Understanding your values
In this five part mini series we’re going to take a look at how you can become an inclusive leader. We’re going to go deeper into each of the topics covered in my talk at Product Tank London. Each article in this mini series will contain self coaching exercises that you can use to understand and develop your own style of leadership.
What topics are we covering in this mini series?
Becoming an inclusive leader
Understanding your values (this article)
Limiting beliefs and cognitive biases
Defining your principles
Privilege and power
If you would like to watch my talk that was the inspiration for this mini series, it’s available now on YouTube.
Introduction
In this second article in the mini series, we’re going to dive into understanding your values. This is a foundation stone in developing your relationship to your ‘self’, particularly your self awareness, as it reveals what you are motivated and demotivated by across all areas of your life. Your values underpin the way you make decisions, whether you are aware of them or not.
This article contains the following sections:
What is a ‘value’?
Different types of values
Using values to become an inclusive leader
A self coaching exercise to identify and validate your operational values
By the end of this article you will have clarity on what your operational values are, and how to use them to guide you to become a more effective and inclusive leader.
What is a ‘value’?
Let’s start with a definition. A value is a principle or standard, something that you judge to be important in life. In terms of linguistic construction, values are nominalisations, which is where a verb functions as a noun. To give an example, growth is a value (from to grow, a verb).
When you say you hold a particular value, then we must first recognise that this is subjective and not universal. We each have our own interpretation of what that value means to us: one person’s idea of growth is not the same as another’s.
Values form during our adolescent period, and are strongly influenced by peers, family and school. They differ for every person based on their culture, environment, relationships with other people and lived experiences, before becoming fixed around the age of 35. However, significant emotional events in life can affect our values, as can changes in who we spend time with and the context we live in.
You may not be aware of your values - until they are violated. What’s more, it can be challenging to determine our own values because they are subconscious, and hold emotional content that can be difficult to process. That’s where working with an experienced coach can be helpful (values elicitation is a specific technique I have in my coaching toolbox - more on this at the end of the article).
Different types of values
There’s a few different ways of looking at values:
Operational versus idealistic values
Means and ends values
Let’s go through each type now.
Operational versus idealistic values
Operational values determine how you live your life right now. They guide you in decision making to maximise what is important to you. They act in two ways:
Move towards values: we strive to achieve these, as these create pleasurable emotional states, e.g. freedom, love, security
Move away from values: we strive to avoid these, as these create painful emotional states, e.g. anger, frustration, loneliness
Let’s look at an example to see how this plays out. You are presented with two job opportunities:
Option one is with a large corporate, at the same role level you are now, but with a substantial increase in pay. There is a well defined career progression pathway, and mature processes for product development.
Option two is with a startup, at a higher level than where you are now, but on slightly less money. Everything is scrappy, and you would need to build the team and product culture within the organisation.
Depending on your values you may choose one or the other. If you have a move towards value of financial security, the first option seems the most attractive as it’s more money and with a more mature company implying better job security. However, if you value growth then you may opt for the second opportunity, because you may consider that you will learn more and faster there than in a more established environment.
What if one of your move away from values was failure? This is contradictory to growth, but this conflict happens often and can lead to decision inertia. Taking this into account, option 1 may be preferential to option 2, again because it is arguably lower risk. The combination of high financial security and low risk of failure in option one might be stronger than the high growth in option two, and steer you in that direction. When this conflict arises, you quickly learn the rank of your different values!
During coaching, I find that women are more motivated by what they don’t want than what they do: they often haven’t give it much thought. ‘Oh, I definitely don’t want to manage people’ is a fairly common statement - but what do you want to do instead? This is where idealistic values come in, as these guide you towards what you do want to achieve in the future. You might think, right now I want to work on growth, but in the future I want to have financial security (e.g. as you progress through your career and consider having a family). A key element of coaching is defining what that future you looks like, and working out how you will get there.
Means and ends values
Another way of looking at values is to understand if they are the means, or the ends. Means values include family, friends, security, and so on. These are surface level, so we have to dig deeper to understand what these means values actually give us - the ends. These are the feelings, the answers to the question “what is most important to you in…”.
Let’s look at this in practice:
Family (means) gives us love (ends, move towards), but also guilt (ends, move away from)
Friends (means) give us belonging (ends, move towards), but also frustration (ends, move away from)
The trick is to not stop at the means, but get to the ends. We may put up with family not always being nice because they give us love, which is important to us. Remember, values motivate us to take action. I’ve worked with many women who have got to a point where they have to make a change, because they are feeling guilty about balancing a successful career with raising a family, running a house, and all the other expectations they have to juggle (and feel they are doing inadequately).
Using values to become an inclusive leader
It’s important to recognise and respect that we all have different values. There are also no right or wrong values - but there are some that are more helpful to fostering inclusivity. These tend to be pro-social values and include:
Belonging
Compassion
Community
Fairness
Justice
Love
Openness
Respect
This is a non exhaustive list, but hopefully you get the gist.
Once you have that awareness of your values, you can ask yourself how you can lean into them to create more inclusivity? If respect is important to you, what are the ways that you can show respect towards other people, and role model those positive behaviours for others to learn from? If community is important, what are the ways that you can create community for yourself and others?
Even if your short list of values does not contain any that are obviously pro-social, it is still possible to find ways to leverage your values to drive inclusivity. Say you have a value of security: instead of applying this strictly to yourself, think about how that could be important for other people too. In what ways do people create security for themselves? How could you support and encourage that? (psychological safety is a big one!)
So that now brings us on to the final part of this article - an exercise you can use to identify your operational values and start putting these into practice.
Self coaching exercise: Finding your operational values
I recommend completing this self coaching exercise when you have 30-60 minutes to yourself, free from distractions. Grab a notebook and a pen, and your drink of choice, and spend some time journalling your answers to these prompts:
Start by identifying the times you felt the following emotions:
Happy
Proud
Fulfilled and satisfied
What was it about each of these times that made you feel that way?
Review the list of 100 values in the image below and select 20 that you feel align with the reasons why you felt happy, proud, satisfied and fulfilled in those experiences.
From that list of 20, narrow it down to 10 values. You may wish to consider which ones are similar and which you are more drawn to.
From that list of 10, prioritise your top 5 values.
Write those values on a post it note or piece of paper which you can keep somewhere visible for the next week or so. Keep checking in on whether your actions are congruent with your values. Do they feel right?
If you find a value isn’t working for you - change it. Try out another for a week and see if that works better.
Once you’ve found 5 that work for you, notice how they start coming up in your decision making. How are they driving your choices and your behaviour?
Consider how you could lean into your values more to drive inclusivity. Challenge yourself to identify one action you can take within 24-48 hours that would improve inclusion in a particular context, e.g. at work.
Periodically check in with your values (say every 6 to 12 months) - how are you using them to guide you through life? What’s changing over time?
