Great leaders are individuals who have successfully developed (or taken over) a story that appeals to the values of their followers. 

Values are the motivational keys that cause people to choose to follow a particular person, path, goal, career. Think for a moment of the value that brought you to the work you do now. Were you motivated by curiosity? Prestige? Success? Financial reward? Security? Enterprise? Community? Service? Advance? There are many other values that may be your personal drivers.

Objectives

You will be able to:

• Recognize key words which denote values
• Understand your own and others values
• Discover how to uncover core values
• Use values to affirm a common purpose

Activity

In groups of four or the team:

• Start by agreeing a project. If you, as a group, are already known to each other than select a project which is, or could be, under way in your company. It must be a project of some importance.
• Each person now takes five minutes to jot down some important reasons why the project should be completed successfully. Consider the benefits to the company, its customers or the market and general public, not forgetting the employees, the managers, the board of directors, the shareholders and yourself. 
• Now pair up with another person in your group and compare the reasons you have given. Find those values you have in common and, as far as possible, seek to find common ground where the values appear to be different.
• One person from each pair now joins together to make a list of common values.
• Finally, all four members of the group get together to agree a final list of values which have emerged and write out a brief statement which summarises the group’s agreed values and purposes for completing the project. Prepare the final statement on a flip chart.

For larger teams this iterates until you have one set of team values.

Understanding your own values is important for a leader, for a parent, for a human being.

You already know some of the things that are important to you in your life and your work and your team members will know some of their values. Being able to share these and probe can encourage much greater commitment. 

This is a coaching exercise, best done one-to-one. You can do this for yourself through self-coaching – just take the role of coach and coachee. Remember though, when coaching yourself, continue to probe to elicit responses rather than allow yourself a quick and easy answer.

Objectives

You will be able to:

1. Understand your own and others values and personal goals
2. Discover how to link personal values to goals
3. Motivate yourself and others at any time for any (ecological and ethical) purpose.

Activity

A is the coach, B is the coachee.

Discovering key goals

A. asks B “What do you want to achieve in the next six to 12 months?”
B. Responds being true to themselves
A. asks B “What is important to you about (goal)?”
B. Responds
repeat the question building each time on the response.

For example:

B responds: “I want to be promoted”
A asks “What is important to you about being promoted?”
B responds “I want more money”
A asks “What is important to you about more money?”
B responds “I want a bigger flat”
A ask “What is important to you about a bigger flat”
B responds “Because we need more space”
A responds, “So having more space is important to you?”

NB – Money, in and of itself, is rarely a genuine value. It is the most frequent response to the question “Why do you go to work?” but it is NOT the purpose of going to work. Money is a means to an end. Someone who has ‘money’ as a genuine value will typically use money as a representation of something else that is more important to them – such as power or status.

Alternative routes to discover someone’s values:

Ask them about their hobby, favourite sport, what they did at the weekend. Listen and probe for value words.

My personal favourite means of finding out what is truly important for someone: “What did you do at the weekend?”

Weekends are the time that we do the things which are more important to us. If I work all weekend, it is because work is important to me (or perhaps it is a specific project, or my boss demanding I work all weekend is important, or pleasing my boss). If I spend the weekend with my kids… that’s because they are important to me. Weekends are the time when most people have the greatest amount of choice in what they do.

People who know their own values are more committed to the organization!

Warren Buffet notes that lack of honesty can create adversity. His hiring criteria: integrity, intelligence, and energy.” Hire someone without the first, and the other two will kill you.”

Kouzes and Posner’s excellent book now in its 4th edition, The Leadership Challengeincludes the understanding of personal and company values as key to commitment.

Interestingly, they have surveyed organisations around the world linking knowledge of values to commitment. Their findings are presented in the chart below:

We can see that it is much more important that each person has clarity of their own personal values than they have clarity of the organisations values.

Imagine that you can translate an individual’s commitment into performance and gain an increase of nearly 30%. Just by enabling them to have clarity of what is important for them!

Team Values & Beliefs

By now you know that understanding your own values and the values held by your team is important. You also know that beliefs play a very important role in shaping and guiding you and your team. That together, an individuals values and beliefs are their guidance system and the very foundation on which they think, act and behave.

The good and the great leaders of this world know this. Politicians are elected on their values and the beliefs that they will deliver on them (in spite of continued evidence to the contrary!) Wars are fought over values and beliefs. They strike at the very core of our humanity.

So how do we discover our own values and those of our team?

Before you embark on the activities and exercises to discover personal values, I’d like to reiterate: This is not about judging another person’s values and beliefs, it’s about understanding them.

This is a story of two leaders. We worked with the organisation on team leadership because one of their sales teams was “highly successful” and another was “doing poorly, with a very low morale”. The organisation wanted us to “find out what’s working in [the high-performing team],fix the [low-performing team] and run a training program for all the other sales teams to be as good as [the high-performing team].” 

Ann, the leader of the high-performing team had joined the company 5 years previously as a sales representative. She was good at her job and always exceeded her targets. She was promoted to team leader after 3 years and had infused her own enthusiasm, determination and will to her team. Her team members were happy, hard-working and also successful, most exceeding targets.

Joe, the leader of the low-performing team had similarly joined the company 5 years previously, though as sales team leader. Joe’s team were, by contrast, unhappy and unsuccessful in achieving targets. This had been the case for all 5 years. The team members had changed frequently over this time, only one member remained from the original team that Joe took over.

Ann was enthusiastic when we spoke with her about her success. Saying “It’s great to have such a wonderful team. I enjoy working with them and we’re doing well.” She went on, “My boss is great, really believes in me and let’s me run things the way I want. I like that, and I try to treat everyone in the team the same way. When they are down about something, maybe their kid is in trouble or sick, I let them take time out if they need to, so long as the work gets done sometime, it doesn’t ‘have to be 9 to 5. I trust them to make up the time, and they do, and more!”

Joe was belligerent when we spoke, “I have tried everything possible to make these people work harder and make target. They’re always moaning that their kid’s sick or they have to visit the doctor. Always skiving off, taking toilet breaks, going for coffee. If I turn my back for one instant, they’re gone.” When prompted, Joe continues, “My boss is pretty useless. Only ever comes round at the end of the month to [tell me off] for not making target. To be honest, I’m fed up, I don’t ‘think I’ll ever get this team to perform and the stress is making me sick.”

There are of course, several things here we could expand on, but what was clearly apparent was that Ann’s boss believed in her and she in turn believed in her team and their abilities, that she could trust them and that they would deliver. Joe’s boss, didn’t appear to be that concerned for Joe and didn’t help. Joe in turn, trusted staff to ‘skive’ and believed that she would never get the team to perform.

When someone else, particularly someone in authority over you (a leader, parent, boss, teacher) believes in you and your abilities it helps you to believe in yourself and your team. What you believe on the inside, becomes manifest on the outside. This is usually the attitude that you portray and the way you communicate.

If, by some chance you are wishing that your parents, teachers, boss etc showed their belief in you… or even vaguely tempted to go “if only…” Go forth right now, find someone that you care about and say the following:

“I believe in you. You can achieve anything you want to achieve.”

You need to believe something before you see it!

When you first played golf. I mean the very first day that you picked up a club and struck a ball. Remember it? OK. Just before the moment that you struck the ball – however well, or not so well you struck that ball. BEFORE you swung the club you believed that: 

1. Swinging the club towards the ball was the right thing to do,
2. that striking the ball would propel it in the direction of the swing. 

You did NOT believe that swinging the club at the ball would cause the ball to become embedded in the club face. What you saw was what you believed you would see. 

Remember, this is BEFORE you had ever struck the ball with a club.

You believed it first, then you saw it.

Of course, you had seen others do this and this informed your belief.Had you not believed it, it would not have happened. 

Let me share a story from one of the juniors I have worked with:

Tom is 14 years old, had never played golf before and only came because his father (who is an avid golfer) brought him along for golf academy because he was “useless at sports and needs to get out from his computer games”.

Tom was not exactly enthusiastic to be learning “this stupid game”. His belief about his ability in sports had been informed by his experience, and the reinforcement by his father’s words.

His hand-eye coordination was not particularly good and his physical fitness was quite poor. However, he was “stuck with us” and would show us that he “couldn’t ‘hit the ball, no matter what we tried”.

Guess what? Tom successfully fulfilled his belief and prophecy. He actually managed to miss the ball every single time. Quite an achievement.

His father decided to give up and Tom never returned.

Another 14 year old, Eddy, I worked with had been playing golf since he was 6 years old. His mother is a national level amateur player and had been teaching her son. Now he needed “a fighting edge to win competitions” for he had “the makings of a champion”.

This young man was indeed an excellent player. Great technical skill, solid strokes and an easy air about the way he played.

“I’m going to beat Tiger Woods!” he told me. 

We have yet to see if he will continue in his determination to put in the practice and effort, and if he will get the breaks (and money) needed to fulfill his dream. 

This story is easily dismissed of course because Eddy was already an excellent player. You also need to know that a bicycle accident left Eddy paralyzed from the waist down from the age of 7.

What we believe about ourselves and the things we do, aligned with our values, determine everything we achieve.