About professional values & beliefs:

List 6-12 most important guiding principles subscribed to by genuine fully-trained professionals working in the general field of expertise required for your organizational unit. These are the academic, educational, or professional values, beliefs, assumptions, & attitudes most commonly held by well educated and properly prepared professionals working in this field.

These statements should be about things that matter collectively, specifically, and uniquely for disciplines and/or knowledge domains represented in your unit—ideas that typically influence how practitioners in the field undertake problem identification, problem-solving, or judgment-forming and daily routines and practices.

Often these principles underline and define professional organizations to which members of the unit may belong and may be found published in relevant by-laws or ethics codes. (e.g.: American Historical Association; American Management Association, etc.)

Alternatively, the list may be developed through brain-storming sessions with departmental employees. It is critical that any important hidden assumptions or beliefs should surface and be listed rather than remain covert.

The most common mistake in developing this list is to parrot basic ethical beliefs common to all sharing your larger culture. The intent here is to craft a list that should be somewhat different for each organizational unit. A list of unique professional values is the goal, not a list of general cultural norms.

Hence, “speaking truthfully” or “keeping promises” might be considered general ethical principles, not unique professional beliefs belonging to a field of knowledge.

In contrast, believing that causation happens sequentially through time might be shared by all historians but not necessarily shared by physicists who might believe, instead, in synchronous causation.

Or believing that goods and services should be procured at the lowest possible cost might be a core belief held by folks in the purchasing department, whereas the Registrar might believe that securing diploma parchment paper in time for graduation is a far more important issue than its cost. But the view in the Registrar’s office might not be a core belief in the unit so much as a tactical assumption while the view in the Purchasing department might indeed be a basic core belief.

In any event, the goal here is to list those profound core beliefs common to professional members of the unit, not transient tactical assumptions. And underlying this goal is an assumption that all persons employed in the unit will eventually all come to share this belief or else will disengage and seek employment in some unit with beliefs more congruent to their own personal views.