Making Values-Aligned Decisions

Episode 154 is a presentation I made at our annual New Year’s Writing Retreat in early January 2023. In this discussion, you’re going to hear me very explicitly talk about our company mission, our company values, and how we made program changes aligned with those values. I think you’ll find a lot of value in listening to this presentation as a leader and creator inside of academia as you think about your values and how you want to align them with the decisions that you make and the things that you create.

Scholar’s Voice™ Company Mission

Our company mission statement reads, “diversity, community, self direction, disruption, and fulfillment, made actionable through trust and love.” We are actively using this mission statement to align each aspect of our company.

Values-Aligned Decision Making Process

As you’re trying to make decisions around the things you’re going to do in 2023 around which publications you’ll focus on, around what grants are applying to, around all the things concerning your academic career, you can ask yourself, ‘does this align with my values? Does it support my mission?’ And then ask, ‘Is it aligned with my audiences, my students, or my colleagues’ needs?’ but most importantly, ask ‘Is this aligned with ME? Does this work for me?’ There should be a combination of these three things.

When you make decisions like this, you might miss out on something.Making choices in this way might mean that we’re missing out. And that’s fine. The idea is that we make choices and we take on projects that we feel really good about, and that we’re grounded in, and there willl be more projects that come along.

Changes We Made to Better Align Within our Programs

Our 2023 words we are trying to align with are simplified & impactful. All of the decisions we’ve made within our company are based on the decisions to be best aligned with these two things. As a result, we renamed our Alumni Programs Soar. Soar supports graduates of Scholar’s Voice™ programs to create and maintain practices by participating in a yearly rhythm of professional and personal development. It’s a really highly curated community with shared values, commitment to change, and the rejection of the current culture of academia. With diversity, community, and self-direction being our three company values, we wanted Soar to align with these 3 aspects.

A way that we are making our program more diverse is by grouping all the graduates together of all the programs we offer.  Because we know that when we have people in different career stages in the same room, that diversity really helps to foster more community and deeper professional development and growth happens in these diverse spaces.

Another thing that is important to us is community, so we are moving 1 weekly meeting at the same time per week in order to have a specific time each week to foster community by being in the same space at the same time together.

A way we are aligning our self-direction is by allowing you to choose which meetings are most important to show up to on a weekly basis for yourself. We want you to trust yourself and have a self-direction to choose what is the most important thing for you to come to every week.

Changing our Decision Making Process

An essential first step for creating a values-aligned decision is to make sure that your values are articulated. Once you’ve articulated your values, you can move on to using those values to curate all of the rest of your decisions through the lens of them.

A question that one of my friends who’s who’s a coach asked me was, “what’s the next level that you’re not getting to when you keep making decisions the old way used to make decisions?”

Humans are afraid of change, and we’re very afraid to do things in a way that we haven’t seen done before. Which is what a lot of what we’re asking you to do in our programs is. We’re really asking you to make decisions in a different way than you’ve made them before. What we tend to do is think about all the things that we’re giving up, or that we’re missing out on when we make decisions in a new way. 

But there’s also things that we’re missing out on when we make decisions in an old way and there is new growth that can happen. That’s not happening when we continue to make decisions in an old way, or in a way that doesn’t serve us any longer.

Consider how the old-way decisions you’re making are holding both you and your students and colleagues back.

“We know that when we have people in different career stages in the same room, that diversity really helps to foster more community and deeper professional development, and growth happens in these diverse spaces.”

“I really don’t want to be reactive… I want to feel like I’m being proactive, not reactive. And how to do that is through this kind of intentionality.”

Join our Pilot Navigate Program: We are going to offer Navigate as a 12-week program to test out some changes we are considering making. It will run from February 2023- Mid-May 2023. In addition to our core Navigate curriculum, which we are reorganizing, reordering, and revising for this pilot version, what we’re looking for is 10 to 20 academics who want to do this new pilot version of Navigate. 

There will be more details to come on this in the coming weeks, so make sure you’re on our email list to get all the details first!

Info sheet for Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®
Get on the Navigate waitlist here!

Continue the conversation:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors with a disruptive perspective on their field to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Get on the waitlist here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing, and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. Want to train with us for free on your campus? Now you can when you recommend our Scholar’s Voice Faculty Retreats to a decision-maker on your campus! Download the brochure with the retreat curriculum and both in-person and online retreat options here.

Read the full transcript.