Leading with Your Core Values

Your inner compass in times of change

Somewhere in a drawer, or a photo on an old phone, there is probably a flipchart page with your values written on it.

Freedom. Integrity. Growth.

Then Monday arrived. Board papers, a team issue that could not wait, three things that were already late.

And the words went quiet.

This is not a failure of seriousness. It happens to most of us, and it has happened to me more than once. Values tend to go quiet precisely when the pressure rises – which is the moment they would have been most useful.

When my own compass was missing

Years ago, at the end of my time in financial services, I had no clear language for any of this.

What I had was a feeling. Drained. Stuck. Successful in a way that did not seem to belong to me.

Looking back, the diagnosis is obvious. I wanted freedom – to work in a rhythm that matched my own energy. I needed courage – to move towards something I could not yet describe. And I was missing kindness as a way of working, not as a personality trait.

Naming that would not have made the decision easier. I want to be careful here, because the tidy version of this story is not true.

What it would have changed is the quality of the deciding. Less second-guessing. Less looking sideways at what other people seemed to want for me.

That is what values actually offer. Not certainty. Better questions.

What values are, and what they are not

Values are not goals. Goals are things you complete.

They are not aspirations either. Aspirations are things you would like to be true about yourself.

Values are the principles that shape how you lead, relate, decide and behave under pressure – whether or not you have ever articulated them.

Which means everyone already has them. The only question is whether they are running consciously or in the background.

Shalom Schwartz's cross-cultural work on values suggests they are relatively stable over time, but that their priority shifts with context and life stage. That matches what I see. People rarely acquire new values in their forties. They discover which ones have quietly moved up the list.

Why this matters under pressure

Here is the part worth understanding properly.

The prefrontal cortex – the region we depend on for judgement, planning and regulating our own reactions – is unusually sensitive to stress. Amy Arnsten's research at Yale has shown that under uncontrollable stress, prefrontal function is rapidly impaired, and control shifts towards older, more habitual circuits.

Under real pressure, we do not become less intelligent.

We become more automatic.

That distinction explains something senior leaders describe constantly: not an inability to decide, but a pull towards the default. The familiar move. The response that worked in a previous role, in a previous decade, in a previous version of the organisation.

Clear values do not switch that off. Nothing does.

What they do is reduce how much has to be worked out from scratch in the moment, because some of the thinking was already done on a calmer day. The decision arrives partly made.

There is also a body of research on self-affirmation, where reflecting on a deeply held value before a stressful task is associated with lower stress reactivity. It is suggestive rather than settled – it sits in health and social psychology rather than leadership research, and the size of the effect is debated. I mention it as an interesting direction, not as proof.

A client story

A CFO I worked with – let us call him David – had recently taken on a broader regional remit as part of his firm's global expansion. More visibility. A seat at the executive table. On paper, an unambiguous promotion.

In our first session he said: "It all looks good. I feel flat."

He knew something was wrong before he had language for it, which is usually the case with people who are good at their jobs. What took a few conversations was locating it.

The scope had changed the shape of his week. More alignment meetings, less of the strategic problem-solving that had drawn him into the work in the first place. Growth, one of his strongest values, had disappeared from his daily experience without anyone noticing – including him.

He was performing. He was not developing.

What he did about it was deliberately small. He started mentoring a finance lead in another region. He joined a strategy programme that genuinely stretched him. He began training for a half marathon, not for the medal, but because he wanted something in his life he was visibly not yet good at.

"I did not need a different role," he said later. "I needed to bring more of myself into this one."

Sometimes that is the answer. Sometimes the honest answer is that the role has to change. Coaching should be able to hold both.

The part that usually gets left out

Values are often discussed as though, once identified, they simply guide you.

In practice, the hardest moments in leadership are not values versus no values. They are values against each other.

Freedom against security. Kindness against candour. Loyalty against integrity. Ambition against presence at home.

Those conflicts do not resolve. You cannot optimise your way out of them.

What clarity gives you is not an escape from the trade-off. It is knowing what you are paying, and choosing to pay it deliberately rather than discovering the bill years later.

That is less comfortable than the flipchart version. It is also considerably more useful.

Worth sitting with

1. Which of your values feels most alive right now – and which one has gone quiet?

2. What does each one look like as behaviour, this week, under pressure? Not as a word. As something someone else could observe.

3. Where are two of your values currently pulling against each other?

4. Which value has been overruled so often that you have stopped noticing?

If a value cannot be described as a behaviour, it is probably still an aspiration.

A gentle invitation

If this resonates, you are very welcome to get in touch.

I work with senior leaders and founders navigating transition, complexity, and moments where what worked before no longer feels like enough.

Book a discovery conversation – no agenda, just space to think.

Further reading

Shalom Schwartz, on the structure of human values – the most rigorous framework available, and refreshingly unsentimental.

Amy Arnsten, on stress and prefrontal function – technical, but the source of the mechanism described above.

William Bridges, Transitions – on the difference between change and transition, and why the internal timetable rarely matches the external one.

#NousLeadership #KindDisrupter #ScienceMeetsSoul #ExecutiveCoaching #LeadershipTransitions #SelfLeadership