Perspectives 1: Assessing your leadership values
“True leadership lies in guiding others to success. In ensuring that everyone is performing at their best, doing the work the pledged to do and doing it well.”
In 2022 I enrolled in the EDUCAUSE Executive Leadership Academy. This six-month, cohort-based program helps people on their way to becoming executives develop their leadership skills.
Here is a picture of Executive Leadership Academy cohort for 2022.
The course’s first module is about building your “leadership brand,” which I never gave much thought to. So our first exercise was to identify our leadership values. The activity turned out to be more challenging than I expected.
We started by taking the Barrett Values Center Personal Values Assessment. This is a free assessment, and I found the resulting insights interesting. The assignment required us to select some of the values provided by the evaluation and claim them as our own. Choosing values off a predefined list didn’t work for me. The list of single-word leadership values limited the reflection and exploration process.
After giving up on the predefined list, I spent a lot of time reflecting on my leadership values and came up with a preliminary list, which looked a bit like this:
Give people what they need to be successful
Wish for and support the success of others because their success makes you successful
Trust that people want to do good work and that it's our job to enable them to do so
We must have joy in our work
Everyone has value
Community amplifies belonging
Transparency, collaboration, relationships
I ran my newly found list past my work partner, Felix. Having worked with me for four years, Felix has a pretty good understanding of my values. He pointed out the value I hold most important: making sure people are treated respectfully and fairly.
My mentor also says we should group everything into sets of three. He firmly believes that people can keep three things straight in their minds. So if I were to try to combine my eight items above into three, the list might look like this:
Trust
Treat people right
Create a sense of belonging
Reflection
What are your top leadership values? Make a list then ask a trusted friend or coworker if you missed anything.
