Why values matter despite the way leaders misunderstand and misuse them

Photo: Adrian Scottow

We hear a lot today about values: ‘family values’, ‘traditional values’, ‘conservative values’, ‘liberal values’ — even corporate values. ‘Values-based leadership’ has become another in the long line of panaceas to solve the problems of corporate under-performance.

But what are values? Do you have them all along, learn them somehow, or choose them like you might choose a club to join or a coat to wear? Are they a tool to be used or something fundamental about each person — to be tampered with at your peril?

Values are beliefs of a special kind: beliefs that come with a large emotional charge attached to them. Our individual values are the origin and location of our sense of who we are. They matter because we feel, deep down, that they do. Heart and head are not necessarily aligned when it comes to ideas. It’s pretty easy to fill people’s heads with notions, opinions and fantasies. The media, advertisers and politicians do it every day! We pick up all kinds of thoughts with little care for what we’re doing. Fortunately, we drop most of them just as easily. Yet while we may pick up a belief of any other type almost as casually — and put it down as easily — our values quickly become part of us.

Values and emotions are totally intertwined. So are values and behavior. In many ways, behavior is driven by values. Whenever you do something “because it’s right” you’re acting on your values. They define you in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Changing or abandoning your values is tough and painful business. Most people never do it throughout their lives. Those who do experience it as transformative, whether for good or evil.

If you can get someone to take on certain values, you can control much of their behavior

Ideas have power only when they seize our hearts as well as our minds; when they change our values to align with their direction. That’s what’s so dangerous about terrorists, fundamentalists and similar extremists. They set out deliberately to embed their values in the hearts of other people, so they can manipulate them for their own purposes. It’s the easiest way to gain and keep control over their followers. That’s why fanatics of every hue talk glibly of right and wrong in absolute terms, often trying to back up their assertions with appeals to their version of God. They avoid reason, because you can show false reasoning to be incorrect. False values can only be ‘unlearned’ deliberately, usually through realizing the hard way the pain and hardship they have been causing us.

Our hearts may, sometimes, be less easy to fool than our heads. They’re also a little less ready to pick up unconsidered direction from others. But they’re also far less ready to drop things once they’ve picked them up. Our values become part of us and letting some go takes resolve, even if they hurt us. Look at suicide bombers: a text-book example of the power of a twisted set of values over innocent lives.

The values you pass on to others really matter

The values we embed in our children, often without even thinking about them, may stay with them for the rest of their lives. The values we allow our society to follow will define us in the eyes of the rest of the world for decades to come. The values we express personally, through our dealings with others, especially at work, say who and what we are more loudly than our words can ever do.

We’re surrounded by groups eager to force their values down our throats; to tell us how to see right from wrong and what to believe. The more someone seeks to force you to accept their values, whether by open threats or by seizing the power of the law, the more it makes sense to resist. If they also disdain reasoned exploration in favor of emotional appeals and claims of divine authority, beware!

Authoritarian leaders and organizations typically demand total obedience to ‘their’ values. There’s no space for discussion or reasoning; no possibility of change or flexibility to cope with changing circumstances. We all believe our values are ‘right’ — if we didn’t, they would be our values — but the authoritarian personality adds the word ‘unquestionably’ in front of the word ‘right’ and expects you to follow suit.

Ethics are values too

Ethics are about doing what you believe is right, even if there’s no law to force you to act that way, no likelihood of being found out if you don’t, and sometimes no material benefit for either — even, maybe, some loss.

Laws operate through external compulsion: they punish you for breaking them. Ethics work by choice: you do what is ethical because it feels right — and the opposite feels wrong. It’s that which proves that they are values, however rational an explanation you can find to support them as well.

Honesty is a value. Concern for others is a value. So is freedom, which includes letting people make up their own minds about what’s right. Dictators and extremists suppress freedom of thought and expression because people who are free to think and explore quickly discover that what the extremists are asking them to do is in the extremists’ interests, not their own. That’s why the more we can uphold and foster true freedom of thought and conscience, even at the risk of life, the less power terrorists will have. We will have defeated them.

Ethical leaders are the only truly values-based kind

When you lead through values in an authentic way, you don’t manipulate as the authoritarians do. You don’t demand obedience to your personal beliefs. You don’t set laws and exact punishments for breaking them. You lead by showing who you are and what matters to you. If that picture is one that others find interesting and attractive, they will choose to align themselves with you. You won’t need to persuade them; they will persuade themselves.

When a leader is authentic — when his or her actions and values align and no dishonesty or fakery is found — others will start to take his or her behavior seriously. When that leader shows perseverance in sticking to his or her values, even if it would be expedient or profitable not to do so, others will judge him or her truly honest. And when the leader acts on those same values every day, in large matters or small, he or she will be accepted as ethical and trustworthy.

Authentic, honest and trustworthy. Wouldn’t you willingly follow a leader like that? Especially when all too many of today’s self-proclaimed leaders have shown themselves to be authoritarian, deceitful, dishonest and manipulative — to say nothing of egotistical: the value that puts ‘me’ before anything and everything else. Values are not there as tools to be used by marketers and spin-doctors to lead us by the nose. They are who you are. If your values are fake and tawdry, you’ll be fake and tawdry too.

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