Values › Community › Contribution
Core value · Community family
Contribution
Adding something of value to the whole
Also covers Making a difference and Usefulness
What does contribution mean as a core value?
Contribution as a core value means wanting your effort to make a real difference, so that the people, work or community around you are better off because you were involved.
What gets you out of bed is the sense that your effort makes something better than it would be without you. As a core value, contribution shows up as restlessness when your work feels ornamental: busy, well paid perhaps, but not adding anything anyone needs. You want to be useful. That might mean fixing a process, mentoring a junior colleague or running the school fete. The question you keep coming back to is whether it made a difference.
What does contribution look like in practice?
- You ask who a project will help before agreeing to lead it.
- You leave a team, a shared document or a campsite in better shape than you found it.
- You give up a weekend to help a charity with the skills you use at work.
- You get restless in meetings where nothing will change as a result.
- You measure a good year by who or what benefited, as well as by what you earned.
When is contribution overplayed?
Contribution can slide into needing to be needed. You take on jobs others could own, struggle to rest because rest adds nothing, and feel oddly lost when your input isn’t required. Your sense of worth can become tied to output, and the people closest to you may start to feel like a project. The mature form contributes by choice, and accepts that you still matter on the days you add nothing at all. One way to practise that is to hand back one job this month that properly belongs to someone else.
Often confused with
Contribution vs Service
Service is a way of life built around helping others. Contribution is about the difference your effort makes to the whole, which can come through building, creating or fixing as much as helping.
Contribution vs Achievement
Achievement is reaching goals you’re proud of. Contribution asks whether those goals added something for other people or the wider organisation.
Contribution vs Significance
Significance is feeling that you matter. Contribution is about what you add, and you can contribute a great deal without anyone knowing it was you.
Questions to sit with
- Which part of your week would nobody miss if you stopped doing it?
- How do you feel about yourself on a day when you’ve added nothing to anyone?
- What would you want someone to say you’d made better, ten years from now?
More values in Community
Being part of something bigger than yourself.
About the author
Matt Rutherford is a Career and Leadership Coach. The Values Finder is the same exercise he uses with his coaching clients. He also writes Stuff that MattRs, a weekly newsletter with practical ideas to help you think clearer and work better.
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