•September 20, 2024
Our core values are foundational to the RoleModel Way and the culture we’ve built at RoleModel Software. Each value stands on its own but combination casts a unique vision for where we want to go as a flourishing organization that develops leaders, launches careers, and serves with humility so that others would see God glorified in our work.
Core values are a constant reminder of how we should be behaving, how we should be making decisions, and how we should be working with each other. They are not surface level; they need to be ingrained deeply and put into practice daily. It is a focusing mechanism for the organization and ultimately unifies us to accomplish our long-term goals.
“[core values] are a small set of vital and timeless guiding principles for your company.” - Gino Wickman
Words are powerful, and each of these values is a single word that can have a variety of meanings depending on your background. We want to share our definition of what these mean to the RoleModel culture, what they are not, and how you'll see them play out in practice. They are not aspirational but are values that we are continually working to grow in.
Character is the first core value we’ll look at; it’s the foundation of our core values and comes first for a reason. It requires a good standard. While we're not perfect, we seek to emulate the perfect character of Jesus Christ. Character is the foundation of everything that we do at RoleModel. It affects everything from the customers we partner with to the people we hire to how we deliver our work. Character is not just the absence of moral failure; it is built through dependable trust, demonstrated through humble confidence, while embracing servant leadership.
A track record of character is built over a lifetime and can be lost in moments. Dependable trust is that track record of knowing that you are a person of your word and someone people can count on to do something even when no one is watching.
As we work together, we collaborate to get things done. But we're doing it in a very high-trust environment. So it's based on being able to depend on what we're doing and who we're doing it with.
Character is not prideful but requires pride in your work. An optimistic outlook that is humble confidence. We also want to be confident in our work—to have pride in it and to do the kind of work we are excited to put our name onto.
Humble confidence is having strong opinions but holding them loosely; that lets us be optimistic when we are trying to solve problems because we know we can do it. That's not based on the foundation of perfection but on a foundation of being confident in our abilities to deliver value.
At RoleModel, serving drives us and it is core to our mission of serving colleagues and our business partners. Servant leadership is taking accountability, sharing the credit, and embracing continuous improvement.
This means strong leaders who invest in those around them and lead by example in taking on hard challenges and accepting accountability. We also seek opportunities to acknowledge the contribution of the team rather than individual accomplishments.
In practice, Character at RoleModel means always speaking the truth in love, even when that's a hard conversation because we're focused on investing in others, whether our team or the partners we serve.
Character starts with you. We’ll never achieve perfection, but it's built over time through dependable trust, demonstrated through humble confidence while embracing servant leadership.
