Effective Leaders Articulate Values — and Live by Them

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Personal Development, Leading & Managing Section | 1

Effective Leaders Articulate Values — and Live by Them

By Morela Hernandez and Catherine Summers | MIT Sloan Management Review | April 25, 2024

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Values lie at the heart of effective leadership, serving as the foundation for decisions and organizational cultures. Yet in the lecture halls, meeting rooms, and offices where we teach leadership, we regularly see a muddiness around how to think about these core principles.  Individuals are often unsure about what constitutes a “value.” 

Values are shaped by mindset and choice. People can consciously identify what they value and purposely choose to prioritize it. Though there are many different types of values, some can bring joy and groundedness, whereas others can generate misery or at least difficulty. In practice, some values are destructive or dysfunctional to achieving the results we seek. Understanding why some values serve us better than others is a distinction that can set the course to our ultimate success or failure.

The authors offer practical steps leaders can take to explore, evaluate, and refine their values to make better decisions and lead organizations toward success. They explain how leaders can develop actions, metrics, and checkups to confirm if they’re really following those principles.

1. Explore your values and keep the ones that ground you. Successful leaders set aside dedicated time for introspection. They cultivate curiosity about what truly brings them fulfillment.  As you generate ideas for what matters most to you, check whether your values are achieved internally or rely on external events. Generally, the most useful values are things you can directly influence through your personal mindset. Good values are generally aligned with positive actions and reflect an objective reality. Then, consider how much you’re choosing values that are based on others’ perceptions. Deprioritizing these values will help your internal grounding. You’ll have a more stable platform from which to make decisions.
2. Evaluate your progress. Next, measure how those values are influencing your decision-making by keeping track of how you actually express values through personal and professional choices.  Within your personal life, a simple way to do this is to list your values and allocate the number of hours per day (or week) you spend on choices that express these values, the quality of personal energy spent while engaging in these activities, and the amount of money you spend in their pursuit.
3. Refine your values through regular reevaluation. Leaders who continually pressure-test the alignment between their values and practices will be better equipped to navigate challenging situations. This is particularly important when we consider that values are not always static. Some evolve over time as individuals and organizations experience different conditions and circumstances. When leaders refine and articulate values that fit a specific situation and context, employees are more likely to feel inspired and take actions in line with those values. 

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Values lie at the heart of effective leadership, serving as the foundation for decisions and organizational cultures. Yet in the lecture halls, meeting rooms, and offices where we teach leadership, we regularly see a muddiness around how to think about these core principles – individuals are often unsure about what constitutes a “value.”
2. Values are shaped by mindset and choice. People can consciously identify what they value and purposely choose to prioritize it. Though there are many different types of values, some can bring joy and groundedness, whereas others can generate misery or at least difficulty.
3. Some of the suggestions how wffective leaders articulate values and live by them are:  explore your values and keep the ones that ground you, evaluate your progress on your values, and keep on refining your values through regular reevaluation.

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Topics:  Leadership, Values, Ethics, Teams