At the end of last year, I was substantially moved by Stephanie Zamora’s piece in the Huffington Post titled, “Choosing Your Guiding Word for 2016.” She argues that many of the resolutions we adopt with the intention of transforming our lives are often forgotten about simply because they are too massive to hold in the front of our minds.

stable|kernel's Words to Live By

Refusing to give up on the journey of self-improvement, she began replacing those grandiose goals with single, guiding words. Words that could become a mantra to guide her year. Words that could apply to an array of encounters and opportunities.

As a long-time lover of words and their power, Stephanie’s message resonated with me personally and professionally. With a good deal of enthusiasm, I challenged myself, my husband and our two young daughters to claim our words for 2016. Since adopting our words, we’ve often discussed them around the dinner table, calling upon each other to apply them to our experiences and future pursuits.

With stable|kernel’s 4th year kicking off at the end of this month, it’s a perfect time to adopt some guiding words for our company’s next shared journey around the sun. Over the next 12  months, we will collectively adopt and follow The Year of Our Company’s Values to stand as stable|kernel’s words to live by.

Now before you think we’ve lost all of our business sense, I should note that our company undoubtedly has traditional goals that we are working to accomplish – goals that measure our business performance and success. The Year of Our Values is simply designed to work in concert with these business goals by focusing on how we go about achieving them. In doing so, we hope our employees will feel a deeper sense of meaning in all of their pursuits.

stable|kernel’s Manifesto outlines four company values:

1) Integrity Always

2) R-E-S-P-E-C-T

3) We Learn. We Share

4) We Stay Hungry

As we stay true to these values while engaging in our work, we know we can trust one another. We thrive in an environment of shared accountability and ownership instead of being crushed by micromanagement: an environment where our employees benefit, our clients benefit and our company benefits.

Every three months leading up to our next anniversary celebration, we will focus on one of our values as our guiding idea. We will practice integrity, respect, learning, sharing and staying hungry in their many applications. These themes will guide our processes, our questions, our community interactions, our internal learning programs and much more. And hopefully, we’ll celebrate our 4th birthday as better, stronger people and an even better, stronger company.

While The Year of Our Values will keep us busy and engaged, you can’t blame us for already getting excited about themes for the years to come! If you’d like to follow us on our journeys, be sure to connect with us on Facebook and Instagram. And if we’ve inspired you to embrace a guiding word of your own, please let us know about it!

Jami Sieder

Chief People & Culture Officer at Stable Kernel

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