How to work BETTER, or how to be a BETTER person working?

What do you value more: to work better, or to be a better person working?

There's no doubt we need people who work better and better. At a time of crisis as it is the present one, we need people who are able to produce more with less or who can break records in sales. Most leaders I know are very concerned about that factor.

Unfortunately, not all these people are really good, in terms of their attitude or even ethics. Under the pressure of productivity, they can cheat or make false promises to their customers. Eventually, some of them are caught and they have to re-evaluate their own behaviors; others become billionaires.

What about putting ethics and attitude as a priority? It does not work necessarily to increase productivity. I remember that piece of Senge's book, where a company decides that Honesty was good enough to be their value. According to the book, a new salesman questioned that by simply putting a probable situation: if a customer wants to buy something we don't have, should we tell them that? Initially  others acted as that was a silly question: of course, you don't tell that to a client. But then the leader in charge was clear that if they put Honesty as one of their values, that is one of the things they will have to tell their customers. After a heated discussion, they finally reached to a compromise and the company did experience losses for sometime, but after that, its sales went up and up. Naturally, if their company did not have a product, possibly others didn't; customers slowly realized they were telling the truth and they started to value that.

Possibly, this is what will happen:

1. If a person starts to focus more on the self, it is possible that at the beginning his or her productivity will decrease. That will happen because of some decisions - not working after such an hour - or new courses to help them in their decision - a meditation course which proposes moments of silence during the day.
2. During that time, it is important the person talks a lot with her or his co-workers, spouses and friends in general. That means, whatever the person is doing should be very clear in his/her mind.
3. After sometime, productivity should start to increase. That will come mainly from some changes in the behaviour - punctuality, for instance - or a better attitude - helping increasing sales.
4. What if productivity is not improving? Possibly, the main answer is that the person is in the wrong place. A career research will be excellent to understand which position will be better served by a person like her, or him.

The main point here is that there is no better reward than the feeling of inner success, but its outcome should be an external success too.

So, what do you value more: to work better, or to be a better person working?