The Value With Nowhere To Go
Most leaders can name some of their values fairly quickly.
That's the easy part, and it's why the exercise so often goes nowhere. The ones that arrive first tend to be the ones that were easy to hold. Rewarded, or at least safe to say out loud.
No value has to fit the culture you work in. But the ones that do are easier to keep. And over ten years, easier does quiet work.
Which makes the second question the useful one. Which of yours isn't getting used?
Some you put down because holding them cost something. The one that didn't suit the industry. The one that got you called difficult. You stopped mentioning it, and then you forgot where you'd left it.
Others you never put down at all. You still hold it. You'd still name it if I asked. It simply has nowhere to go.
That second one is the harder one to catch, because on paper there's nothing wrong.
Let me say that again. On paper there is nothing wrong. And so you don't feel you have the right to complain about it.
She found it mid-sentence
We'd been talking about a reorganisation, the shape of her team for the following year. Then she stopped and said she hadn't disagreed with anyone in about eight months.
Not because she agreed with everything. At some point it had stopped being worth it. Then it had stopped occurring to her.
Her reviews were good. Her diary was no fuller than the year before. She was tired, and the work wasn't what was tiring her.
Some version of this arrives in my coaching room most weeks. Usually with an apology attached. No crisis. No bad quarter. No conversation you could point to.
This is one of the things sitting underneath the kind of tiredness I wrote about in my August letter. Not disengagement you chose. Something you hold that stopped being used, and carrying something you never use is tiring in a way that's hard to explain.
Values don't erode
The assumption underneath all of this is that something has been lost. Ten years in a demanding system, and the person you were has been worn away.
That's rarely what happens.
Shalom Schwartz's research suggests our values are more stable than we assume. They shift at the edges. A real transition can move them. But they don't quietly swap themselves out while we're looking the other way.
Which leaves a puzzle. If values are that durable, why do so many capable people feel slightly unfamiliar to themselves at work?
Because a value can be completely intact and still have nowhere to go.
A value is something you do
Here's the part that took me years to see:
A value isn't a belief. It isn't a position you hold about what matters. It's an activity.
It's also not who you want to be. It's who you already are, and what you need to be at your best.
Courage isn't thinking bravery is important.
It might be the unpopular sentence, said out loud, when saying nothing would have been easier. The decision made without cover. The number put in front of the board before anyone else has seen it. For someone else it looks nothing like any of that.
The examples aren't the point. The expression is the point.
Which is why the way in isn't a list. It's your own life.
My own four
Years ago I did the values exercise properly for the first time. Freedom, kindness, curiosity, courage. They sounded right, and that felt like the finish line.
Nobody told me the list was the easy part.
Naming courage is simple. Working out what my courage looks like on a Tuesday took a lot longer. It turned out to be small and unglamorous.
Saying the thing in the room, rather than in the email afterwards. Telling a client what I actually think, when the softer version would be easier for both of us. Putting a price on my work and not moving it.
None of that looks like courage from the outside. It's what courage is for me. And knowing that is the only reason I can tell when a month has gone by without any of it.
A value you can't recognise in your own behaviour is one you can't notice the absence of.
Why it's so hard to catch
Held without expression, a value doesn't disappear. It goes quiet, and surfaces later as a restlessness you can't explain.
A compass you've stopped reading still pulls.
Quiet is hard to spot, because nothing has been lost.
Two things make it hard to catch in yourself.
There's no alarm. A clash you notice. Something going unused makes no noise at all.
And we stop checking. Do something often enough and the brain stops asking whether it's still worth doing. It simply does it. The habit outlasts the reason for it.
Which is why this tends to be found rather than noticed. In a quiet week. On a long walk. Mid-sentence, in a conversation about a reorganisation.
The audit that works
Much of how I work with values started with Brené Brown. She asks people to narrow their list to two, and observes that almost everyone wants to keep ten or fifteen. Her reasoning holds. If everything matters equally, nothing guides you once the pressure arrives.
I don't think it needs to be only two.
What matters is that the list stays short. Short enough to remember without looking it up. And short enough that you've worked out what each one means for you.
That second part is the real constraint.
Take honesty. You and a friend might both name it and mean completely different behaviour. For her it might be saying the difficult thing in the moment. For you it might be refusing to present a number you don't believe. Same word. Different life.
Nobody can hand you that translation. You do it one value at a time, and that's slow work. Which is the real reason for keeping the list short.
Once you can say what each one looks like, you can check whether it's happening.
Skip the obvious question: am I still committed to this? It invites a loyal answer rather than a true one.
Look at last week instead. Not last year. Not in general. Last week.
For each value, find a moment. A real meeting. A real decision. A real sentence you said out loud. Not where you believe in it. Where it showed up in something you did.
Here's what usually happens.
One or two are alive and well, and you'll find them in minutes.
One is harder. You'll be tempted to count something that was nearly it. Don't. If you have to argue for it, it didn't happen.
And there's usually one you can't place at all. That's the one.
Where to put it back
The instinct is to look for somewhere big. A new role. A new company. A conversation with your chair.
Sometimes it is one of those. More often it's somewhere much smaller.
The meeting where you've been letting something pass. The piece of work nobody has offered you and you haven't asked for. Something outside your job entirely. That's often where a value goes first, when there's no room for it at work.
Pick one. Small enough to do this month. Clear enough that you'd know afterwards whether you did it.
Then the honest follow-up, once you've tried it. Is this a gap I can close where I am, or is this room simply too small for something I need to be doing?
Most of the time it's the first.
Naming it rarely means leaving. Most of the people I work with stay exactly where they are. What changes is how they hold the role.
Buried, it drains you. Named, it gives you room to move.
In one study, people who reflected on a personal value before a stressful task showed a lower cortisol response than those who didn't. Knowing what you value does something measurable under pressure.
The question isn't which values you'd list. It's which one you've stopped listening to.
Where this goes next
Seeing the gap is one thing. Closing it is another.
This work takes longer than an article. I take clients through a values process that does it properly, over more than one sitting.
We work with senior leaders and founders in finance and tech. Usually people stepping into something bigger, or working on how they land in a room.
Book a discovery call. 30 minutes, no pitch.
Further reading
Shalom Schwartz, on the structure and stability of human values.
Anthony Dickinson, Actions and Habits: The Development of Behavioural Autonomy (1985).
Brené Brown, Dare to Lead, on narrowing your values to two.
J. David Creswell and colleagues, on value affirmation and the stress response, Psychological Science (2005).
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