What factors did your organization consider in its last strategy exercise? I suspect they included competitors’ positions, customers’ desires, changing technology, regulation forecasts, structure and resources. Those are the usual inputs consultants and business professors recommend.
Those are all necessary. But there is another input almost every leader overlooks: their personal values.
When I share this advice, the response is sometimes incredulity. This happened just this week, in a class I taught for mid-career executives from Europe. One participant pointed out that incorporating personal values into strategy seemed to contradict the strategy guru who had taught them previous day that strategy should be ‘outside–in’, based on realities outside the organization, not internal interests.
You will be more effective, more resilient and more inspiring when the strategy fits your own values.
Other times, leaders respond with sheepish embarrassment. Isn’t it selfish to set strategy according to one’s own values when the leader is responsible to shareholders, employees and customers?
The answer is no. Incorporating your values into your strategy is not selfish and it is not an excuse to ignore external realities. It is a practical acknowledgement of a fundamental truth: leading a strategy is hard. You will be more effective, more resilient and more inspiring when the strategy fits your own values.
Why it matters
Consider the chair of a surgical department in a major hospital I worked with to create a strategy for her unit. We started with the standard inputs: patient needs, developments in research and technology and the rules of government agencies and private insurers that funded care.
She landed on a plan she believed would make her department one of the best in the world. Then I asked her to test it against her own values, which she had identified in an earlier workshop I conducted with leaders in her hospital. Over two decades, I’ve worked with more than ten thousand leaders from around the world to help them clarify their top values.
I asked the surgery chair to imagine pursuing the plan and to rate her anticipated satisfaction of each value. She moved quickly through the ratings, then paused, looked at me and told me there was a problem. One of her top values was relationships and the plan would create conflict with her mentor, the person who had built the department she now led.
We find the motivation to do hard things when we see them as a path to what we value most.
Why does this matter? Because we work better, harder and happier when pursuing goals that align with our own values. Executing a strategy means communicating a vision, setting benchmarks, battling resistance, adjusting to setbacks and keeping people focused when distractions mount. That takes tremendous motivation, the kind that comes from work you see as truly important.
Values are principles of evaluation. They determine what is good, bad and important to us. We find the motivation to do hard things when we see them as a path to what we value most.
What did the surgery chair do? She did not abandon the plan. It addressed real pressures her department had to meet. Instead, she changed her approach to implementation.
She protected the relationship before moving forward. She brought her mentor along, persuaded him of the new direction and gave him a role in the evolving department. The strategy succeeded. Without the values check, the conflict might have derailed the whole effort.
The impact is clear
Values also make you more effective at leading others. I once asked seasoned leaders to write and deliver a motivational speech to their teams. For half of them, I first showed them their own top values and asked them to keep those in mind while writing. All of the leaders delivered the speech to a video camera and the recordings were rated by peers and communication experts.
The results were striking. Leaders who had their values in mind were seen as more authentic and more worthy of trust. Authenticity has been called the ‘gold standard’ of leadership. Connected to your values, you project it naturally.
Resilience, motivation, authenticity. These are the leadership benefits when strategy aligns with your values. Here is how to get there.
1. Clarify your values. Reflect on people, ideas, experiences or opportunities that strike you as very good, very bad or very important, and ask what makes them so. Then consider synonyms for each word you surface and ask which resonates most. An AI chatbot can help with that.
2. In your next strategy exercise, do the outside-in work: analyze the world, distill insights, make choices. Then run a personal test against your own values.
3. Imagine pursuing the strategy and rate your expected satisfaction for each of your top values. It is fine if you can’t foresee satisfying all of them fully. But if you don’t see any being strongly met or if you expect any to be violated, you have a problem.
4. If you find a conflict, first reconsider your implementation plan. How can you pursue this direction in a way that is authentic for you? If you cannot find one and there is no other viable path available, you may not be the right person to lead this strategy.
Strategy should begin outside–in, with a clear-eyed view of markets, customers, competitors and capabilities. But it should not end there. The final test is personal: whether the strategy allows you to lead with the motivation, resilience and authenticity that hard choices require.
