More Than Work: Legacy continues to build with daily activities

Tim McGuire is a past president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and former editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. He writes about workplace issues.

Funerals always jolt me into genuine reflection.

Listening to eulogies and to the muttered comments in the congregation allows you to get a very good view of what people think of the deceased. Sometimes those whispered comments are more telling than the public eulogies in revealing true character.

Like you, everything is usually all about me, so I can't help but reflect at funerals about what they will say about me when I'm lying in that box. I think about my legacy and about my own eulogy. If I could pull a Tom Sawyer and be present at my own funeral, would the eulogy read the way I want it to read? Would I wince or would I be proud?

It's important to realize that we are writing that legacy everyday, with every contact.

That storeowner I complimented a few months ago for the great way she ran her business will say great things about me, but that clerk I was short with will not be near as positive. We build our legacy with all our actions.

If we genuinely desire to be accountable for our legacy, we need to hold ourselves to a high standard of performance and accomplishment. It's easy for us to see how other people should improve their lives, but it is a lot more difficult to turn those critical powers on ourselves. It is not easy to make an honest assessment of ourselves each day.

Many people are comfortable leaving their legacy to chance. Many others feel better if they have a script of sorts. Some people write out personal mission statements. I know one executive whose mission is "to help other people achieve all they can achieve."

He is open and clear about his mission. Like all of us, he succeeds some days and fails on others, but he always keeps that mission as his guide.

If we're serious about examining how we're doing in living our values, we need a scorecard. We need to have a concrete sense of what we want to accomplish.

We need to know what things are important to us and we need to know what themes we want to run through our actions and efforts.

It is easy to talk loosely about being "values-driven" or being "committed to ethical behavior," but until we define those terms they're as hard to grasp as the wind.

My answer to that dilemma is a personal work code. Such a code should be five or six sentences on a small piece of paper you can easily slide into your wallet or purse. The code should set forth the major things you want to stand for at work and what you're going to do to place your personal stamp on your work.

I first got the idea to develop a work code from John Haughey, a Jesuit who wrote "Converting Nine to Five: A Spirituality of Daily Work." He constructed these characteristics for a work code: that it be personally composed; experience based; personal but accessible through its use of publicly available documents; social; critical; personally relevant; traditional; dynamic; and theological.

I used Haughey's construct to develop my own spirituality of work when I was an editor.

I analyzed what I did as an editor and the meaning I wanted to bring to it. I examined my sense of social obligation and my personal development.

That code had many spiritual aspects, and while helpful for believers, that is not required.

It is crucial that your work code capture your personal goals and mission, that it brings to life the values and ethics you want to take to work, and that your code allows you to affect your work in a way that is unique to you.

Your personal work code should be ambitious, but achievable enough that it will be very similar to that eulogy they give when that inevitable day comes.

Tip for your search

Review your work code at least once a week.

It should be a firm guide but that doesn't mean it can't change often. You change, so your work code should change. With luck, you'll master some things in your original code and you'll want to set some new goals.