Connecting Personal Values & Leadership – a route to success

The values that drive us deep and personal, are the same values that drive us as leaders. Brene Brown, an American professor well known for her work on leadership and vulnerability, has also explored values and how they underpin how we show up both outside and at work. If you want to explore your personal values you might find this exercise from Brene Brown insightful – https://brenebrown.com/resources/dare-to-lead-list-of-values/.

Knowing, understanding and embracing your personal values, will help you to better know yourself as a leader. What motivates you, where you excel and how you make decisions are all driven from your personal value set. Being connected as a leader to your values will drive self-confidence in who you are and what you bring – enabling your strengths to complement those of others around you.

The Society for Human Resources Management defines values-driven leadership as “A leadership style and philosophy that builds on the shared beliefs and assumptions of the leader and the team. Because a common set of values is shared, teams experience greater alignment and benefit from higher productivity.” This definition intrinsically connects the values leaders to those of their teams and successful team outcomes.From this perspective there is potential to be realised from everybody within a team understanding their values and how they contribute to their lives at work and the teams they are a part of.

As leaders, women have often had to stretch and adapt their styles and strengths to better reflect and mirror those around them. Despite these challenges women have made great contributions to organisations and the careers of those they lead. But as leadership thinking shifts, modernises and enables leaders to bring their more complete selves to work, the role of personal values as a guiding light and motivational force is growing.

Values-driven leaders lead with purpose and vision. Being a value-driven leader may feel like a tall order amongst the day-to-day and a big concept to embrace. But it really derives from self knowledge, understanding and confidence. Embracing your values and leveraging them as your inner strength. It’s a concept that great leaders rely on and that aspiring and developing leaders can explore and learn from on their personal leadership journeys too.

Our Personal Excellence Programme (PEP) events and workshops will support your ambitions and develop your skills.

Tailored to the current stage of your professional life – early-in-career, mid-career and senior leader – our 2024 PEP programme focuses on delivering events across four areas of personal development.

Our February PEP,  ‘Adopting a human approach to leadership – and why we need it’ looks into human leadership and why is it important. This interactive session will cover why human leadership is essential in today’s workplace and what it looks like in practice.

You can keep up to date with all our events on leadership, (and many other relevant topics!) here.