The Value of Values - In Leadership and Life

The Value of Values - In Leadership and Life

by Manny Elkind, MindTech, Inc.

Why is the satisfaction of personal values so vital?
Because you can purposely and respectfully use it to motivate and inspire yourself and others to be more productive and innovative, improve results and feel good about it. Personal values provide clarity, insight and vision that can change your expectations of yourself and others.

When you discover your values, you’ll get clarity about what’s most important to you, personally. It will often provide insights to recognize opportunities and the courage to act in ways that you would not have been previously considered. It makes people aware of how often they violate their own values, the values of others and the potential negative consequences of both.

People become motivated and inspired to achieve goals when they believe that their personal values will get satisfied. Therefore, it’s in the leaders and everyone’s best interests to create opportunities for their own values satisfaction and for the values satisfaction of the people they collaborate with or supervise. Almost always, what's good for personal values is good for both the organization and the individuals.

Some interesting findings about Values:

• An individual’s personal values are their greatest motivators and their source of inspiration. They have a great influence on our decisions. Violations of personal values by one’s self, by others or by systems in or outside the organization typically create anger, stress and conflict.

• “Values satisfaction” is like food for our emotional health and effectiveness.  It gives us the motivation and energy to be more productive and creative and help others and sustain it over the long term. If values satisfaction is absent we are more likely to not feel motivated and to feel down, anxious, stressed and get sick more often. It’s unlikely that a person can sustain being creative and productive in that state.

• People will get motivated and committed to achieving the goals of the organization when they believe (consciously or unconsciously) that their personal values will get satisfied.  So it’s in the leader’s best interests to provide opportunities for their direct reports and others in their organization to get their values satisfied.

• Personal values are like an organization’s “Key performance indicators.”  The organization’s “Key performance indicators” are standards for measuring progress and have a major influence on decision-making. They identify what's most important to an organization for survival and success. Personal values are also “key performance indicators.” They are an individual’s standards and principles for measuring personal progress and have a major influence on their thinking, feelings and decision-making. They identify what's most important to an individual for their survival, success and satisfaction.

• When people take action to get their personal values satisfied, almost without exception, the side effects are to improve their operations, help the people they work with and support the organization’s goals.  Almost always, what’s good for personal values is also good for the organization.

• Values can be an extraordinarily effective mainstream decision-making tool involving the most important organizational and personal decisions. Examples of situations that can benefit:
• Selecting or leaving jobs, bosses, colleagues, subordinates, careers, and companies
• Problem-solving and discovering opportunities involving strategy, operations, technology, policy and administration
• Self-motivation and motivation of others
• Improving quality of relationships
• Managing anger

• Values are measurable. although not to decimal exactness. If you ask a person to what degree in a scale of 1-5 they are getting their value of “accomplishment” or “happiness” satisfied on their job, they can almost always answer easily, accurately and confidently.

• Values are neither good nor bad. They’re neutral. People have behaved in wonderful ways to satisfy their value of accomplishment. Those same people at times may have behaved in terrible ways to satisfy their value of “accomplishment,” like lie or sell defective product. It's not the personal value that’s good or bad, it’s the behaviors.

• An organization’s values can be most effectively developed and put into practice when people first understand their personal values and their relationship to organizational values. Inspiration and motivation can become systemic when there is mutual support between personal and organizational values and the organization’s goals.

• When people know their most important personal values, they develop a much deeper understanding of what it takes to be inspired, That stimulates ideas about how to motivate and inspire themselves and others.

• Abstract personal values like happiness, feeling good, inner peace and satisfaction are the most important personal values that people identify, almost without exception. Yet many people do not expect to get those kinds of values satisfied at work and some leaders dismiss them as not important.

• Most leaders know relatively little about personal values. What most leaders don’t know:
• What is or isn't a personal value
• How values influence their decisions
• More than a few of their personal values in the context of work
• How to prioritize the importance of their values

• Different people interpret the meaning of a specific value, like "trust," in different ways. This means that people who work together can have the same values and still get in conflict because they have different beliefs about the specific behaviors that are evidence of those values. 

Discovering your values is a challenge. 

Using them is surprisingly easy and extraordinarily worthwhile.