Have you ever attended a leadership course or corporate training session where you were asked to quickly jot down your core values? If you have, I’ll bet you identified around five values that you thought should be important to you and would be appropriate should you be singled out to share them with your colleagues.

But have you ever sat down in a quiet space and thought deeply about what is truly important to you? Are there things that are so important that you would be willing to make a stand for them, lose your job over them, give up your freedom for them, or even sacrifice your life to preserve them? This might sound somewhat dramatic, but I doubt many people have taken the time to consider what is truly important to them and what they are willing to do or not do in order to live according to their values. In fact, I doubt most people are even aware that they have a consistent set of values that guide the way they live their lives. Rather, they live according to what seems right to them at the time. But if they were to stop and think about why they make the decisions they make or act the way they do, they might just realise their free will is being controlled by internal and external factors and a sense of what is right or wrong.

Values can be grouped into three broad categories. These are individual values, societal values, and corporate values.

As humans, we are social creatures, so we need to conduct ourselves and behave in a manner that won’t see us cast out from our social group or network. When we are young this means acting in a way that subordinates us while we learn and become accustomed to what is acceptable to the group. As we grow and rise in status within the group, our values become important as they characterise who we are and they influence those who are subordinate to us. Our values underpin our moral character and define the type of person we are. Because we are brought up within our relevant social settings our individual values a generally aligned with those of our “tribe”.

The multicultural nature of the world today has seen a melding together of a broad range of values from various ethnic groups and geographic locations. There are also societies that are very conservative and have strict religious teachings or legal doctrine that determine their values. There can be significant differences between the values held sacred by one group to those held sacred by another and this has contributed to conflict throughout history.

In today’s business world, we now also have corporate values which tend to be linked to the ethical conduct of business and the adherence of organisations to their social and legal responsibilities. Unfortunately, business values are sometimes developed as a subset of the business planning process and are developed by senior leadership behind closed doors. An organisation’s values need to reflect the values of the society in which it operates as well as those of its employees. Trying to force employees to conform to corporate values that do not align with the individuals’ values doesn’t work as it’s the same as trying to convince a 13th-century religious scholar that the world isn’t flat.

All teams, groups, organisations, and businesses are made up of individuals whose values are shaped by their specific cultural, social, and religious upbringing and beliefs. Amongst all of this variability, there does; however, seem to be some consensus on core values within specific groups. Without diluting the absolute importance of the individual, societal groups do tend to share the same, or at least similar values such as the need to be loyal, honest, fair, humane, and free, noting that some cultures interpret these values differently.

While individuals may hold around five values as core to them, the variability in these values is very large and exists on a sliding scale.  Individuals within the same group may all hold honesty as a core value with most trying to be honest most of the time, while one may be dogmatic and another quite liberal in their adherence to this value.

With so many competing values the effective functioning of any group can be impacted upon by a misalignment of values. 

Many organisations now list their values on their websites and in their proposals and use them as a selling point. This can be construed as disingenuous as specifying that one of your values is honesty, for example, may be seen to imply that this differentiates you from your competitors when, in reality, acting honestly is a normal expectation of business by society and under the law. Similarly, listing courage as a value for your employees to adhere to is only valid and effective if management and leadership genuinely reward courageous behaviour, when in reality, too often the opposite is true. Others like teamwork are listed to encourage better collaboration and enhanced performance to only be undermined by compensation and promotion systems that reward individual effort.

If organisations are going to espouse specific values, they need to ensure that the values chosen are truly representative of how the organisation wants its staff, managers, and leaders to behave and how it wants to be known. Alternatively, an organisation made up of staff from very different backgrounds, might be better served by adopting and documenting a set of expected behaviours rather than a list of values. 

In my opinion, the two areas where values provide the greatest value are in shaping an individual’s moral character and in influencing individual and group decision making.