege I have to be in this position. Connecting with others and building relationships has also become a positive byproduct of the work.
Taking Lemons and Making Lemonade
Matt Scott, Director, Storytelling & Engagement at Project Drawdown
What about your current work aligns with your values?
I've always been passionate about social and environmental impact and justice and making the change that we need to see. But in many of the spaces that I've been in in my career, whether that was working with the white House, working with NASA, working with the USAID program or Nike or others, I have found time and time again as a young Black queer person, that I've often been the only one of me and my identities represented in the room. What's troubling about that is knowing that whether it comes to climate change or any complex problems that our world faces, we need a diversity of perspectives because we can't solve any problems without that.
Project Drawdown gave me the space to found, create, and fully shape the direction of Drawdown Stories and what the work that we do looks like. At Project Drawdown, we really do focus on creating belonging for folks in what we're doing, and my work in particular really does that for folks who are not only the most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis, and not only the least represented, but also (and this is the piece that's often overlooked) have so much untapped power that hasn't been welcomed or brought to the table, that could make massive changes and a massive impact to actually doing something about the problem at hand.
What are some values that inform how you show up to your work?
If there's one value, I have to say that I really center in the work I do and in how I show up at Project Drawdown and beyond, it is taking lemons and making lemonade. That's actually a value that I got from my dad, Moses, who passed away in 2017. He grew up in Civil Rights Era Virginia in Prince Edward County, at a time when Black students and white students went to school separately. After the Supreme Court mandated that schools integrate, Virginia still decided in 1959 that they'd rather close their public schools than have Black and white students go to school together. The schools remained closed for about five years, and so many students didn't have access to education, including my dad. So after a year, when the opportunity came up thanks to the Quakers, my dad left everything he knew to move away and live with white strangers in an especially contentious time and graduate high school then graduate from an HBCU, Howard, serve as a captain in the military, graduate from Harvard Business School, and go on to start a family and his own business making a positive impact in the community in honor of his mother.
One thing that my dad would always say was that the story of his life was taking lemons and making lemonade, and that’s true for so many of the folks who I connect with through my work. Especially when you come from an underrepresented background, that’s something you have to do. There are lemons, there are challenges, that come in the forms of racism and bias, and stereotypes, and micro-aggressions, and sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, and all these other things depending on your identity, and yet I’ve always been so amazed how many people, myself included, find ways to make lemonade and use that story and that adversity as motivation to turn it into something that can make a positive difference. We are not victims or villains, we are heroes.
In challenging times, how do these values keep you grounded?
My value of taking lemons and making lemonade explicitly helps me because it’s a reminder that things won’t be perfect at times, but how can we look at them as an opportunity to do something more. When my dad passed away in 2017, it was incredibly challenging, but it also helped me see people more fully and helped me to aim to make the most of my time on this earth and helped me value the importance of people’s stories and the fact that often our stories do not get told, especially if they are from underrepresented backgrounds. My values keep me really grounded in why work matters, keeps me grounded into what I’m fighting for, and keeps me committed to the cause. It’s never just about doing the work and getting the job done. It’s about the purpose and the mission that goes beyond the organization and a project.
If you’ve been thinking about how your values show up in the workplace, and how you can align your work and your values more, we hope to see you at Heart at Work on Wednesday, February 28. You can register to join here.