“When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.” Roy E. Disney.

Throughout my 35 year career in business (yes it’s been that long) I have held a strong belief in values based leadership.  Our values guide our decisions and the way we interact with our colleagues.  We are happiest in our work when our organization’s values are consistent with our own, and when people in the organization consistently live the organization’s values each day.

I have been participating in a training program this year to become an ICF certified Executive Coach.  Early on in the program I was asked to complete an exercise on values adapted from Brene Brown’s book Dare to Lead (2018).  This exercise involved selecting from a list of values the ones I identified with (in my case 23 values) and then distilling these down to my two core values.

What are my core values? Trust and Compassion. When I am living my core value of Trust I tell the truth, acknowledge my mistakes, keep people’s confidences and honour my commitments. When I live my core value of Compassion I listen to people, put myself in other people’s shoes and help strangers.

The values exercise also helped me explore the behaviors I might exhibit when I am not living my core values.  For example, if I deviate from my core value of Trust I can become critical of others for their mistakes, find myself speaking about someone behind their back, or hold back what I’m thinking about a situation. If I drift from my core value of Compassion, I might ignore someone in need, or lose sight of someone’s own personal situation when asking them to do something for me.

This was a profound experience of self exploration and reflection on how true I am to my core values, how invigorated I fell when I am living them, and what stresses can result in me departing from them.

This leaves me with a few unanswered questions:

1. To what extent are my values aligned with other peoples’ values?
2. How often do we reflect on our values and how we live them?

To answer the first question my colleague Olivia Brincheski has put together a quick survey to understand which of the 23 values I selected most resonate with others. I would greatly appreciate you completing the survey (which should only take a few minutes, or perhaps a little longer as you reflect on your choices). Quite simply, we ask you to select the 7 values which resonate most strongly with you and the 7 which resonate the least, then stay tuned. This list of values is not all encompassing, and may also identify with values that aren’t on our list, however for the purpose of this exercise I ask that you park that thought and reflect on those values later.

Over the next month I will reveal the 7 values people most resonate with, and maybe we can start a conversation about each of those and their value in work and in life.

To complete the survey, please click on the following link.