Kashbox Coach Note: Leadership Coaching
As a leader, the only effective way to direct your life and the lives of others is to know what you truly stand for. Your personal principles or values direct your thoughts, priorities, preferences, and actions. The aspects of life that you value shape your character, which determines how you lead. They determine how you do everything.
Unfortunately, many leaders haven’t identified their values and often find their roles frustrating, confusing, or unfulfilling. If a leader’s experience can be described this way, imagine what their people are experiencing. If you struggle with internal conflicts or feel something important is missing from your life, assess your values.
Max Klau states in his Harvard Business Review article, Twenty-First Century Leadership: It’s All About Values, that a significant purpose of personal values is to serve a cause greater than yourself. Great leaders envision serving by contributing to a cause where they try not to be the focal point. This requires a set of values based on benefiting others.
Your values are your ideals, the foundational principles you live by. They are the important standards you feel should govern body, mind, and spirit, manifested throughout your personal and business life. Generally, people resonate most with a handful of values, each greatly influencing their character. Prioritizing just a few prevents losing focus.
Some examples of personal values that leaders have been known to embrace:
- Honesty
- Integrity
- Accountability
- Humility
- Loyalty
- Serving others
- Excellence
- Optimism
- Relationships
- Hard Work
The list is broad. No two leaders will have the same set of core values. They are almost as unique as fingerprints. Your values establish your personal standards for what is right and wrong, acceptable and not acceptable. They are the basis for judging your progress of growth, your impact on your areas of responsibility, your contributions, and the satisfaction you receive. Working with a leadership coaching program can help you assess and align your values with your leadership style.
Values Are Barometers
In his book Find Your Voice As A Leader (Aviva Publishing, 2016), Paul Larsen recognizes that because we set our personal standards with our values, they serve as gauges or barometers for the important things in our lives.
Your sense of success is based on how well you feel you’re upholding your values. If you value relationships, you can assess how many new ones you made or how many struggling ones you mended. If you value humility, you can judge how well you allow others to be lifted and recognized.
As a leader, your satisfaction or fulfillment can be gauged by your values of serving or working hard. When your values lead you to make a positive impact in these areas, you are rewarded with great feelings and a sense of worth.
A high value of optimism or excellence can impact your emotional level or state of energy. Similarly, a high value of loyalty or commitment impacts your perception and approach to challenges, endurance, and perseverance.
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Values As Warnings
Larsen also states that leaders whose roles are misaligned with their values experience inner conflict, stress, or frustration. You may be a leader facing hardships without recognizing the reasons. An inner look at your values may reveal some contradictions in your business life that must be addressed.
You will be torn inside if you value transparency and must be vague when dealing with difficult corporate issues with your people. Going down a contrary path will affect your emotions and spirit.
If you value excellence, you will be discouraged and defeated if your environment’s pressures force your people to submit substandard work. Your inner self will conflict with your actions.
If you value relationships, you will be distressed if your workload doesn’t permit you to engage your people in ways that allow you to know them. You’ll sense an emptiness inside that won’t go away.
Look for the warning signs. Actions that contradict your values can affect your responses to situations, your confidence and positivity, or your quality of relationships. This is another reason why assessing your values is so critical. Allow a leadership coach or mentor to help you identify those ideals you strongly believe in.
Assess your job, duties, and career path to see where you fit and where you don’t. Make changes before a value-action misalignment takes you further down a painful path. Conflict with your values benefits neither you nor your people.
Making Use of Your Values
Leaders who follow their values are seen as authentic and are appreciated because they’re genuine and trustworthy. Use your values and the related personal attributes to enhance your environment. Set a vision based on value-oriented choices and hone in on a path for the future for yourself and your organization.
Your values establish your culture. You set standards for what is right and wrong, just the kind of leadership people seek. The virtues and principles you stand for can help you establish organizational goals. By being the example of honorable values, you motivate staff to implement your vision.
Valuing people builds the relationships that create engagement and investment. An authentic, relational culture fosters value-based responses, accountability, and higher accomplishments. The values of trust and respect forge truthfulness and a focus on people. Leaders who earn the trust of their people experience a special unity that enhances their entire organization.
Put your values to work in your leadership style, decision-making, and goal-setting. As the people in your organization recognize, respect, and adopt your values, they become embedded in the organizational culture.
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Renewing Your Values
As a leader, you grow into your leadership skills through personal experience, self-development, mentorship, or individual leadership coaching. Experience and tenure allow you to see how your values evolve. Wisdom comes from successes and failures and leads to the understanding that some things are more meaningful than you originally thought.
Seeing how relationships have been vital for you and your organization makes you value people more. Perhaps some relational failures came with a heavy price. Adjusting your values enhances the importance of engaging and helping people. Everyone benefits from your renewed perspective.
If you have learned the hard way that taking credit for the contributions of others causes them to distrust you, your values probably need review. Valuing humility and trust more than you once did can be a change brought on by past mistakes. Everyone has some character flaws. Great leaders learn from their mistakes and evolve their values.
Getting caught by a customer for being deceptive will likely cause you to revalue the ideal of integrity. Truthfulness or accountability may be hard lessons to learn, but if improvements are made and damages are atoned, renewing values will send you off in a better direction.
Values are worth assessing periodically. Take stock of yourself, what you stand for, and what mindsets you need to adjust. Some good questions to ask yourself are: what’s worth standing for… and why?
Keep your values in mind as you lead. They will be evident in your actions, decisions, and conversations. Your values will guide your thinking, responses, goals, and vision. Your people will see a nobler, genuine, trustworthy leader worth following.
Creator of the KASHBOX: Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, Habits
Helping You Realize Your Potential
I help people discover their potential, expand and develop the skills and attitudes necessary to achieve a higher degree of personal and professional success and create a plan that enables them to balance the profit motives of their business with the personal motives of their lives.
