Begin with Values: Set the tone for your business and your team.
[Part #1 of 5 in Essential Pillars of Strong Leadership]
In our exploration of the Essential Pillars of Strong Leadership, we begin with the cornerstone of integrity. It’s the fundamental quality that underpins every action, decision, and relationship a leader engages in, setting the stage for trust and credibility.
3 Things to Remember:
- 🔑 Understand your own values.
- 🔑 Codify the values of your organization and/or team.
- 🔑 Live and lead by example.
Throughout my career, I’ve collaborated with organizations that either had codified values and principles or lacked them entirely. In some organizations, values were documented, but they weren’t really incorporated into the culture. The experiences were night and day.
As a leader, it’s imperative to deeply understand your personal values. Similarly, it’s vital for your organization (and maybe even teams within) to have established and agreed-upon values. There are numerous resources available to help clarify them if needed.
Values act as rules of the game. While they’re generally not inherently good or bad, they help everyone play better together. Clear values create alignment, fostering more effective and harmonious teamwork and collaboration. This can lead to faster progress and greater success.
A note about integrity: Theoretically, your values might not include integrity. However, I firmly believe the best teams have a solid foundation of integrity. Integrity is more than just honesty; it’s about being consistent in actions, values, methods, and principles. It’s about doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. When a team operates with integrity as a foundational value, trust is built, and collaboration becomes seamless. It fosters an environment where everyone feels valued, heard, and respected.
🔎 Case Study: Supportive Values Done Right
In my first year at Trello, I helped codify our product principles. Having these documented was extremely supportive as we scaled from 50 to 250+ employees. Our 3rd party developers and partners could also leverage them for their work with us. During the acquisition talks between Trello and Atlassian, the alignment of the two organizations’ values came up again and again and were instrumental in the deal going through with such strong support. In the years after, Atlassian’s company values were a constant presence, actively guiding decisions and shaping interactions. Each value has a graphic, acronym, and custom emoji in Slack. You can feel them woven into the fabric of the company. (There’s even a quiz you can take to see how you align with the values.)
🚀 Your Values Are Effective When:
- Your values are well-understood and regularly referenced. This will require a conscious process to articulate and prioritize. A list of 50 is as useless as having none at all.
- Your values guide who you work with. This includes hiring and expanding your team, finding partners and acquisition targets, marketing to and retaining the right customers, and so on. As an employee, allow it to guide where you work in the first place.
- Your values guide your processes, decisions, and actions. When leaders walk the talk, it inspires trust and respect from the team. Allow your values to guide the tradeoffs you make in decisions. I like the structure of “this over that”. The Agile Manifesto does this well. Although “processes and tools” are necessary and important, “individuals and interactions” are valued more.
- Your values are reflected in your work and/or services.
“It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” — Georgia O’Keeffe
For example, if an organization values beautiful, intuitive design, their team will require experienced and talented designers. Their processes will require time and space for those designers to do their magic. Their decisions will prioritize findings from user research and usability testing. Their actual products or services will likely also visibly express the values.
🌱 Baby Steps to Implement:
Begin by defining your personal values. Even if you’ve done this before, revisiting and updating them can be beneficial, especially during significant life changes. You can do this yourself and may even find coaching to be helpful. [Here’s a list of inspirational values I’ve used when coaching others.]
Before you’re done, prioritize them to support making tough trade-offs. Consider your relationship with integrity. How important is it to you to be honest? Show up on time? Be respectful? When are you in alignment by not doing those things?
Only once you’re aligned with your own values should you lead a team through a values creation exercise.
⚠️ Warning: Values Out of Alignment
Some suggest your current actions and how you spend your time are the truest reflection of your values. I don’t necessarily agree with that. It’s quite possible your aspirations, thoughts, values, words and/or actions are out of alignment. If you value adventure and inspiration, but don’t make time for new experiences… If you value diversity in your teams, but don’t support the real human feelings and needs of those people… If you value innovation in your organization, but everyone is always under the gun with hard deadlines… Consider whether your values or your actions need to change to get you into alignment.
Doing a little check in on a regular basis can keep things flowing smoothly.
What are your core values, and how do they influence your leadership?
Feel free to share your thoughts or reach out for a chat — I’d love to help.
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And be sure to check out the full Essential Pillars of Strong Leadership series!
➡️ Next up: Empathy Above All: Assume Positive Intent with yourself and others.
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