When It Comes to Values

Mind the Gap

Mission statements are easy enough to write. I have read hundreds over the years, and most are well-crafted. Some are even beautiful. Living them, that is a different story. Identifying the gap between what you say matters and what you actually do makes all the difference.

Mission statements tell you what an organization aspires to value, but they can’t tell you what an organization actually values. To understand that, you have to experience the culture in practice.

Values live in what actually happens in the day to day actions of leaders, and especially when there is responsibility to take, and a cost to pay. What leaders do under pressure — whom they protect when something goes wrong, what they tolerate, what they refuse, who gets heard, and who does not — these decisions reflect and create organizational values. Over time, those choices teach everyone in the organization what is real, regardless of what the mission statement says.

Wherever you are working, you are feeling this every day. This is why values alignment is such a big part of leadership. The values leaders hold become the values of the organization.

Leadership begins with your values, not a strategic plan.

If a leader has not done their own values work, the organization will be at odds with itself. In the worst case, it will not reflect any values at all.

Most of us think we know our values. Often we don’t.

I taught ethics for years before I came to organizational leadership and coaching, and one of the first things I learned is that most people make no serious attempt to examine their own values. My students used to say (and believe) that values were “made up.” That’s a cop out. It’s easy to say they are made up if you’ve never thought about what you stand for and what matters to you. Values are all we have, many times. They are no more made up than mathematics. They are a way of discerning what is real and true and what matters.

The truth is, people live their answers to questions about what is worth caring about, but they often don’t want to examine what their behavior reveals. Aligning your values with what you do is the rarest thing. It takes self-knowledge, commitment, and honesty.

Not really living our values, feeling alienated, is a failure we are all set up for.

We absorb values from our instincts, our families, our cultures. Some we hold because we get used to them. Some we hold because we are afraid not to. Some we hold because no one ever invited us to ask whether we still believed them. Most of us are running on a lot of values we have not actually chosen, but simply inherited.

When something really hard hits, it may be a challenge at work where you need to stand up for something, or it may be life going very differently than planned. And suddenly, you are in a crisis. Do I protect myself or do what is right? Is my instinct to act a good one or a self-protective one?

Very often if we haven’t been paying close attention for a long time, we will fall back on what we were trained to do rather than what we would choose here and now if we are doing our best thinking. Inherited values may drive your behavior, but they will not feed you. They are how you were trained, not who you are. Chosen values inspire you. They have weight. They pull you forward because something in you recognizes them as worth reaching for.

Both are operating in you, often at the same time, often in conflict. The peacemaker in you may be at war with the truth-teller in you, and you may not even know it. You may be praised for one and undone by the other. Where these conflicts go unexamined, you feel a chronic low-grade lack of integrity — not because you are dishonest, but because you are unconsulted.

That feeling is information. It is worth taking seriously.

Values are not discovered. They are achieved.

We talk about values as if they were well known to us, waiting for the right moment of reflection to propel us forward. They are not well known to us. What will surface, if you sit quietly, may be a familiar set of words — integrity, family, excellence. But if they haven’t been put to the test, you do not know. And very often the values you are actually living look more like self-interest, self-protection, and self-deception.

Aristotle understood this two and a half thousand years ago. (No, we haven’t changed that much.) Values become real through practice. Put another way, what you do is what you become. You become courageous by doing courageous things, again and again, until courage is your disposition — the thing you reliably do, not the thing you wish you would do. Aristotle called this habituation. The fact is we often habituate ourselves to values we may not want to own, upon reflection.

The values that are real for you are the ones you have practiced into being. The rest are aspirations or shadows. Aspirations are fine. Just do not confuse them with character. Shadows are good to shed light on.

The good news is that you can begin this practice at any age, at any stage, in any role. No one can do it for you.

What this means for leaders

If you are leading anything — a team, a company, a board, a family, yourself — your values are already shaping it. Whether you have examined them or not. Whether you would endorse them or not. The people around you can feel the values you actually live by long before they hear the ones you claim.

This is why a leader’s first work is internal. Not because internal work is more important than results, but because results that come from an unclear leader are unreliable and often costly. Strategies built on murky values drift. Missions held by leaders who have not done their own work get diluted, to say the least. Sometimes the mission does not hold together at all.

The opposite is also true. A leader who knows what they value and lives from it can hold ambiguity, lead through change, make hard calls, deal with difficult situations, and stay grounded when everything around them is shaking. Not because they have all the answers, but because they know what they are willing to be, and what they refuse.

Organizational mission, vision, and strategy rest on values that are lived. Without it, they are scaffolding around an empty center.

A starting place

I created this Values Discernment Instrument for the leaders I work with, and I am sharing it with you as an invitation to look more deeply into what matters most. It is not a quiz. It is not a personality assessment. It is an invitation to look honestly at three things:

Where your values have already shown up — in moments of peak aliveness, real cost to you, and regret.

Which values you actually want to be known for, and which you have been carrying without choosing.

And where the gap is. Not the gap between you and someone else’s idea of a good life, but the gap between the values you hold and the life you are currently living.

That last one is where most of the work is, and where most of the freedom is, too.

Do not try to do this perfectly. Sit with it. Come back to it. Bring it to your coach or a trusted friend. Notice what you avoided answering, and treat that as a starting point for curious exploration.

The work of knowing and living your values is among the most important work of a human life. I hope this serves you.

Cindy