Two ways to identify the values that matter most for your leadership.
In his new book, What Do You Really Stand For? , Columbia Business School professor Paul Ingram draws on decades of research and frameworks to help you articulate your values, integrate them into your work and life, build stronger relationships, and achieve better outcomes in all that you do.
Here’s an edited excerpt. Captain Matt Feely was the leader of logistics for the U.S. Navy’s extensive efforts to bring humanitarian aid and relief to the people of Japan after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. When the massive, 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck on March 11, it triggered a devastating tsunami and a nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
In the first hours and days after the disaster, Matt and other leaders close to the crisis began an immediate humanitarian response, moving supplies and preparing for a much larger effort. Only later, as the scale of the need became clear and Washington caught up, was the broader mission formalized and named Operation Tomodachi, which means “friend” in Japanese. Two days into the effort, Matt was proud of the life-saving efforts of his organization.
But then he received a call from an admiral that took his breath away. The admiral reminded Matt that U.S. law required a formal request from the Japanese government, and approval by Congress, to legitimize the expenditure of government resources that Matt’s organization was engaging in. Of course, in the immediate post-tsunami chaos, these bureaucratic requirements had not been met.
Matt faced the most momentous decision of his decades-long leadership career: whether to continue providing lifesaving relief despite the legal risk. When Matt told this story on a recent visit to my MBA leadership class at Columbia, the students asked what and how he decided. Matt opened his wallet and showed them a card he always carries that lists his guiding values, which include humanity, equity, service, and love.
He told the students that upon consulting those values, he knew immediately that he must continue to provide aid. The point of Matt’s story is not that one should defy the rules, but instead that we should know and follow our values. Values are simultaneously a compass that directs us to the right goals and an engine that moves us toward those goals. Our values show us the path and motivate us to pursue it.
In a world of relentless change, noise, and uncertainty, clarifying our core values and reminding ourselves of them may be the most important actions we can make. How Values Help Us Values are more than just words. They are real, practical, and powerful—something you can use every day to live better, lead better, and be better. That is the true value of values.
They are the deepest parts of who we are, and when we use them with intention, they can become our greatest source of clarity, strength, and purpose. I’ve worked with more than 10,000 leaders around the world to help them identify their top values and apply them to make decisions, build relationships, find motivation, and maintain ethics. Knowing the right word for a value makes a real difference.
While many of us have an intuitive sense of what matters, taking the time to identify and articulate those values through a more rigorous process—rather than simply thinking of them in the abstract—can sharpen our judgment and strengthen our ability to lead ourselves and others. Choose Your Values There are two options to identify a set of values to work with: reflection and laddering. Reflection.
Reflection amounts to a look backward to tap into the feeling of your values in action. Values are principles of evaluation—they are what we use to determine that anything is good, bad, or important. So, to activate memories of them in action, reflect on very good, very bad, or very important experiences, people, or projects. There are many reflections that can work for this purpose.
Try this: think of a very negative experience at work, a time when you were hurt or angry. Think back to that episode and remember the details and how you felt at that time. Now, write down a word or two that explains why you were hurt or angry in terms of something positive that was missing from the situation.
So, for example, if you were hurt because somebody lied to you, write down “honesty” because it was honesty that was missing. If it was a really negative situation, there will be more than one thing that was missing, so what else was missing? Ask and answer that question two more times. Try to write down four values.
Now, we’ll turn to a different reflection. This time, think of a very positive experience at work, one that left you feeling completely satisfied. Again, take yourself back, recall the details and luxuriate in the positive feelings of that episode. What was present in that experience that made it so satisfying for you?
What else was present that made it so satisfying? What else, and what else? Again, this reflection should have generated four values. Adding these to the output of the first reflection will give you up to eight distinct values.
If you feel the set of values you have identified through reflection represents concepts that are important and meaningful to you, that they are a reasonable first approximation of your top values, you can take them forward to the next step, sharpening your values.
If you are not satisfied yet with the set, or if you’d like to know about another approach for identifying values, engage the following laddering exercise. Laddering. This is structured method for identifying your core values by moving from concrete choices to abstract meaning. Developed in the 1960s and widely used in psychology and consumer research, it helps clarify what truly matters to you.
The process begins with a simple starting point: choose a set of three elements drawn from your life—such as jobs, relationships, places, or even something playful like favorite foods. The specific category doesn’t matter; what matters is that the items are meaningful to you.
Next, ask: How are two of these different from the third? Then decide which you prefer and, crucially, ask why. From there, shift away from the specific items and focus on the underlying quality driving your preference. Continue this pattern—asking why and identifying contrasts—until you reach a point that can’t be meaningfully reduced further.
That endpoint is a core value. Repeat this process across multiple triads to generate a set of values, typically between three and eight. These represent a distilled version of what matters most to you. Sharpen Your Values Now you’ve got a set of three to eight values that have come out of either reflections or ladders.
Everything you’ve identified is a value for you. We want to make a final check to see if we can improve on any of the words in your set. Let’s say one value from your laddering exercise was “accomplishment. ” Identify a list of synonyms for accomplishment—an AI chatbot can be useful to generate the list.
Starting with the word at the top of the synonym list—say it is “excellence”—ask yourself, “If I had to choose between accomplishment and excellence, which would I choose? ” Then take the winner of that contest and compare it with the next word on the list. Keep making those comparisons until you’re confident that you have the best expression of your values.
The goal isn’t to get an exhaustive list of your values—it’s to produce a potent distillation of the ones that matter most to you. Once you have identified your top values, keep them handy so you can remind yourself of them when you need a boost of confidence, ethics, or motivation. Many leaders I have worked with keep a list of their values on their phone or on a card in their wallet. .
. . Like Matt Feely, you won’t always have complete information or the luxury of time when your leadership and judgement is tested. But knowing your most important values provides something more powerful: a clear sense of what matters and the confidence to act on it.
In a world that rarely slows down or simplifies itself for us, that clarity is essential. Paul Ingram is the author of What Do You Really Stand For? , from which this article is excerpted. Buy Now
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