When was the last time you reflected on your personal values? What are your top five values, and which is your cardinal value?

In a 2015 commencement speech at George Washington University, Tim Cook emphasized the importance of values at Apple under Steve Jobs and now his CEO leadership: “Your values matter. They are your north star.” Cook is right. Together with our beliefs, our sense of self, and our passion and purpose, our values form a key part of what I call the essential core of a creative leader. So, today, let’s focus on this crucial yet often overlooked aspect of creative leadership: personal values—what they are, why they are important, and how you can gain more clarity about them.

What are values?

Values are a person’s principles or standards of behavior, one’s judgment of what is important in life. Your personal values express your personal ethics and moral compass and drive your personal code of conduct and behavior. 

Typically, your values are a central pillar of your core identity(who you really are) and reflect key aspects of your genuine personality. In Genius Journey, the creative leadership development program I created for Thinkergy, the first five foundational genius mindsets are all about defining your essential core as a creative leader. After you have investigated your beliefs and identified your authentic self, you are ready to become aware of your guiding values. While for many people, this is easier said than done, it’s essential to unlock your true creative potential as a leader. 

Why does it matter to clarify your values?

Your personal values reflect how you like to run and live your life. They express what is important to you. Being consciously aware of your values has at least five major benefits:

1. Values help you lead authentically. Personal values form the bedrock of authentic creative leadership. When you have a clear grasp of your values, you are more likely to act genuinely and consistently, fostering trust and respect among your teams. Authenticity inspires others to “Insist upon yourself” (as the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested) and creates an environment where creativity can flourish.
2. Values guide Decision-Making. Being in tune with your top values can help you make the right calls with confidence and integrity when facing complex decision scenarios, tough personal choices, and ethical dilemmas. Recalling your values can simplify decision-making, as Roy E. Disney (Walt Disney’s nephew and son of Disney Corporation’s co-founder Roy O. Disney) highlighted: “When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier.”
3. Values further expand your self-awareness. In the Genius Journey, we first ask you to take stock of your core beliefs and then rediscover and reconnect with your authentic self. Once you have defined these foundational aspects of your creative leader core, we invite you to clarify your personal values next. Reflecting on what truly matters to you is a vital stepping stone to uncovering your passion (what you love doing) and, ideally, even your purpose (your raison d'être, why you’re here in this life) later in the Genius Journey. 
4. Values strengthen persistence. In times of adversity and setbacks, understanding your personal values can make you more resilient. Being anchored in your values can help you better weather the inevitable storms of business and life with composure and determination. Your unwavering commitment to your personal principles empowers you to take on and overcome challenges and inspires your teams to do the same.
5. Values extend to your business’s values. The corporate values of an organization tend to reflect the personal values of the leader who founded the business or runs it. For example, the company values of a startup or scale-up venture are typically identical to those of a solo founder or a synthesis of the personal values of the founder team (as I explain in detail in an earlier blog post titled Values: This is how we do it). Likewise, the corporate values of a well-established large organization tend to evolve over time by incorporating the personal values of a new CEO within a year of their arrival. 

How can you gain more clarity about your personal values?

One option to become clearer about your values is to use one of the plentiful online tools available, such as Personal Values, which uses a paired comparison approach to assess different values. While these tools are often time-effective in helping you determine your values, you have to settle on a given range of values, which may not include certain values that are truly important to you. Some tests may also force you to prioritize one value over another, even though you may view some values as being equally important to you.

I prefer to give creative leader candidates traveling the Genius Journey both clarity and choice on their personal values by using a more creative and intuitive approach. Thereby, you can identify and adopt values that matter to you and then use the “Value Pyramid” tool to prioritize them. Follow these instructions if you want to try it out:

1. First, compile a comprehensive list of values that resonate with you. This inventory serves as your starting point for further exploration and deeper reflection.
2. Then, review the following list of 66 human values. Are all your listed values featured? Do any other values on the list appeal to you? Feel free to adopt them and add them to your list. (Note: The range of possible human values and principles that guide human behavior can be vast, depending on how wide you cast the net. Moreover, values may overlap sometimes (depending on how you define each one) and thus are not disjunctive.)

Acceptance, Achievement, Adventure, Ambition, Authenticity, Balance, Beauty, Challenge, Cheerfulness, Commitment, Compassion, Competence, Community, Contribution, Courage, Creativity, Curiosity, Diversity, Efficiency, Empowerment, Enlightenment, Equality, Excellence, Excitement, Fairness, Family, Financial Security, Forgiveness, Freedom, Friendship, Fun, Generosity, Growth, Health, Honesty, Humility, Independence, Influence, Innovation, Integrity, Intelligence, Joy, Justice, Learning, Love, Loyalty, Mindfulness, Peace, Persistence, Productivity, Purpose, Relationships, Respect, Responsibility, Security, Simplicity, Spirituality, Teamwork, Tradition, Trust, Trustworthiness, Uniqueness, Variety, Vitality, Wisdom, Wonder

3. Next, score each value on your expanded list on a scale from 0 to 5 (0—not important at all; 1—not so important; 2—rather important; 3—Important; 4—highly important; 5—super important).

4. Going forward, we use the Value Pyramid to create a hierarchy of values. This tool offers you space to position one top value, two secondary values, and two to three tertiary values. some text
   1. First, separate the wheat from the chaff: Identify all values you rated with a 3” or higher next to the top half of the Value Pyramid. All other values (i.e., with a score of 2 or less) are “below the waterline” and are rather unimportant and not rarely relevant to you, and you don’t need to consider them any further. 
   2. Then, place each value scored with at least a “3” on the respective levels 3, 4, and 5 next to the pyramid. 
   3. Review your highest-scored values and place them in one of the available fields of the pyramid. If you don’t have enough empty fields, reassess the values and downgrade the less important ones. Alternatively, synthesize several values into a new higher-order value you label anew. So, shift the values up and down, and feel free to group them into a “value cloud” on a higher level of abstraction that you name with a unifying label.  
   4. Continue shifting and shuffling your top values until you arrive at one primary value, two secondary values, and 2-3 secondary values.
5. Review your hierarchy of values and ask, “So what?” What is your cardinal value? What can you learn from your 5-6 top values that you’ve identified to be important in your life? How may they point you toward your passion (what you love to do) and purpose (why you’re here)? List any insights gained from the exercise in your notebook.

When you prioritize your values, be aware that some values may support each other while others flow in opposite directions. For example, ‘intelligence’ and ‘knowledge’ complement each other nicely, while ‘freedom’ and ‘security’ are opposing values. So, let your intuition guide you when considering what values flow in the same or opposing directions.

Conclusion: Let your values be your guide

“Create a ladder of values and priorities in your life, reminding yourself of what really matters to you,” recommended the American author Robert Greene. Become crystal clear about your personal values. They give you greater clarity and expanded self-awareness as a creative leader. They simplify decision-making in complex, ambiguous situations and help you to persist when the going gets tough. They mirror key aspects of your personality and authentic self and pinpoint your passion and purpose in life. And as a creative business leader, your values strongly influence the corporate values of the venture or company you lead. 

So, what are my personal values? My top three values are what I’ve dubbed free flow (freedom and flow), creativity, and personal growth (curiosity, learning, and expansion). Tertiary values that matter to me include positive life energy (vitality, balance, and health) and the Wow (= excellence, ambition, value, and experience).

But how can you be sure that our personal values align with your personality? Simply use TIPS, Thinkergy’s talent, and Innovator Profiling System. When your values and personality align, many of your top values are positioned in the vicinity of your TIPS profile on the TIPS Profiles Value Map. As you see on the map below, my three top values nicely fit my TIPS profiles as an Ideator. We will talk more about how personal and corporate values map out in TIPS and what it tells about the leaders and companies in certain industries in a future article in this blog.

• What are your top three values that guide your life and career? What value trumps others and matters most to you? 
• Ready to embark on a transformative journey of creative leadership? Join the Genius Journey and discover the power of personal values and the other elements of your essential core (belief, sense of self, passion, purpose). Take the TIPS test and unlock your unique talent type. Connect with us today and let your values be your guide to success!

© Dr. Detlef Reis 2024.

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