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Every great company and leader likely has talked about their values and why identifying them is important. In our experience at DS Leadership Life, we think so too. Nevertheless, often they end up plastered on posters in the break-room or are only talked about at quarterly retreats, never to be truly applied in our day-to-day work.

It’s worth understanding first that our values are constructs. A construct is like the weather and includes a lot of things. So, if we say we value “fun”, fun can mean a lot of things. Individually this matters as well as in our organizational life. The main point here is that our values need to be demonstrated through our behaviors. When we do that, we feel aligned and clear and when we aren’t doing that, we feel pretty miserable.

We need to come back to them again and again and ask ourselves this question: is what I’m about to do in line with my values or in conflict. The crazy thing is that sometimes we can have competing ones too. If you want to understand more about our values and how we under-express them over over-express them at different times, go to here and take the survey. It sheds light on much of our own internal conflicts.

Lastly, we need to use our values to guide our decision-making and our behavior. I think Steve Jobs really speaks well to this in the short video.

How do you express your values at work and in other areas of your life?