Your hidden or explicit values determine much of your behaviour. You may be reluctant to talk about your values, but all of us have guiding principles whether or not we care to admit it. It is by recognising your values, clarifying them and embedding them that you ensure you have maximum impact with minimum internal distress. Searching for consistency between values and behaviours is part of embedding wisdom. Ensuring that you come over in a consistent way will increase the likelihood of you being taken seriously by others.
The values that are important to you will be visible to those around you, whether you welcome that fact or not!
Understanding your values and how they drive you is crucial to understanding why you react in particular ways. Understanding your motivations in different situations enables you to make the best possible contribution in work or wider activities. Embedding your values provides a valuable moral compass for your decisions.
Values are 'beliefs or behaviours which are of particular importance to an individual in the way they live their lives and interact with other people' (The Four Vs of Leadership, Capstone, 2006). Personal values result from beliefs about the right or wrong way of doing things. They are based on moral judgements (absolute or relative to the particular situations) and experience.
Key questions that are worth asking yourself are:
What personal values drive me?
How captive am I to my inherited values?
How do my values cope with major external change?
What is the interplay between individual and corporate values in the organisation in which I work?
Living your values can mean asking yourself honest questions about:
What is keeping me going?
Where do I believe I can make a difference?
What behaviours are most important to me?
What personal qualities do I most want to reinforce in myself and others?
Those who make the biggest difference and generate the most respect often bring sharpness of thinking and clarity around values. They live out behaviours that build trust, confidence and partnership. Living your values in such a situation is not a soft diversion. It provides a foundation for building effective working relationships rooted in a shared belief about what will work and how partnership and collaboration will deliver effective outcomes.
You cannot convincingly feign your values or borrow them.
To be convincing, values and principles have to come from inside you. Leaders who cope well in very challenging times make decisions based on clear principles, have a sense of conviction about the right thing to do and are able to balance short- and long-term values. When things start to go wrong, a strong sense of moral responsibility can be sustaining in finding a solution.
In 2008 we did a piece of research at Praesta Partners, seeking out leaders who had been through times of extended turbulence. It was clear that strong leaders:
Maintain their core attitudes and their beliefs no matter how much pressure they come under.
Tackle each new challenge clearly and calmly, leading from the front to inspire those around them.
Know how to look after themselves to maintain stamina and well-being for a lengthy and often exhausting period.
A central message from the research was the importance of 'doing the right thing'. Focusing on doing what you believe to be 'the right thing' maintains your sense of personal integrity, self-worth and even accomplishment, no matter what the final outcome. What someone regards as right can come from their own values and experiences or from having considered the perspective of trusted advisers. In our research, we saw effective leaders addressing the following key questions and finding a dynamic balance between them:
What is right for the organisation?
What is right for the people who work in it?
What is right for me as a leader?
Sometimes values can be a source of distortion. Is there something rigid about your cultural baggage that gets in the way? Your beliefs and emotions produce a powerful cocktail that can send you off on a particular perspective that you might later regard as absurd.
Emotions such as disappointment, resentment, anger or fear can distort your understanding. Such negative emotions can eat away at your objectivity. Fear can take away your ability to analyse a problem effectively. The resolution is to be utterly honest with yourself: to be clear what your values are and recognise the extent to which your behaviour patterns at times of stress divert you from your values. It is by applying this plumb line that you are able to see how your behaviour becomes distorted and what steps might be necessary to bring it back into line.
When you find yourself blaming others, this is often a good indication of the fact that you're avoiding the responsibility of taking action yourself. If there is a hint of blame, your values are at risk of being tarnished and the prospect of working together effectively as a team will go out of the window. Whatever your own or others' failings, thriving depends on accepting the reality of what has happened, being consistent with your values and not overlaying emotional blame, either on yourself or others.
Living your values is about putting any shocks or surprises into a wider context. Unexpected events may need you to expend immediate energy, but they need to be seen realistically as either a one-day distortion or a major event with long-term implications. You don't need to be fearful of such events but rather focus on the reality of what might happen. If you are clear on your guiding values, you are better able to achieve detachment and view setbacks as learning opportunities and not damaging defeats.
I encourage people to write down their key values and what those values mean to them. This simple and quick exercise provides a good framework for discussion about where those values come from, how they influence your life and work and how you want to develop them further. Reflect quickly and articulate or write down the first thoughts you have about your values – this can be helpful in identifying what is most important. A more comprehensive approach might be to go through the following steps. Consider:
Look closely at each value, possibly spending spare moments during the day on one of the values, then going through the same process on a different day with another of the values, asking yourself the following questions:
What does the value mean to me?
How has the value been relevant to me in particular situations?
Is the value standing the test of time or does it need to evolve?
Are these four values robust enough for the future?
Would those around me recognise me living these values?
How would I hold myself to account for living these values?
Look through a list of possible values such as those set out in Box 3. You might then reflect on which four you resonate with most, or which you would like to reinforce in yourself.
You might conclude that some of your core values are absolutely right and are fundamental to your success, but you might also conclude that certain values need to be reinforced if you are going to raise your game successfully. For example, as you move into more senior roles, determination, partnership and foresight might become ever more important.
Part of living values effectively is demonstrating that you are interested in the people with whom you are working. James Caplin, in I Hate Presentations (Capstone, 2008) talks about too many presenters being stuck in the school-essay mindset of imparting information. This involves telling a long story about the past ('how we got here'), the present ('where are we now') and the future ('where we are going'). The 'gold nugget' in what Caplin is saying is the need to understand the difference between being interesting to an audience and being interested in them. He says, 'If you approach from the point of view of being interesting to the audience you will become little more than someone becoming an act. If, however, your audience senses you are interested in them, you are on your way to establishing a bond between you.'
At the core of living values effectively is demonstrating that you are interested in the people you are working with and the issues they are addressing.
Focusing on saying something interesting may not resonate and may fail to 'light a spark'. You are much more likely to ignite interest and energy when there is a sense of empathy, shared concerns and values.
Looking after your values is both a personal and a corporate responsibility. Within an organisation, there is a responsibility on individuals both to live the corporate values and to support others in doing the same. The best organisations clearly articulate their vision and values and what these mean for different people. This provides an effective benchmark against which individuals can assess what behaviours are appropriate and what will be the consequence of living those values. A good example of an articulation of vision and values, and what it means for staff, customers and delivery partners has recently been published by the UK Department for Communities and Local Government (Box 4). This provides a clear framework for making decisions.
Another excellent example is the recently adopted mission, values and delivery outcomes of West Mercia Police (Box 5). These were agreed following an extensive internal consultation process that was aimed at securing significant levels of staff 'buy-in'. The use of the 'I' word puts a strong focus on individuals living the values and using them as they continue to raise their game.
At the centre of looking after your values is building trust. Trust gets people energised and is essential to the sound health of an organisation. Focusing on building trust can have a powerful influence for good in enabling individuals in an organisation to live both personal and organisational values effectively. Box 6 sets out a very helpful perspective from Sally Bibb and Jeremy Koudri in their book Trust Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
From Sally Bibb and Jeremy Koudri (2004) Trust Matters: For Organisational and Personal Success, London: algrave Macmillan.
