Manila, 15 February 2023 — How finding your core values sets you up to play a bigger game.

Story

It happened in 1997. As Apple launched its Think Different campaign, Steve Jobs explained why clarifying and communicating your company’s core values are so important. The focus of marketing, he said, should not be on the product, but on something larger and more inspiring to the customers. As an example, he referred to Nike, where they talked continuously about athletes and athletics and not about the shoes they made. Listening to the 1997 clip of Steve Jobs reminded me of how important his message is for leaders today. Those at the top of companies, and also those at any level who want to bring about positive changes to their work and world.

What does it take to become a trusted leader? Well, it helps if the people around you know that you are not only good at what you do, but that you have a vision for where you want to go in your career and why. In my experience interviewing candidates for positions, this made a difference. One of my questions would be how the role they applied for would fit in their career plan, in their vision of where they wanted to go. Almost always, their answers provided clarity. Some would readily, and with a spark in their eyes, talk about their vision and values, while others remained focused single-mindedly on the application. While staff nowadays tend to change roles and jobs more frequently than before, it is still important for employers to find the talents who have worked on their vision and can communicate about it.

In the LEADyear 2023 Challenge in Grow3Leaders, that is what we did last month. The members in their Collabs worked on their leadership visions. For many, that was the first time they gave that a go. For everyone, it was a challenge to leave their comfort zone and think bigger. Of course, I took on that challenge too, and updated my own vision. Why is this so important to leaders? Well, it’s about what you will devote your life to doing and, consequently, what you will become known for. Leaders are on a journey to discover what they want to become known for, and then to get clear and communicate that to the people around them, so that they can execute on their vision. Today, when you work on your leadership vision, it can bring you back to discovering your core values, just like Steve Jobs recommended companies to do back in 1997.

Challenge

So how do you work on your leadership vision? The long answer is, from my experience, to work with a coach and a community of peer leaders and use a common framework to get you going, and then to share your insights and give each other feedback. The short answer is that you can start by yourself right away and, without overthinking, start creating (or reviewing and updating) your core values, your leadership vision, and your life purpose. It’s not the theory that matters, but your practice. That said, it’s real work, and it will take time and reflection, and preferably also feedback from others, to move you forward. What’s important in my experience as a coach is that this is not a one-time exercise. Our fast-changing world demands us to keep our core values, leadership vision, and life purpose alive by regularly reviewing and refining them and keeping them top-of-mind to guide and empower us in our daily and weekly work.

When Steve Jobs highlighted the importance of core values, he had just returned as Apple CEO and was fighting to lift his company out of the doldrums of stagnation, confusion, and poor performance. His focus was to bring transformational change to Apple, which he managed to do. Then I reflected on the work that my fellow water specialists and I did at the Asian Development Bank where we set out to do many things that were deemed impossible. I can still hear the voices from that time. Developing a client-driven Water for All policy? Impossible. Moving beyond trust funds to set up the bank’s first financing partnership facility? Impossible. Doubling the bank’s water investments? Impossible. Setting up a coaching program for water professionals? Impossible. And I could go on. Yet we did all of them and much more. Because we were driven by core values and vision. We had a big purpose and we were set on playing a bigger game.

Today, we need leaders and teams who will take on the ‘impossible’ of changing course in our businesses, cities, and countries in midst of a world beset by problems of global warming, (un)sustainability, water-related disasters, poverty, conflict, mental health, digital transformation, and more. Is it impossible? I would say that your response will depend on your leadership, and that in turn depends to a considerable extent on your core values, vision, and life purpose. What will you become known for? Is it going to be playing the same middling game, or is it going to be stepping up and playing a bigger game (this is one of the colloquial definitions of leadership)? It’s your turn to answer that. As leaders, it’s always our turn to transform first and then step up.

Question

When you do your homework to discover your core values, it can open up new career opportunities unexpectedly. That’s because your core values (what you hold to be important in your life) are linked to your leadership vision and your life purpose. As you work on all three, you will discover for yourself how they are connected. In my experience, I have seen how that can trigger leaders to make adjustments in their lives and career paths and take the benefit of new growth opportunities. They discovered that to play a bigger game, their ladder had been placed against the wrong wall. 

Here are a handful of the many surprising career shifts that I have witnessed in leaders I worked with. From biology to disaster management and then to business innovation. From corporate founder and executive to trusted strategic advisor and coach. From a student of international relations to transboundary water security to member of parliament and then to minister of ecology (in just a few years). From water planning to psychology to becoming a coach. From international water law to events management to becoming a facilitator and coach. And from international water management to leadership development through coaching and training (that’s me). And there are many more. These are just some I could remember in 3 minutes.

Coming to you, who knows what you will realize when you heed Steve Jobs’s example to prioritize working out your core values. Who knows what you will discover when you work on your leadership vision and life purpose? I can assure you that what you will find, after doing your homework the right way, is likely to transform what you will stand for as a leader and what you will become known for as a leader. Now, to get there, you will rarely feel in the right mind space during your busy weekdays at work. You need to give yourself some time and space (and company) to work on this. If you want to find out more about that, set up a Free Strategy Call, so we can discuss what you bring to the table and where you want to take your leadership to play a bigger game.