Why the values on the wall will not help you on a bad day

Think about a leader you have worked for and ask yourself what defined them; what they stood for. You can probably get to an answer pretty quickly and I bet it did not just come from what they said. It more likely came from what you saw them do, particularly when things were difficult.

I have two telling recollections of this. One relates to a leader who unwaveringly supported me and my team when we were being heavily criticised for a piece of work we had produced. Frankly, without that support I would have resigned. Another concerns a leader who told an outright lie in a critical meeting. We may live in a so-called post-truth world, but I don't and neither should you. I suspect the shock on my face was visible.

My point is that your values reach your team as a set of conclusions they draw from watching what you do. So, in this piece we'll look at what values are, why your own are more important for you than the ones on the office wall, and four things you can practise to make your values easier to see.

It is worth being clear about this, because the word gets used loosely in the workplace.

Shalom Schwartz, whose work influences a lot of the research in this area, describes values as desirable goals, varying in importance, that serve as guiding principles in a person's life (Schwartz, 2012). They are our enduring beliefs about what is important that transcend particular situations, guide our selection and evaluation of actions, people, and events, and are ranked by relative importance.

Two parts of that are useful to us. The first is that a value is a guiding principle rather than a target. The second is that values vary in importance and direction, which means that we rank them, and sometimes find that they pull against each other (Schwartz, 2012).

That ranking is important for us as leaders, because the tough situations are rarely a choice between right and wrong. They are usually a choice between two things that both matter, when you can only have one of them.

Most organisations have a set of values. They all sound the same and, in my experience, on their own they are pretty meaningless.

The research here is robust and led by Barry Posner and Warren Schmidt. They found that:

Regular readers will probably recognise the likely reason for this. In Ryan and Deci's Self Determination Theory, a value that is imposed from outside will only guide your behaviour reliably if and when you have taken it on as your own. Until then it operates as something you do because you feel you have to, rather than something you do because you want to (Ryan and Deci, 2000).

I am not suggesting you ignore organisational values. On one level, you need to pay attention to them because you need to be seen to 'play the game'. But, more importantly, the research shows that clearly expressed values help managers interpret priorities, make decisions and resolve competing demands (Posner et al., 2023).

So, why do your values matter to your team?

The answer is what researcher Tony Simons called 'behavioural integrity': the perceived alignment between a manager's words and deeds, including whether they act on the values they say they hold (Simons, 2002).

The evidence on this demonstrates that when leaders practise what they preach, it builds strong perceptions of honesty and credibility:

Here are four things you can practise to help keep your core values at the front and centre of your leadership approach:

Write down five or six values that you think matter to you. Then cut them down to two or three, using this test: which of these would I hold on to even when it costs me something? Whatever survives are your core values. The rest are more like preferences.

It is worth doing this on paper rather than in your head. Most of us have never put our values into words, and when you do, the exercise can give you greater clarity and may turn up something you were not expecting.

As well as identifying your values, it is important to think about how they show up. So, for each of your core values, finish this sentence: "someone on my team would see me doing this when ...". Then finish the harder version: "and they would see me do it even when it was inconvenient, for example when ...".

Seggewiss and colleagues studied 1,000 employees and found that what predicted commitment was the values people saw in their leader, largely regardless of whether those values matched their own, with people-centred values having the strongest relationship of all (Seggewiss et al., 2019). So your team do not have to share your values. But they do need to be able to see them.

This is easier than it sounds. When you announce a decision this week, you just reference the value behind it. "I want to do things this way because I would rather take time to do this fairly than rush through it and make arbitrary decisions." It takes a few seconds, and it makes a big impact. It also sits naturally alongside explaining your reasoning, which we looked at last week.

A review of the evidence on values and behaviour brings out an important point we should not ignore: whether someone's values drive what they do depends a good deal on the situation and the pressure they are under at the time (Nazirova et al., 2024). Values are easy to honour when nothing is at stake, but they can be harder to access in the pressure situations when they would be most useful.

You therefore need to be certain of where you stand if you are thinking of announcing your values to the team. Cha and Edmondson studied an organisation with strongly stated values and found that the act of stating them raised the standard the leaders were then held to. Where actions did not tally with the stated values it was put squarely down to hypocrisy and people became disenchanted (Cha and Edmondson, 2006).

So, the message here is under-promise and over-deliver. And if you fall short, which you will, admit it and say what you will do differently next time. In my experience that conversation is a good deal less painful than you expect it to be, and it usually does more good than the original slip did damage.

Doing this work will not make the hard decisions easy. But it will help you steer the right course when the pressure is on and the easy way out looks attractive.

So, to sum up: your values exist for your team in the form of behaviour they can see, which means your job is to be clear about the values that are genuinely yours and then act on them consistently, especially when it would be easier not to.

All of my posts for new leaders are here.

Coaching - If you are struggling to be the leader you want to be, or you have never really put into words what you stand for as a leader, that is exactly the sort of thing we can work through together. There are more details here.