leadership core values essay

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The 13 essential leadership values for anyone leading a team

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What are leadership values?

The importance of a leader with values

13 Important values of a leader

Core values of a leader make for great leadership.

What makes a great leader?

Is it someone who takes command with a firm leadership style ?  

Does it take an ethical leader who seeks to follow their moral compass and embraces the shared values of their employees?

Or is a successful leader one who can transform a company’s culture  so that it allows each individual to thrive? While also reaching company goals  and staying true to each core value of the business?

It is all of these things and many more.

If you’re an aspiring leader who is intent on supporting your team, you might be feeling a little overwhelmed at all you need to be. Especially if you're also focusing on transforming and improving organizational culture. And want to be recognized as exhibiting ethical leadership behavior .

Take a breath because we’ve got your back.

We’re going to explore the 13 core values of a leader that you should foster to be the type of leader you dream of.

Let’s start, in a typical leadership style, at a high level.

Values are the underlying beliefs that guide our decisions and actions and ultimately shape our days and careers.

Leadership values are a subset of those values that positively influence one’s ability to lead effectively or be a ‘good leader .’

You can foster and develop leadership values with time. However, as with many character traits, you will probably have a tendency toward one specific leadership skill or another.

You can uncover these natural leadership qualities  by asking yourself questions such as:

• What values guide my personal life?
• How do I react in common situations (such as when confronted with change)?
• What kind of leaders do I gravitate to (such as a passionate leader or a more strategic leader)? Do you gravitate toward leaders who lead with a strategic foresight ? 

You should also consider this question: What are the goals, mission, and culture of my company?

The leadership values related to effective leadership at your company will lie at the intersection of your personal values and your company’s values.

The importance of a leader with values

Everyone has values , but not everyone exhibits good leadership values.

Anyone in a leadership role should be aware of the values they hold, their strengths, and the areas they can improve on as they grow as a leader.

Because your values determine how you execute leadership, the team environment you create, and the success of your company. The values you display as a leader will permeate your entire organization and affect its performance.

Leaders who adhere to their values earn respect and commitment from their teams. Value-driven leadership can inspire others not just to follow them but to adopt those values as their own.  

By embracing the notion that you can develop leadership qualities, you can also choose leadership values to develop. This is possible both through leadership training and mindful attention and practice.

Let’s review 13 core values that an outstanding leader should demonstrate.

1. Empowerment and development

As a leader, you are in a position of power.

Instead of trying to keep all that power and control for oneself, an effective leader empowers others and amplifies their own impact as a result.

This empowerment can come from formal employee training, ongoing coaching, and workforce development . Mentorship and the delegation of responsibilities can also help.

Empowering others through mentorship and delegation of complex tasks creates a stronger team. With it, you will help build future leaders you can rely on with confidence.

Leaders have the important responsibility of creating and maintaining the organizational vision. What does the company seek to become in the next 5, 10, or 20 years, and what steps are required to realize that goal?

“...As a visionary leader, you should be thinking about more than just the next quarter. You should also be thinking about the next decade, and what your company’s reputation and place in the world will be after 40 quarterly results.”  Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors

When you center vision as a leadership value, this means you keep the big picture at the forefront of your decision-making.

It also means employing foresight to plan for obstacles. Keep an eye out for anything that may get in the way of your company’s vision, and be ready to update the vision as you gain more experience and information.

Successful leadership also includes the leader’s ability to communicate that vision to their team members. The message must be shared in a meaningful, actionable, and engaging way.

3. Communication

“Communication and communication strategy is not just part of the game—it is the game.”  Oscar Munoz, executive chairman of United Airlines

Communication  is the foundation of any relationship.

In a work setting, centering communication as a core leadership value manifests in many ways. It can take the form of conveying context to employees. Or it can be setting clear expectations for individuals and teams. Or even providing and seeking constructive feedback .

A leader may have a clear vision, but unless communication is a driving value, others will not be able to share it.

4. Reinforcement and influence

Positive reinforcement and recognition to your team members are important forms of communication.

“The number one thing that you have to do as a leader: to bolster the confidence of the people you lead.”  Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

When things are busy, it can be all too easy to speed along without making an effort to show that you noticed someone’s contribution.

However, positive reinforcement is a huge aspect of improving employee motivation and engagement. Not only that but in lifting your influence as a business leader.

Without recognition, the motivation of team members  can lag, and their productivity will grind to a halt.

By demonstrating appreciative behavior, you encourage others to reinforce each other too. This helps boost employee morale across the organization.

Empathy  is the ability to understand others, see from their point of view, and feel what they are feeling. It is a value that is held in high regard by many senior executives and good business leaders.

The importance of empathy as a leadership value is not simply to be nice or likable. You can build a far stronger team by exercising empathy and understanding each person’s motivations with whom you work.

Empathy will help you match people’s strengths and skills to roles where they can make the most impact. It will help you build and sustain positive and productive relationships. It will also help you recognize the core values of others on your team.

This is the knowledge that you can harness for the betterment of each individual and the company.

6. Humility

Leaders must constantly be learning . To be in that receptive state of mind requires humility.

Opportunities to build wisdom can easily be lost if you are not willing to recognize and process mistakes. Humility also means knowing when to ask for input from others.

If you have a gap in knowledge in a certain area, seek advice from those with more experience or from coaches. If your strategy is not connecting with your audience, consult the people closest to the work or your customers.

Having a strong sense of emotional intelligence , self-awareness , and humility is a key leadership trait. It prevents leaders from becoming insulated from the outside world. In turn, this allows them to focus on becoming better leaders all-around.

7. Passion and commitment

An extraordinary leader is not only capable of commanding influence or communicating successfully.

They are also:

• committed to meeting organizational goals  
• passionate about the company and their leadership role within it
• and demonstrate ferocious resolve when faced with adversity

A leader with this kind of mindset can motivate everyone around them. Their passion and energy are so infectious that it drives and uplifts the entire team.

As a leader, you can demonstrate respect through many of the behaviors already listed here:

• Empowering others
• Strong communication skills
• Recognition of employee abilities
• Empathizing with the situations of others

Respect should also move in all directions. Treat upper management, your board, employees, and customers with the respect they deserve to gain respect in return.

It’s also important to build a culture  where differences are respected and appreciated. Having diverse viewpoints within the organization is a strength, and those who differ from you in opinion should feel as valued as those aligned with you.

9. Patience

Patience is a value that is often learned with time but is an incredibly important skill for those in leadership roles. At its heart, patience is about delayed gratification .

Leaders need to be patient with new hires who aren’t up to operating speed yet. They also require patience with existing team members who are working out how to deal with complex issues. This is especially true where the leader may be able to tackle with greater ease.

Patience also benefits leaders who have long-term goals, such as quarterly or annual sales targets. These goals can only be achieved incrementally through perseverance and patience.

10. Resilience

A key nature of business is change, and as a leader, you often take the brunt of big changes — or even initiate them.

You must be able to weather these times, not only for yourself but for your team.

This is not to say you can’t have human reactions to challenges, but ultimately your team will respond to how you handle hardship and communicate the outcomes.

Employees look to their leaders for cues during unpredictable phases, and a show of resilience at the top will bolster the entire organization.

Resilience has tangible positive outcomes  as well. As BetterUp’s study on resilience shows, it increases revenue, encourages innovation, and retains employees .

11. Honesty and transparency

Employees want a coach and leader who is honest and transparent about their performance, business objectives and directives, and internal company politics.

Nobody likes to feel like they are being lied to or deceived. A little leadership authenticity goes a long way.

Transparency does not mean telling everyone everything as soon as you hear it — there is a time and a manner in which to convey information.

You want to be aware of how new information impacts people and impart it with care, utilizing values we’ve discussed like empathy, communication, and respect.

Take a company reorganization, for example. You don’t want to sound the alarm that change is coming before you’ve worked out the details. Nor do you want to spring the news on people the day before everything shifts.

Valuing transparency, in this case, would mean communicating why there is a reorganization and getting other company leaders on board with how it affects them and their teams. It could also include hosting a Q&A for everyone who will be affected and setting clear expectations for how and when changes will occur.

“Being transparent about our plans enables us to get better feedback.”  Shantanu Narayen, chairman, president, and CEO of Adobe Inc.

12. Accountability

One of the values that many employees admire in a leader is accountability .

Accountability means taking responsibility for one’s duties and goals and, at times, owning responsibility for the shortcomings of one’s team.

However, strong leaders also need to be prepared to hold their employees accountable for the tasks they are responsible for, which helps to promote personal growth with your team.

13. Integrity

Integrity is a character trait that gains respect and trust.

As a leader, integrity means approaching all of your work with consistency and coherency: the way you communicate with others, carry out your organization’s mission , and approach new situations.

Integrity means honoring commitments (including to yourself) and doing what you say you will do, as well as approaching challenges in ways that are coherent with other values and beliefs.

Leading with integrity can sound abstract because it encapsulates so much, but you can think of it as integrating all of your core leadership values  — the end doesn’t justify the means if the means violate our core values.

The people who work for us notice if we only exhibit our values when times are good. By knowing your leadership values, reviewing them, and having them guide your actions, you will be leading with integrity no matter what your company faces.

Becoming a great leader is a journey that will last your entire career.

Of course, the sooner you start focusing on these leadership values, the faster you’ll become the leader you want to be:

• Empower and development
• Communication
• Reinforcement and influence
• Passion and commitment
• Honesty and transparency
• Accountability

Are you looking for a helping hand in developing your leadership skills? Check out how we help leaders grow .

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Maggie Wooll, MBA

Maggie Wooll is a researcher, author, and speaker focused on the evolving future of work. Formerly the lead researcher at the Deloitte Center for the Edge, she holds a Bachelor of Science in Education from Princeton University and an MBA from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Maggie is passionate about creating better work and greater opportunities for all.

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Leadership: Definition and Values Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Definition of leadership, leadership values, definition of empathy, the impact of empathy on company performance.

While participating in class discussions, I have noticed that most of my skills have developed to a great extent. Particular attention needs to be paid to qualities such as leadership and empathy. In today’s world, these skills are highly valued, so developing them is very important. These qualities are undoubtedly necessary for life; they are applicable in all fields. Leadership and empathy will help me reach the heights of my career and become a highly skilled professional.

Psychology and sociology define leadership in the same way, as some social influence in a group with the expectation of achieving common goals. Accordingly, a leader is a person who has this influence (Banks et al., 2022). The leader must have qualities to help the team achieve the most effective joint work. Most companies worldwide require leadership development to organize to be as efficient as possible (McCauley & Palus, 2021).

A whole expert environment has developed in this area, manifested by a huge amount of theoretical material and practical classes. A person can learn techniques, techniques, and certain ways of communication and develop the skills of a real leader, to master all that is offered by courses, training, and other events. However, unfortunately, they do not teach empathy, determination and courage, diligence, and a passion for achieving goals. These qualities are not skills but personal characteristics that depend on the individual.

I think these characteristics are inherent to me, and working in the classroom has only helped me improve this skill. Since childhood, I have liked to take an active role in games, acting as a leader. For example, I can give an example of my activities in school: when it was necessary to organize an event, I always took responsibility. I liked to organize the process and manage the team. I think I was very good at it because I always got praise from my classmates and teachers.

In leadership, it is very important to follow specific values shaped by a particular leadership experience. The first value I can identify is the search for ways and opportunities. Leaders go beyond what they are used to, taking risks and experimenting. Of course, not all experiments are successful and can often have disastrous results, but sometimes it is impossible to achieve something new using traditional methods. Leaders are not afraid to take risks and step outside their comfort zone. A leader is in constant motion and search; any motion is about overcoming obstacles and limitations.

The next value is giving direction to employees. A leader can look at the situation more broadly and from the outside. This makes it possible to work out a movement strategy and be ready for different scenarios of the situation, quickly making adjustments in response to changes in the surrounding world. The leader creates a clear image of the future and communicates it to others. A sincere desire to achieve a goal goes beyond the personal self, infecting others with enthusiasm.

I can form the third value of leadership: empowering others to act. Successful leaders help subordinates grow and assert themselves by enhancing competence, involving them in decision-making processes, and objectively evaluating their contributions. A leader needs to help his subordinates become leaders, grow professionals, and delegate more and more authority to his subordinates, which will encourage people to reach new heights in response. Encouraging a new vision is undoubtedly important; the leader motivates the team to innovate. The leader needs to show human attention, care, and personal gratitude because people appreciate it and reach for greater goals.

The last value is setting an example and following the mission and values. The company’s mission and system of values are the most important elements of any business organization’s existence and long-term development. This system serves as a constitution by which the whole organization lives. The values provide answers to questions about the mechanisms of decision-making under conditions of high uncertainty and risk.

The next quality I developed in myself is empathy. Empathy is conscious empathy for the emotional state of others, the ability to recognize what they are feeling, and to express compassion. Empathy differs from sympathy in that it creates a connection between people instead of disconnection (RSA, 2013). The skill of empathy helps a person feel a sense of belonging to what is happening to a person, and the person will understand that his or her emotions are important to others. This skill is necessary for building interpersonal relations because it is possible to find a common language, come to agreements, and develop a strategy that satisfies both parties only if one can put oneself in the other’s shoes.

Empathy affects a company’s image, efficiency, and quality of work of its employees. Loud statements that employers give to their employees do not always turn out to be reality. This reduces trust in the company and the desire to work in it. However, as soon as management keeps its promises, the company is transformed, and employees begin to trust their bosses and willingly perform their duties.

Empathy influences innovation because to develop a good idea; an employee must genuinely want to help the person and solve their problems. This approach helps employees create more personalized technologies to meet customer needs. Empathy impacts sales and service because empathetic service builds relationships between customers and managers. This approach is often found in coffee shops, restaurants, and the luxury segment when the client wants to sincerely help, serve, and learn about his affairs – this inevitably increases sales.

Empathy affects employee engagement; they have a higher goal than earnings. It is embedded in the cultural code; employees see their coworkers empathizing with their customers. Then they get more engaged; they want to come to work and talk to customers. They realize they can make someone’s day better and see a smile on another person’s face.

I have this quality because I can empathize and put myself in another person’s shoes. I need to understand that my employees or clients feel comfortable. I am always willing to come to the rescue if needed. A good company is built on trust and understanding between employees and supervisors. I understand that good interpersonal relationships are only possible with such a quality as empathy.

Thus, I can say that these qualities are very important in building a career. Without leadership qualities, it is impossible to manage a team, and without empathy, it is impossible to achieve the role of a good leader. That is why I can say that these skills are interrelated. When a person achieves one of them, the achievement of the next one becomes inevitable. I continue to improve these qualities, as constant development is crucial in achieving any goal.

Banks, G. C., Dionne, S. D., Mast, M. S., & Sayama, H. (2022). Leadership in the digital era: A review of who, what, when, where, and why . The Leadership Quarterly , 101634. Web.

McCauley, C. D., & Palus, C. J. (2021). Developing the theory and practice of leadership development: A relational view . The Leadership Quarterly , 32 (5), 101456. Web.

RSA. (2013). Brené Brown on Empathy . [Video]. YouTube. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2023, December 6). Leadership: Definition and Values. https://ivypanda.com/essays/leadership-definition-and-values/

"Leadership: Definition and Values." IvyPanda , 6 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/leadership-definition-and-values/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Leadership: Definition and Values'. 6 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Leadership: Definition and Values." December 6, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/leadership-definition-and-values/.

1. IvyPanda . "Leadership: Definition and Values." December 6, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/leadership-definition-and-values/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Leadership: Definition and Values." December 6, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/leadership-definition-and-values/.

20 Leadership Core Values: Why They Are Essential for Building a Strong Foundation

• May 6, 2024

Leadership extends beyond only decision-making and strategy. Its essence lies in adhering to leadership core values. As a leader, you should know the core values essential for building a solid foundation. From the perspective of leadership, it is evident that core values are not just guidelines but the very essence of what makes a leader genuinely influential.

Leaders who embody and promote core values within their organizations set a powerful precedent. Their actions, decisions, and behaviors reflect their personal character and shape the culture of their teams and organizations.

These values provide a moral compass, guiding leaders in making ethical decisions, building trust, and fostering a positive and inclusive work environment. They align the goals and actions of a team, ensuring a cohesive and unified direction.

Each leader should take time to consider various core values, recognizing that they differ for everyone. Reflecting on these values can be a helpful part of making decisions, ensuring that actions align with personal principles.

In this blog, we will discuss 20 leadership core values for you to reflect upon. We encourage you to identify with values that align closely with your personal and professional beliefs and let them guide your leadership journey.

Understanding And Identifying Leadership Core Values

It’s essential for leaders to recognize and understand their own leadership core values, as these values are important in shaping their decision-making and guiding their actions. Embracing these leadership core values is vital for leaders, as they significantly influence their professional and personal conduct and choices.

1. Integrity

Integrity is one of the most critical leadership core values. Leaders who embody integrity are recognized by their commitment to doing what’s right, regardless of challenges. This value plays a crucial role in leadership by building trust through transparency, which is essential for effective teamwork. It ensures ethical decision-making. Leaders with integrity set an example within the organization, serving as ethical role models and shaping a culture of trust and responsibility.

2. Accountability

Accountability means taking responsibility for one’s actions and decisions and sets a powerful precedent for teams. Accountable leaders inspire their team members to take ownership of their work, enhancing performance and engagement. Moreover, the awareness of being accountable encourages more deliberate and informed decision-making, leading to more effective outcomes. This sense of responsibility improves individual choices and strengthens the overall team dynamic.

Respect goes beyond polite behavior; it’s about genuinely valuing each person’s contributions within an organization, including team members, clients, and the broader community. When leaders show respect, they send a clear message that every individual is important.

This leadership core value enhances employee engagement, as respected employees are more motivated and perform better. It also cultivates a positive workplace culture where everyone feels valued, boosting morale and job satisfaction. Additionally, a leader’s respect for others significantly shapes their personal and professional reputation, setting a standard for how they are perceived and treated in return.

4. Transparency

Transparency in leadership, marked by open and clear communication, fosters trust and an inclusive work environment. Transparent leaders share information honestly, eliminating confusion and hidden agendas. This approach builds trust as team members understand the rationale behind decisions and actions. It also cultivates an open culture where everyone feels comfortable sharing ideas and concerns, enhancing participation and inclusivity. Additionally, transparency is key in reducing rumors and misinformation, which can harm organizational morale and productivity.

5. Innovation

Innovation is about creating a culture that values creativity and adaptability, encouraging unique approaches and thinking outside the box. Innovative leaders foster an environment where experimentation is welcomed, and failure is seen as a learning opportunity.

This mindset is crucial for several reasons: it promotes creative problem-solving, often leading to groundbreaking solutions; it drives change, helping teams adapt and grow in a constantly evolving world; and it inspires others, as the leader’s openness to new ideas motivates the team to embrace creativity and change.

Empathetic leaders who genuinely connect emotionally with their team make members feel heard and valued. This approach enhances teamwork, as team members are more inclined to share ideas and issues, leading to stronger collaboration. It also boosts employee satisfaction, with understood and valued employees being happier and more committed. Additionally, empathy fosters a more inclusive workplace by recognizing and appreciating diversity, contributing to a respectful and welcoming environment.

7. Collaboration

Collaboration is a key strategy for achieving tremendous success and efficiency in any organization. This collaborative approach fosters a dynamic, innovative, and supportive work environment crucial for the organization’s success and longevity. It offers significant benefits: it creates opportunities for mutual learning and skill-sharing, enhancing professional development; it makes teams more adaptable and flexible, enabling them to respond effectively to changes and challenges; it optimizes resource use, reducing waste and increasing operational efficiency.

8. Excellence

Leaders committed to excellence create an environment where quality is standard, encouraging teams to aim not just for ‘good enough’ but for ‘great’ or ‘outstanding’. This commitment to excellence enhances problem-solving skills as leaders face challenges head-on, seeking innovative solutions. Such a focus on excellence is fundamental for leaders aiming to make a significant impact and foster continuous improvement in their teams and organizations.

Courage is essential for facing risks, making tough decisions, and upholding what’s right, even in challenging situations. It drives innovation, trust, ethical behavior, and effective change management. Courageous leaders treat failures as learning opportunities, demonstrating resilience and growth. They uphold ethical standards, standing firm on integrity even in the face of adversity. Additionally, courageous leaders are advocates for their teams and ideas, defending their members and championing what they believe is best for the organization.

10. Humility

Humility is a key leadership core value centered around recognizing one’s limitations and being open to feedback. It’s not about undervaluing oneself but focusing more on others and being approachable, adaptable, and committed to continuous learning and growth.

Humble leaders foster a culture of learning, as they acknowledge they don’t have all the answers and remain open to new ideas and improvement. This enhances teamwork by creating an environment where everyone feels valued and encouraged to collaborate and share ideas. Additionally, humility helps reduce conflicts and power struggles, contributing to a more harmonious and effective work environment.

11. Service

As a leader, embodying the core value of service means prioritizing the needs and welfare of others above personal interests. This selfless approach aims to achieve objectives and focuses on the well-being and growth of team members and the community.

Leaders who embrace service enhance team morale and job satisfaction, as team members feel valued and respected. A service-oriented leadership fosters positive organizational change, focusing on the greater good rather than solely on profits or personal success. This transformative impact benefits both the leader and the organization as a whole.

12. Sustainability

Sustainability as a leadership core value is about guiding businesses towards long-term viability and ethical responsibility. It’s a strategic approach where leaders balance immediate financial goals with the broader impact on the environment and future generations. This future-oriented mindset involves considering the enduring effects of business activities.

Embracing sustainability can significantly enhance a company’s reputation, appealing to a growing demographic of socially responsible customers and partners. This shift often leads to increased brand loyalty and a competitive edge in the market. Moreover, sustainable practices, like reducing energy use or minimizing waste, can lead to operational efficiencies and cost savings, bolstering the business’s financial health.

13. Adaptability

Adaptability is essential for navigating and leading through change with flexibility, readiness, and confidence. This skill is crucial for keeping organizations relevant and competitive while business and technology evolve constantly.

Adaptable leaders maintain composure during uncertainty, making clear decisions that instill confidence in their teams. They view change as an opportunity for continuous learning and growth, fostering an environment where both they and their teams can thrive and evolve. This adaptability is key to successfully managing the dynamic nature of today’s business world.

14. Visionary Thinking

This value is key for leaders aiming to make a significant impact and guide their teams to sustained success. A visionary leader doesn’t merely respond to current events; they anticipate and prepare for the future, motivating others to embrace this journey. This approach leads to future-focused goal setting, where leaders create a compelling vision that directs the team’s efforts toward long-term objectives. It enhances change management, as visionary leaders identify future trends and ready their teams for upcoming changes, keeping the organization agile and competitive.

15. Global Awareness

Global awareness goes beyond understanding different cultures and markets; it involves integrating this knowledge into leadership practices to enhance inclusivity and effectiveness. Leaders with global awareness value diversity and inclusion, creating teams where diverse perspectives are valued and everyone feels heard.

Understanding global dynamics provides a competitive advantage, enabling leaders to anticipate market changes and adapt strategies effectively. Additionally, it strengthens their ability to build and maintain international relationships, opening doors for business expansion and collaborative opportunities.

16. Decisiveness

Decisive leaders navigate challenges and capitalize on opportunities efficiently, instilling confidence in their teams and stakeholders. Their ability to act swiftly prevents delays, leading to more efficient operations and successful outcomes. Clarity in decision-making provides a clear direction for the team, reducing confusion and enhancing focus on tasks.

Moreover, a decisive leader fosters confidence among team members; seeing their leader confidently make well-informed decisions creates a sense of trust and stability within the team.

17. Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and manage personal emotions and those of others, is crucial for effective leadership. Leaders with high emotional intelligence can recognize and respond to their own emotions and those of their team members, enhancing communication, strengthening relationships, and promoting a positive work environment.

This skill leads to stronger team relationships, as emotionally intelligent leaders are more approachable and empathetic, fostering trust and connection. It also increases empathy, enabling leaders to understand better and motivate their team members. Additionally, emotional intelligence is vital in managing stress, allowing leaders to handle challenging situations without negatively impacting their team.

18. Learning Orientation

Learning orientation is about maintaining an openness to new knowledge and experiences, a core value that significantly influences a leader’s performance and growth. Leaders who embrace this mindset are well-prepared to navigate an ever-changing world effectively. It fosters continuous personal growth as leaders actively seek new skills and insights, keeping them at the forefront of their field. It also cultivates humility, as these leaders acknowledge they don’t have all the answers, making them more approachable and effective listeners. Moreover, prioritizing learning sets the tone for a culture of growth and education within the organization, encouraging everyone to embrace continuous learning and development.

19. Inclusiveness

Inclusiveness ensures that everyone, regardless of their background or beliefs, feels heard and valued. This approach fosters a positive and productive work environment, stimulates innovation, enhances decision-making, and upholds ethical standards.

Inclusive leaders strengthen their teams and equip their organizations to navigate the complexities of a diverse world effectively. Emphasizing inclusiveness leads to increased employee satisfaction and retention, as it creates a welcoming and supportive atmosphere. It also enables leaders to effectively reflect and serve a diverse customer base in today’s global market, understanding and catering to various needs. Furthermore, inclusiveness is a cornerstone of ethical behavior in the workplace, promoting fairness and equality.

20. Resilience

This core value is essential for leaders to steer through difficult times and foster long-term growth and success. Resilient leaders effectively handle pressure, maintaining calm and focus within their teams during challenging situations. They view failures not as setbacks but as learning opportunities, fostering a culture of growth and improvement. Additionally, resilience involves managing emotions effectively, allowing leaders to make clear and reasoned decisions in challenging circumstances.

Why Are Leadership Core Values Essential?

Leadership core values are not just important; they’re essential. They shape every aspect of an organization’s culture, strategy, and day-to-day operations, laying the groundwork for sustained success and integrity.

• Guiding Principles: Core values provide leaders with direction in complex situations, ensuring consistent and integrity-driven decision-making.
• Inspiring Trust and Confidence: Demonstrating core values consistently builds trust among team members, a cornerstone of successful collaboration and leadership.
• Alignment and Cohesion: Core values align individual goals and strategies, fostering unity and a shared sense of purpose within teams.
• Attracting and Retaining Talent: Clear, strong core values draw and keep employees with similar beliefs, enhancing engagement and loyalty.
• Reputation and Brand Image: Living out core values boosts an organization’s reputation, making it more attractive to customers, clients, and partners.
• Adaptability and Resilience: Core values offer stability during change or crisis, aiding effective adaptation while preserving the organization’s ethos.
• Ethical Standards: Adherence to core values is vital for maintaining integrity and ethical practices, which are crucial for long-term organizational success.
• Long-term Vision and Sustainability: Core values aid in making informed decisions for sustainable growth, focusing on the organization’s long-term health and success.

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Leadership core values are not just lofty ideals; they are practical necessities for effective and sustainable leadership. They serve as the compass guiding every decision and action, shaping not only the leaders themselves but also the culture and success of their organizations. As leaders, regularly reflecting on and realigning with these values is essential for personal growth, team cohesion, and organizational success.

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Effective Leaders Articulate Values — and Live by Them

Here’s how to bring clarity to what you value to improve workplace decisions — before a crisis presents tough trade-offs..

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Values lie at the heart of effective leadership, serving as the foundation for decisions and organizational cultures. Yet in the lecture halls, meeting rooms, and offices where we teach leadership, we regularly see a muddiness around how to think about these core principles.

Individuals are often unsure about what constitutes a “value.” When asked to delve deep into personal moral codes and what it means to hold certain standards and ideals, people struggle to clearly convey what they believe and how their actions reflect these beliefs. In truth, we have found that people don’t spend much time thinking about what they stand for unless they face a crisis — by which point, they are unprepared to properly evaluate the possible trade-offs among competing values or the long-term consequences of decisions.

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Values are shaped by mindset and choice. People can consciously identify what they value and purposely choose to prioritize it. Though there are many different types of values, some can bring joy and groundedness, whereas others can generate misery or at least difficulty. In practice, some values are destructive or dysfunctional to achieving the results we seek. Understanding why some values serve us better than others is a distinction that can set the course to our ultimate success or failure.

Here, we offer practical steps leaders can take to explore, evaluate, and refine their values to make better decisions and lead organizations toward success. We explain how leaders can develop actions, metrics, and checkups to confirm if they’re really following those principles.

Practical Steps for Leaders to Articulate Their Values

Explore your values and keep the ones that ground you. Successful leaders set aside dedicated time for introspection. They cultivate curiosity about what truly brings them fulfillment. Yet, as with many tenets of leadership, this is easier said than done. Sitting quietly, just thinking about personal values, can be a frustratingly ineffective endeavor. Values are often too abstract to pinpoint without the aid of a structured activity and tangible object.

We recommend leaders begin by identifying an artifact — a simple but tangible object — that symbolizes something they hold dear in their lives. This object can be something that helps tell a personal story about an important topic. We ask individuals to think about how this meaning was formed and what role the belief has played in their personal and professional lives.

Successful leaders set aside dedicated time for introspection.

We’ve seen people select photos of loved ones to reflect their sense of responsibility to others, an army boot that symbolizes belief in sacrifice and service to a greater cause, and tattoos that commemorate a commitment. The process of picking an artifact and explaining its meaning to a colleague helps people uncover what matters most to them. These tangible objects often represent their core values.

Of course, other structured activities can similarly help us discover our deeply embedded beliefs. Journaling is one such tool. Writing down what makes you feel good and the experiences you find interesting can help you not only explore but, more importantly, evaluate your values.

In his book about adopting a counterintuitive approach to living a good life, author Mark Manson makes the case that good values are typically ones that you have control over (that is, you can choose to express them). They are, he says, immediately achievable in how you orient your mind. Good values are also socially constructive. Consider the value of honesty, for example. You can control whether you are honest, and though it might be hard to do sometimes, being honest is typically socially beneficial in the long run.

In contrast, Manson argues, prioritizing external validation — be it through social approval, a singular focus on material success, or being right (or righteous) — is characteristic of bad values. These principles can damage our well-being and be socially destructive. For instance, we all know individuals who value being correct all the time. But this is a value that is untenable and unrealistic. Holding that value is likely to generate more problems than solutions. Popularity as a value is also not great because it’s completely out of our control. It doesn’t matter how you orient your mind; you cannot choose to express popularity.

Good values are typically ones that you have control over.

As you generate ideas for what matters most to you, check whether your values are achieved internally or rely on external events. Generally, the most useful values are things you can directly influence through your personal mindset. Good values are generally aligned with positive actions and reflect an objective reality. Then, consider how much you’re choosing values that are based on others’ perceptions. Deprioritizing these values will help your internal grounding. You’ll have a more stable platform from which to make decisions.

Evaluate your progress. Identifying and articulating your core values are important first steps. Next, measure how those values are influencing your decision-making by keeping track of how you actually express values through personal and professional choices.

Within your personal life, a simple way to do this is to list your values and allocate the number of hours per day (or week) you spend on choices that express these values, the quality of personal energy spent while engaging in these activities, and the amount of money you spend in their pursuit. For instance, if personal growth is a value, what can you identify that you do each week to invest in it? Are you challenging yourself by learning a new skill? Are you setting aside time to learn this skill when you are fresh and energized? Are you spending money on a class or employing the right expert or coach to help you refine your new skill? Taking stock of how your stated values align to how you invest your time, energy, and money can help clarify how effectively you are living your values.

In translating this practice to the workplace, the authors of The Leadership Challenge , James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, encourage leaders to write a personal credo. The goal is to bring clarity to what you value and how you express it in the workplace. To begin, imagine you are about to take a six-month sabbatical during which you will have no contact with your work team. You must create a one-page memo to let them know the principles and metrics that you believe should guide their decisions and actions in your absence. What values will you prioritize? List them in rank order. How will your team know if their work is consistent with these values? Identify specific metrics. Detail all of these things for your team to resolve the inevitable conflicts and issues that could arise during your absence. Afterward, if you feel so inclined, you can share the outcome of this exercise with your actual team and encourage them to do the same task to build a sense of shared values.

List your values and allocate the number of hours per day (or week) you spend on them.

Choosing metrics of value alignment may feel unnecessary and difficult at first (for example, how do you tangibly evaluate high-level constructs like honesty?), but metrics are critical tools to assess whether work products and procedures are in line with agreed-upon principles. Falling short in these metrics can be an important signal to individuals that their own values or their organizations’ values are not effectively translating to decisions and behaviors.

Refine your values through regular reevaluation. Leaders who continually pressure-test the alignment between their values and practices will be better equipped to navigate challenging situations. This is particularly important when we consider that values are not always static. Some evolve over time as individuals and organizations experience different conditions and circumstances. When leaders refine and articulate values that fit a specific situation and context, employees are more likely to feel inspired and take actions in line with those values.

Take, for instance, the challenges that have beset Boeing. When a door plug blew off an Alaska Airlines flight just minutes after takeoff in January 2024, questions regarding the quality and safety of Boeing’s 737 Max airplanes resurfaced. After fatal incidents in 2018 and 2019, Boeing leaders were once again facing the grounding of all Max models by the Federal Aviation Administration. One finding has been the misalignment between Boeing’s espoused values of “safety, quality, integrity, and sustainability” as a top priority while using stock price as the most important metric of success. Indeed, investigative reporters have traced back a significant shift in how success is measured at Boeing to the company’s 1997 merger with defense manufacturer McDonnell Douglas. To emerge successfully from its crises, Boeing’s top executives will need to re-create and adapt — within a new context — the value-aligned processes and metrics that brought the company to engineering excellence in the past.

When leaders bring specific values to life, employees can see opportunities to do the same in their own corners of the workplace. For example, Megan Johnson, a nurse and instructor at the University of Michigan School of Nursing, and Steve Vinson, DEI program manager for ambulatory care at Michigan Medicine, championed introducing Black hair care products to the hospital system. “When I worked the night shift, I had patients that would tell me, ‘Wake me up at 6:00 so I can get ready for the provider,’ because, to them, their experience was different if they didn’t look a certain way,” Johnson said on a university podcast . Vinson added that the effort he and Johnson put to overcome the administrative hurdles in pursuit of this change — to purchase a supply of Black hair care products instead of depending on staff to share their own with patients — was a way to demonstrate what it means to live the university’s core value of inclusion. “We talk about those values a lot, but this was an example of folks really walking that walk,” he said.

In our own classroom, we have seen a significant increase in the awareness and importance students place on identity-based issues. Our value of inclusion has remained a priority; however, as we adapt to external cultural shocks and changes, how we practice this core principle has evolved. Our efforts to develop and strengthen a psychologically safe and inclusive classroom has required us to renew and refine the language we use, update the teaching examples we provide, and broaden the cohort of practitioners who engage with our students.

Related Articles

As you reevaluate how you prioritize your core values and their corresponding metrics, you should also seek to identify and correct any misalignments. Through refining your understanding of your own values, you can ensure that your decisions remain consistent with your core principles.

Understanding values is not a passive endeavor. It’s an active process that demands introspection, articulation, and ongoing commitment. Core beliefs are the cornerstone of effective leadership, guiding leaders on a path of principled decision-making and purposeful action. By recognizing the features of useful values and adopting practical steps to uncover and uphold them, leaders can harness the full potential of core values to achieve both personal and organizational success.

About the Authors

Morela Hernandez is a professor of public policy and business administration at the University of Michigan. Catherine Summers (Owsik) is a postdoctoral fellow with the Erb Institute and the Ford School’s Leadership Initiative at the University of Michigan.

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Jon vanhala.

Understanding Our Core Values: An Exercise for Individuals and Teams

Last year, I read Brené Brown's book Dare to Lead . I am very fond of her book Daring Greatly . Dare to Lead covers much of the same subject matter—relationships, vulnerability, shame, being present—but I found the framing of these themes with a focus on leadership particularly valuable.

The word leadership makes me uncomfortable. It is often used to evoke a caricature of leadership—cunning, bravado, strength, decisiveness, certainty—a caricature that is missing the depth, connection, purpose, authenticity, relatedness, and understanding of true leadership. In Dare to Lead , Brené defines leadership broadly, without any association to role, title, seniority, or relationship:

I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.

This definition recognizes that everyone in an organization can provide leadership, and that leadership can involve developing and nurturing tooling, technologies, procedures, source code, documentation, relationships, and culture, in addition to people.

A value is a way of being or believing that we hold important. Brené believes that leaders always carry a clarity of values, and that leaders do more than profess their values, they practice them. As leaders, we need to be clear about what we believe and hold important, and we need to ensure that our intentions, words, thoughts, and behaviours align with our values.

Explicitly identifying our values takes reflection and contemplation—deeply personal work that many people have never taken the time for. I thought it would be valuable for me to define and express my core values, and to get each person on my team to do the same, as a way to improve self-awareness, understand each other better, identify leadership opportunities, and support each other in our values. This essay is an exploration of this exercise: an exercise in exploring, identifying, expressing, and sharing our core values.

Defining Our Core Values: An Exercise for Individuals

In Dare to Lead , Brené presents a list of values. [1] The list includes a diverse set of over 100 values, values like accountability, achievement, balance, competence, excellence, family, giving back, joy, legacy, order, patience, recognition, resourcefulness, travel, wealth, and wisdom. You can also add your own values. The exercise is to narrow this large list of values down to your two core values.

As Brené describes, reducing this list to just two values is universally difficult. Most people will identify with 10 or 20 values. However, if many values on the list are important to you, then nothing is truly a driver. The most difficult work comes in focusing the list of values that you identify with—Brené calls these second-tier values—down to just two.

After completing this exercise and observing a number of friends and colleagues complete this exercise, I think the most effective way to focus our values is to first identify all of the values that we connect with, then organize them into values that relate to each other. This mapping helps establish our motivating values that our other values support. As Brené elaborates:

I've taken more than ten thousand people through this work, and when people are willing to stay with the process long enough to whittle their big list down to two, they always come to the same conclusion that I did with my own values process: My two core values are where all of the "second tier" circled values are tested.

Exploring My Values

The values I identified with are underlined below. I also added three of my own: quality , objectivity , and diligence .

I am an engineer, so a number of these values make sense at face value: ethics , intuition , knowledge , learning , resourcefulness , understanding . We must be careful, however, to avoid misinterpreting another person's values from our own perspective. We need to reserve judgement, stay curious, ask questions, and develop the cognitive empathy required to appreciate these values from the perspective of the other person.

For example, some people will misinterpret my identification with values like ethics , excellence , fairness , integrity , and justice . They will think, "Yes, that is Colin: harsh, judgemental, inflexible, and unforgiving. He speaks in absolutes and extremes. If he would just lighten up a bit and take things less seriously, he would be a lot better off!" But this interpretation is very different from how I see these values. I associate them with being equitable , objective , caring , and responsible . [2]

Time is another value that might be misinterpreted without further explanation. I value time to work by myself, or with a small group of people, with focus, in a state of flow, doing deep, challenging, high-quality work. I do not enjoy context switching, or making reactionary decision without the time to digest, contemplate, and experiment. I do not enjoy making short-term investments without recognizing the systemic impacts or aligning them with longer-term objectives. This is something that I often find in conflict with my role as a manager, dealing with a fractured schedule and making myself available for interruptions. It is also in conflict with the noisy and distracting open-plan offices that are so popular these days, and the never-ending stream of email, group chat, code reviews, Tweets, and so on. [3] Being responsible for operating critical, customer-facing production services, where I may have to respond to a production incident at the drop of a hat, also influences how I value time. Sometimes, even just the anticipation of an interruption is enough to ensure I struggle to get work done. [4]

As I refined my values, four of them rose to the top and I organized my other values around them.

Note how connecting values with other values helps give them more texture and makes them easier for others to interpret. Some values I identified with in multiple ways. For example, time in terms of the quality of my time and my experiences, but also as the time to learn and expand my knowledge . Understanding I identified with knowledge , but also with vulnerability , in terms of feeling understood by others.

As I examined these values further— quality , independence , knowledge , and vulnerability —it became clear to me that quality was my top value. It was the driver for almost all of my other values. [5] As I explored vulnerability more, I concluded that the values I categorized with vulnerability were also about quality : the quality of my relationships, the quality of the experiences that I share with others, and the quality of the organizations that I am a part of.

Narrowing my values to just two was difficult. Quality was undoubtedly my top value, but independence and knowledge seemed almost equal. One of my colleagues pointed out that one cannot have independence without knowledge , and suggested I pick knowledge . However, I identify with these values the other way around: it is from knowledge that I can be independent , express my creativity, take risks, and be unique. My colleague helped me identify knowledge as my second core value.

Expressing My Two Core Values

As I already mentioned, organizing your second-tier values around your two cores values helps give them texture and helps other people understand them:

Once you have identified your two core values, form a sentence for each one that concisely communicates this value to another person. My two core values are quality and knowledge . I value the quality of my work, the quality of my experiences, and the quality of my relationships. I value knowledge because it is the foundation of understanding and fuels my ambition, creativity, independence, and intuition.

Sharing Our Values: An Exercise for Teams

After identifying our values individually, I met with each person on my team and we shared our values, one-on-one. It was an enlightening experience. Even though some of us have been working together for years, it helped me understand people more completely, and it helped people understand me better, as well. It was important that I shared my values, rather than just asking people to share their values with me. This made it a shared experience, building trust and connection.

After sharing my values, one person commented that they sound like the values of a more senior engineer. There was more clarity in them and they were focused on depth, excellence, independence, and continued learning. They compared them to the values of someone earlier in their career, where they might value learning, growing, having an impact, and making a difference. [6] It is reasonable that some values would shift over time, especially through life-changing events, like having a child or changing careers, that broaden our perspectives. Other values will be less mutable and ingrained from our early childhood. [7]

The core values of my colleagues who participated in this exercise were: knowledge and collaboration ; independence and commitment ; personal-fulfilment and openness ; respect and personal-fulfilment ; making a difference and freedom ; growth and making a difference ; contribution and trust ; and, finally, compassion and ambition .

The final part of the exercise was to share our values with the rest of the team. One person commented, "I would like to share and hear what other people's values are—that is where I will really learn." We shared our values during a team off-site meeting. Each person shared their two core values and, since this was a team-building exercise, we each identified why these values were important in our work.

When listening to someone share their values, we need to be very careful not to impose our interpretation of the value. The other person's mapping of that value, based on their experiences and perspectives, may be wildly different from ours. For example, consider environment . Two of my colleagues identified environment as a value. For one person, environment was related to their work environment, identifying it with collaboration, openness, respect, flexibility, and lack of toxicity. For another, environment was the importance of the connection between their work and its impact on advancing renewable energy and sustainability to improve people's lives and the health of our planet.

It is equally important to recognize that other people will not always see us or understand us the way we see and understand ourselves. A really valuable book for understanding the values that drive you, as well as providing perspective on how other people interpret you, is Please Understand Me . [8] As an example, describing Rationals , like myself:

One of the most important things to remember about Rationals, if they are to be understood, is that they yearn for achievement. Some might suppose that these seemingly calm and contemplative types have no strong desires. But beneath the calm exterior is a gnawing hunger to achieve whatever goals they set for themselves. [9] —David Keirsey in Please Understand Me II

As I already mentioned, rather than just stating your two core values, relate them to your second-tier values and define a sentence for each one. This provides others enough perspective and texture to avoid misinterpretation. Staying curious and asking your colleagues to tell you more is also an excellent way to avoid misinterpretation.

The Values of a Team

One of the reasons that teams are so valuable is that they invite diverse experiences, perspectives, opinions, and contributions. The individuals that form a team will not all share the same values, but their values should be compatible and complimentary. As teammates, we have the wonderful opportunity to respect, celebrate, and support each other's values.

For my teammates, I see common themes in their values. They want to learn, grow, and express their creativity, doing so in an environment that is open and respectful, where they are making a difference and working on problems that are meaningful. They want connection to each other, as well as connection to their work, including the greater meaning, purpose, and lasting impact. They want agency and autonomy. People want to contribute and be empowered to make decisions that have an impact. [10] I believe most teams would exhibit similar themes in their values, because these are the values that Dank Pink identified as our intrinsic motivators—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—in Drive , one of my favourite books.

The opposite of autonomy is control. Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement. Engagement leads to mastery, the desire to get better at something that matters. — Dan Pink

Many of my colleague's values— learning , commitment , connectedness , relatedness , respect , perseverance , authenticity , reliability , excellence —are related to my top value: quality . They value the quality of their experience, the quality of their work, and the quality of their impact. This is not surprising, since this is a team that I built and it will undoubtedly reflect my values in the process. It is also unexceptional, because teams of engineers will fundamentally value quality.

One of my favourite ideas from the software classic Peopleware , is the notion that you cannot negotiate quality with a team. The internal quality bar of an effective team is just so much higher than what anyone can impose externally. If you try to dictate quality, you will drive out pride-of-workmanship, the team will be unhappy, and you will lose the team. This is a theme that others have repeated: Erik Dietrich, in the article How To Keep Your Best Programmers , and Bryan Cantrill, in his talk Leadership Without Management: Scaling Organizations by Scaling Engineers . If you focus too much on short-term thinking and solutions, you will never leave enough time for the long-term thinking and investments that lead to the quality that engineers crave.

They don't understand the most fundamental truism of software: functionality, quality, and schedule—you get to pick only two. By the way, if you're going to pick functionality and schedule, I'm out of here, and so is every other high-quality engineer, because I don't want to deliver shit. — Bryan Cantrill

It is invaluable for a team to explicitly identify and express their shared values. As Brené writes in Dare to Lead , "We can't live into values we can't name". My articles On Being a Team Lead: Welcome to Our Team and Reflections on Being a Team Lead were my attempts to express and align our values as a team. Both of these articles have been especially valuable when shared with people who want to join our team. People can ask themselves, are these values that I identify with, values I share, values I want to uphold? [11]

I enjoyed the exercise of exploring our core values. It improved my self-awareness, it broadened my understanding of my colleagues, and it helped my team improve their understanding of me. My colleagues universally felt this was a valuable exercise. Because we are all leaders , it deepened our understanding of our preferences and highlighted areas where we have the agency to make a meaningful impact.

Regardless of the values you pick, daring leaders who live into their values are never silent about hard things. — Brené Brown in Dare to Lead

Exploring, identifying, and expressing our core values is a vulnerable experience. Sharing our core values with colleagues is an even more vulnerable experience. But that's the whole point: going through this exercise as a team helps build the self-awareness, understanding, and relatedness that are the foundations of a psychologically-safe and high-performing team. If your teammates understand your values, it will be easier for them to understand where you are coming from, it will reduce conflict, and it will help them support you in staying true to your values in your work. Aligning shared or complimentary values can clarify the mission of a team.

Team dynamics and psychological safety are the most important aspects in understanding team performance. — Accelerate

It would be useful to revisit this exercise over time, to see how our values change. Even if they do not change, reflecting again on our core values and sharing them again with friends and colleagues will strengthen our relationships and understanding of each other. Reflecting on our values over time takes this exercise to the next level. It can help us understand when it is time to leave a job—before becoming frustrated or bitter—and it can help us understand when the underlying driver for a value is related to aspirations, judgement, expectations, or shame. I will explore these subjects in a subsequent article .

The list is also available on Brené's website . ↩︎

I have encountered situations where people mistakenly think I want others to be held accountable, but I do not even like the word accountable . As Brené writes in Dare to Lead , "Blame is so easy and accountability is such a time suck. And no fun at all." I prefer the word responsible . I believe we are responsible for our work, but we are only accountable to ourselves . ↩︎

I disable notifications for almost all applications, but when I do open them, keeping up with a large number of unread messages, even if they are well curated, still imposes a significant penalty on my time and attention. ↩︎

I wrote about this some in my essay The Cost of a Meeting: Is the Daily Stand-Up Worth It? . It is why I enjoy working on my writing for this blog on the weekends when I can find the time to focus and get deep into my work (usually) without interruption. ↩︎

For people who have never met me, they can probably see a reflection of this value in the essays that I write on this website. They tend to be long, considered, and detailed. I write these essays for myself, and I certainly understand that they will not be everyone's cup of tea. What is important to me is long-term quality. Some of my early work can be quite scrappy and disorganized, then I refine it over time. ↩︎

These are also values of a senior engineer, but a senior engineer likely feels more accomplished and, therefore, more comfortable living into these values, giving them less emphasis. ↩︎

This happens through contributing factors like shame and how we were conditioned as a child, well before we can talk. I will expand on this more in a subsequent article. ↩︎

I found the book Please Understand Me really valuable for understanding myself and how others see me. I have referenced it a couple of times on this blog in the articles An Interview as a Listening Session and On Being a Team Lead: Welcome to Our Team . ↩︎

An important value for Rationals is that these are goals they have set for themselves, not goals imposed by others. ↩︎

Agency is often overlooked. Even too much collaboration can erode agency . I wrote more about agency in my essay The Importance of Agency . ↩︎

I also think it is really valuable to explicitly describe how the team works and, through this process, explore and express the values of the team. An excellent example is Rob Witoff's manifesto How One Eng Team Works . My team has a git repository that describes how we work. It includes documents on team structure, communication preferences, development methodology, recurring meetings, and programming philosophises. ↩︎

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10 Core Leadership Values Every Manager Should Embody

Published on: , december 8, 2023, updated on: .

Written by 

Lucy Georgiades

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Effective leadership is all about inspiring, guiding, and setting a precedent for your team. As you develop your management skills, following a set of core values can help guide your approach to leading your staff.

In this blog, we delve into what leadership values are, why they matter, and which ones every manager should embody to excel as a leader.

As you embark on the journey of effective leadership, remember that continuous guidance can make all the difference. Visit Elevate Leadership Coaching to discover how our tailored coaching programs can help you develop the essential values and skills for outstanding leadership.

What Are Leadership Values?

In your personal life, you likely have core principles that guide your actions and choices. These values serve as a compass that helps you navigate situations you encounter.

In the same way, leadership values are principles and “people skills” that you apply to your own management style. They shape how you interact with your manager, coworkers, employees, and customers in the workplace.    

Why Every Manager Should Have Leadership Values

When properly communicated, leadership values can result in a stronger workforce. A Leadership IQ study of 4,360 employees and leaders found that employees are 115% more engaged when their organization has a well-defined set of values.

And most importantly, leaders who embody their values earn the respect and commitment of their team. These leaders don't just command authority. They inspire others to follow them in pursuit of broader organizational goals, and help their teams internalize these values themselves.    

10 Essential Leadership Values to Practice                    

While every great leader can identify and develop their own unique core principles, focusing on these 10 leadership values can help lay the groundwork for a highly effective approach to management.

1. Clear Communication

Effective leaders prioritize clear communication with their team. Employees who understand the company’s mission and how their tasks fit into broader goals are better able to succeed.

How to communicate clearly: Share your vision and goals with your team regularly, and encourage open dialogue. This means not only conveying your thoughts but also actively listening to others.

2. Role Modeling

Want to see change in your team? Lead by example. The best managers live out the behaviors and attitudes they expect from their teams. Role modeling fosters a culture of responsibility and integrity within each group.

How to be an effective role model: Model responsibility by admitting your mistakes, taking ownership of your decisions, being punctual, and showing a strong commitment to your work.

3. Psychological Safety

Psychological safety promotes healthy conflict and allows team members to take risks, speak up, and share concerns without fear of punishment. In fact, a McKinsey study found that nearly 75% of employees associated leadership behaviors rooted in psychological safety with a positive team climate.

How to provide psychological safety: Encourage risk-taking and reassure your team that failure is a part of the learning process. Celebrate diverse viewpoints and encourage constructive debates among your team members. Consistently let your team know it’s safe to come to you with concerns and that there will never be retribution for reporting problems in the workplace.

4. Authenticity

Authenticity in leadership involves self-reflection, openness to feedback, and a willingness to improve. Authentic leaders inspire trust and loyalty in their teams, which creates a more cohesive and motivated workforce.

How to promote authenticity: Be genuine in your interactions. Share your leadership journey, including your challenges and how you overcame them.

5. Proactivity

Proactive leaders are dedicated to personal growth and the development of their teams. This not only enhances their own skills but also sets a positive example for their colleagues.

How to be proactive: Encourage your team members to identify new projects for themselves and support them in pursuing those initiatives. At the same time, seek additional opportunities for yourself, such as volunteering for new projects or mentoring others.

6. Humility and Vulnerability

The modern workforce favors leaders who show humility and vulnerability over those who think they have all the answers.

How to show humility and vulnerability: Acknowledge that you don't have all the answers and be open to learning from others across your organization, regardless of their position. Encourage employees to present ideas even if they differ from your own.

7. Setting Boundaries

Establishing healthy boundaries is vital for personal well-being and a productive work environment. This can be particularly beneficial for leaders who are showing signs of overwork, burnout , and poor work-life balance.

How to set boundaries: Establish a healthy work-life balance. Adhere to your own boundaries for your personal and professional life, and in turn, respect those that your team members set for themselves.

8. Continuous Learning

Leaders who prioritize continuous learning create a work environment where new ideas are valued. And as an added bonus, keeping your team’s skills sharp can help your company stay competitive.

How to encourage continuous learning: Plan and participate in learning and development activities with your team. For example, on-demand programs like Elevate Academy are an easy way for your team to constantly improve their leadership skills over time.

9. Accountability

A culture of accountability starts where everyone on a team (including its leaders) understands what is expected of them and feels personally responsible for their objectives.

Accountability is uniquely tied to seeking and receiving feedback. A Gallup study of over 65,000 employees found that workers who received thoughtful feedback had 14.9% lower turnover rates than employees who received no feedback. Furthermore, Workleap found that 69% of employees say receiving positive feedback beyond their regular performance reviews motivates them to work harder.

How to promote accountability: Set clear expectations and hold yourself and your team accountable for meeting them. Celebrate successes and constructively address issues. Regularly communicate feedback and provide your team with the necessary resources for them to do their jobs.

10. Adaptability

A big part of any leader’s job is managing and driving change. And in challenging circumstances, leaders should be adaptable and should show resilience for their team.

How to encourage adaptability: Being adaptable means always maintaining a positive attitude, even when changes are negative. Find solutions rather than focusing on problems, and clearly communicate your thought processes with your team.    

Communicating Your Leadership Values to Your Team

Communicating values is crucial for building a cohesive and motivated group, especially if you lead a team of managers.

Start by presenting them in a team meeting as well as through written communication. Explain why your values matter to you and how they influence your decision making. And lastly, invite feedback from your team. Ask how they see these values affecting their own work or if there are any conflicts with their own ideas.

Start Building Your Leadership Values

Identifying and embodying a set of core leadership values is crucial for any manager to lead effectively. By integrating these qualities into your leadership style, you can inspire and guide your team toward greater success.    

Are you ready to elevate your leadership journey? Visit us at Elevate Leadership Coaching to discover more insights and tools that will empower you to embody these essential leadership values.

Founder & CEO @ Elevate Leadership

In London and Silicon Valley, Lucy has spent over a decade coaching Founders, CEOs, executive teams and leaders of all levels. She’s spent thousands of hours helping them work through challenges, communicate effectively, achieve their goals, and lead their people. Lucy’s background is in cognitive neuropharmacology and vision and brain development, which is all about understanding the relationships between the brain and human behavior. Lucy is an Oxford University graduate with a Bachelors and a Masters in Experimental Psychology and she specialized in neuroscience. She has diplomas with distinction in Corporate & Executive Coaching and Personal Performance Coaching from The Coaching Academy, U.K. She also has a National Diploma in Fine Art from Wimbledon School of Art & Design.

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Home Essay Samples Business

Essay Samples on Leadership

What type of leader i am: examining my leadership.

What type of leader are you? This question delves into the unique qualities, values, and approaches that define my leadership style. As a leader, I recognize that my actions and decisions influence others, and understanding my leadership style is crucial for effective collaboration and impact....

• Leadership Styles

How to Be an Effective Leader: Guiding with Excellence

Becoming an effective leader requires more than just holding a position of authority; it entails embodying qualities that inspire and guide individuals toward shared goals. Whether leading a team, an organization, or a community, effective leadership is marked by the ability to foster collaboration, motivate...

• Effective Leadership

How to Be a Good Leader: The Path to Effective Leadership

Leadership is a multifaceted skill that involves guiding and inspiring individuals or groups toward a common goal. While leadership styles may vary, there are essential qualities and practices that define effective leadership. In this essay, we will explore how to be a good leader, discuss...

Are Leaders Born or Made: the Nature vs Nurture Debate

Are leaders born or made? This age-old question has ignited debates, discussions, and exploration into the realms of leadership. The inquiry into whether leadership is an innate trait or a cultivated skill has intrigued scholars, practitioners, and curious minds. This essay delves into the heart...

• Leadership Development

Analysis of President Barack Obama as a Leader

Successful leaders possess distinct traits and qualities that set them apart. One such leader is Barack Obama, who exemplifies several key leadership characteristics. Inspirational communication, unwavering conviction, and a willingness to take risks are among the qualities that have contributed to Obama's success. Furthermore, Obama's...

• Barack Obama
• President of The United States

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Leadership and Management: My Personal Philosophy of Leadership

Everybody can be a leader. Nevertheless, I feel that not every individual can lead effectively. I also believe that it is not a position but a process. Leadership is an action to influence other people to move and accomplish the same goal. Leaders are ineffective...

• Leadership and Management

Leadership Development: Analysis of My Leadership Experience

This reflective essay is an analytical look into my leadership experience not only as a leader but also as a member of a group. I specifically adopted the situational approach and the path-goal theory when presented with different leadership challenges hence the adoption of changing...

My Chevening Leadership: Leadership Skills that I Developed

I acquired leadership skills from early adulthood based on my experiences in church and my family. I developed organisational, resilience and other leadership skills which have been honed over the years. My leadership skills continued in secondary school when I started volunteering and campaigning against...

What Is Leadership For You

It is a general term that can have very different meanings with broader possibilities and scales associated with it, and it goes through some evolution with constant permutations and combinations that go on forever. It starts from ancient times and then into the Middle Ages...

Important Role of Leadership Quality and Professionalism

Dedication, strength, honor, and integrity, are just a few of the descriptive words that can be used to define a leadership role. Accountability, knowledge, as well as integrity are words used to help describe professionalism. Notice how the words used to describe these roles are...

The Meaning Of Leadership To Me: Qualities That Create A Leader

For countless millennia, we had witnessed the birth of several societies and organizations that had flourished from successful leadership. Today, in modern businesses you could immediately tell how the leadership it had evolved into at present and the leadership it had decades earlier. Take for...

• Personal Qualities

The Definition Of Leadership: What Does Leadership Mean To Me

My leadership philosophy is established about the need for a leader to encourage and inspire to do what motivates them. It can be accomplished by a leader and at the same time attaining the goals and the task of the team, department, institution, or corporation...

• Personal Beliefs

Chelladurai's Model Of The Leadership

The model that is used for leadership in sports would be the Chelladurai's model of leadership. Chelladurai's model is a framework which builds on research from non-sporting settings in order to analyze effective leadership in sport. The fundamental target of the leader is to achieve...

Example Of Effective Leadership In Jeff Bezos Life Path

Since the beginning of people’s lives, everyone makes choices and decisions which gradually define a person itself. It is often difficult to identify whether the decision was good or bad because each person has a different level of awareness of the importance. Some things which...

Leadership Style Of Jeff Bezos

Jeffrey Preston Bezos is an American technology entrepreneur and the founder, CEO, and president of Amazon.com. Since high school, he has had an interest in computer science which led to him pursuing a degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University in 1986....

Management Vs Leadership: The Good And The Bad Of Being A Manager

Being a manager is a job. Being a leader is a role. Increasingly companies are seeing that you need both skills for an effective work environment. In the article, “What Leaders Really Do” by John Kotter, John highlights the differences between a leaders and managers,...

Ender's Game Character Analysis Essay

A mission that decides the destiny of humanity, its survival or obliteration, is a challenge many will succumb to. Failure is not an option. Ender’s Game, a science fiction novel written by Orson Scott Card, tells the story of Andrew “Ender” Wiggin who fights in...

• Ender's Game

The Rule of Charlemagne: The Development of Europe Under Successful Leadership

“Right action is better than knowledge; but in order to do what is right, we must know what is right.”- Charlemagne Charlemagne, also known as Charles I, Charles the Great and the Father of Europe was an important Germanic figure in medieval times and has...

• Charlemagne

The Benefits and Disadvantages of Transformational Leadership Style

Transformational Leadership deals with the motivation, inspiration, and encouragement of the personnel in order to carry out the innovative and creative change. This change directly helps the company in the growth and allows the scope for development. This leadership style is based on improving the...

• Charismatic Leadership

What Makes a Leader Charismatic

Leadership is a dense genre that had remained under debate regarding the difference in opinions of the definition and components of leadership, and either it is intrinsic quality or learned behavior. Despite all the debate, Leadership can be contributed as a personal impact that is...

The Influence of Mansa Musa's Leadership

The most important aspects of this topic would be the importance of Mansa rebuilding the Mali empire. After he helped rebuild the empire they were more powerful and had a more important standing within society. The emperor who came to make a difference within their...

My Motivation to Obtain the Darwin T. Turner Scholarship

The Darwin T. Turner Scholarship is a program of diversity and leadership initiatives. Hello, my name is Simratdeep Kaur and I believe I should be a Turner Scholar because I show great potential in the future. I have maintained great academics, participated in many school...

• Scholarship

What Does Being Inducted into National Honor Society Mean to Me

From the time I was inducted into National Junior Honor Society in seventh grade, I had always dreamed of the day when I would walk across the stage to become a part of National Honor Society. I have been continuously determined to do my very...

• National Honor Society

The Four Tenets of National Honor Society I Exemplify in My Everyday Life

Induction into the National Honor Society validates academic goals that I have worked extremely hard towards thus far. Membership would not only help maintain my academic performance, but assist me in accomplishing further goals of my school career. Getting accepted into NHS has been a...

A Brave Leader: The Success of Rosa Parks Leadership

Refusing to give up your seat on the bus; a seemingly trivial decision in the goings-on of everyday life. Maybe one would be considered rude, or irritate others – but beyond that, the effects of the refusal would seem relatively insignificant. How is it then,...

• Racial Segregation

Implementation of Leadership and Personal Development Planning in South Africa

Introduction Post-1994, the dream of the masses (previously disadvantaged groups), was a vision of self-governance, prosperity, equality, liberation and a sense of belonging and patriotism. Most of all, the yoke of Apartheid was demolished, it was a new future that held promise, a better life...

• Personal Development Planning

The History of Syrian Leadership and Its Impact on the State of a Country

Syria became one of the most discussed and controversial countries in the world in recent years due to its ongoing armed conflict. Millions of Syrians escaped from their homeland looking for a shelter and a better future abroad causing internal conflicts in highly developed countries...

The Concept of Leadership and Mother Teresa as Its Vivid Illustration

Leaders have the power and the intellect behind the organization, and they have the capability to influence the ones working for the company to accomplish and reach the company’s goal. According to Patel (2017), a strong manager or leader must reach and develop eleven traits...

• Mother Teresa

Investigating the Losses and Leadership Positions in Starbucks

The Starbucks brand started in 1971 by opening its to begin with store area in Seattle, Washington. Within the 1970s and 1980s, Starbucks Corporation experienced victory within the U.S. market. By 1987, Howard Schultz purchased Starbucks after serving for 5 years within the operation division...

The Humor Style Suitable for Leadership Positions

Throughout this report, the main topic in focus will be the Leader Humor Style. The definition of humor is not straightforward, “Over the years, researchers have been trying to arrive at one definition of humour which is both comprehensive and universal. All their efforts have...

The Results Of My S.M.A.R.T. Leadership Experience

Leadership, S.M.A.R.T. goals, and the Seven Habits profile are all interconnected in many ways. Throughout the course of this paper I will address the results of my Seven Habits profile, servant leadership, and make S.M.A.R.T. goals. They will assist me in becoming a better leader...

• Emotional Intelligence

The Definition of Leadership: Barack Obama's Presidency

Leadership can mean various things a success, power, efficiency, andintelligence. Among other qualities. However, leadership is taken into accountwhen the leader or the person who is the heads of a movement has the abilityto influence others and make a positive impact on the world around...

Leadership Is My Strong Side

Mustering the courage, penetrating the challenge, and engendering the creativity are the abilities to define myself as a visionary leader. After the head of Corporate Social Responsibility of PT Pertamina Region VII awarded me as the best presenter in Pertamina Technology Challenge, an opportunity as...

• About Myself

The Importance of Good Ethics and Leadership in Society

One of the most important, yet least understood phenomena on earth is leadership. The research was done to investigate leadership traits, activities, behaviour, and processes; yet, until Burns (1978), a few researchers were able to distinguish between leadership that is "transactional" and leadership that is...

• Human Behavior

Change Management in Organizations Dependency on Leadership

This paper seeks to establish how change can be effectively introduced to the challenging global business environment of today. However, to establish this, one has to first understand what a change management strategy is and to critically analyze the key composition of an ideal change...

• Change Management

Analysis Of Individual Aspects Of Leadership

The first factor for business success is empowering leadership. Leadership has taken companies to its peak of success. This report will look into the leadership style of Sandberg in the different companies she had worked. How her leadership skills influenced and impacted the people she...

Application Of Engineering Leadership To Improve Group's Performance

This case occurred during a practical lab session where my group and I were tasked with a graded lab report based on that session’s experiment. That week’s experimental procedure was knowledge-intensive and rigorous, requiring a good understanding of that week’s lecture content while involving many...

• Engineering

Best Way For Society To Prepare It's Youth For Leadership

The provided memo brings a lot of questions to mind. These need to properly addressed before jumping to the conclusion that increasing the advertising budget will help increase the attendance of people in movies produced by Super Screen Movie Production Company. Firstly, the memo talks...

• Modern Society

Classic Leadership And Organization Dilemmas

The main challenge of any organization is to perform tasks in the right time. If they cannot perform it within the prescribed time, their ongoing work can be interrupted. Therefore, if the job is to be executed at a given time, it is necessary to...

• Organizational Behavior

Jim Davis Case Study Analysis: The Problem Of Leadership And Power

Leadership and power have a fine line in which they were most effectively together. In that relationship it is important that a good sense of credibility is established in order to achieve and maintain a status. The problem at hand is how Jim is going...

Leadership – The Art Of Managing People

The capacity to sort out a gathering of individuals or an organization is called leadership. The individual who directs the gathering is characterized as a Leader. Despite the fact that the bigger fault and less credit come to them, a pioneer is the foundation of...

Leadership And Management In International Hospitality Business

Introduction Leadership includes giving the data, information, and techniques to understand that vision, and organizing and adjusting the clashing interests of all individuals and partners. Be that as it may, the initiative has changed after some time and has made numerous difficulties for the individuals...

• Hospitality
• Marketing Management

Leadership In Different Aspects Of Life

Introduction Leadership is defined to be the action of leading a group of people or an organization. In the coaching profession, coaches lead their teams. If you were to ask me what my personal definition and general philosophy of leadership is, I would say, “Leadership...

• Personal Life

The Challenges in the Leadership School: Stepping out of the Comfort Zone

I applied to leadership school and I was told it was going to easy but boy was I wrong. As soon we got on the bus things turned for worse. First, all phones were confiscated as we got on the bus then we to be...

Leadership Style And Influence Of Two Historical Figure

This is an extensive study of leadership styles and scope of influence of 2 historical figures of Nepal. “Siddhartha Gautama (Gautama Buddha) and Prithivi Narayan Shah. They can be seen as an effective and influential leader known to whole world. I found difference in their...

Leadership Theories And Personal Evaluation

Trait Theory Of the eight trait theories presented in the textbook I feel that I possess predominantly the desire to lead, honesty, integrity and emotional intelligence. In most jobs that I have been employed, I often find myself thinking of ways that the manager could...

Psychology Of Work: Organizational Leadership Theories

In lieu of the changing business environments globally, companies strive to be competent enough to be able to respond to customer expectations, have sound and healthy relationships with all the stakeholders, have operations that are transparent and accountable and increase their bottom line fulfilling their...

• Social Psychology

Revitalization Through New Leadership For Success In Any Field

The topic presented here makes a very valid argument that revitalization through new leadership is crucial for success in any field, be it politics, education or government. I am in concord with the claim that those in power should graciously make way at regular intervals...

An Overview of the Five Levels of Leadership

Nowadays the word ¨leadership¨ is used in all spheres of society, from the political field to the business and religious fields. One of the modern precursors of the study of leadership is John C. Maxwell, who for years has used and taught an instrument of...

The Social Influence Of Leadership On Human

For many years, many people (scholars) have had lot of interest in leadership, there have been many debates and some occasional confusion explaining the concept of leadership or what it really means. (Bass 1981) (Northouse, P 2016) Even now, defining it is not as easy...

Value Proposition Of Investing In It Leadership

Companies that invests in IT leadership perform much better than the companies that don’t. IT Leadership development is very important for creating competition and having an upper hand over other companies. A standout amongst the most important internal features to implement change is IT Leadership...

Essay About What Leadership Means To Me

For me, leadership means not only pursue success for myself but also to motivate and empower others to do the same by setting the perfect example to follow. For me, leadership means knowing where to go, leading the right path, taking new challenges and not...

Best topics on Leadership

1. What Type of Leader I Am: Examining My Leadership

2. How to Be an Effective Leader: Guiding with Excellence

3. How to Be a Good Leader: The Path to Effective Leadership

4. Are Leaders Born or Made: the Nature vs Nurture Debate

5. Analysis of President Barack Obama as a Leader

6. Leadership and Management: My Personal Philosophy of Leadership

7. Leadership Development: Analysis of My Leadership Experience

8. My Chevening Leadership: Leadership Skills that I Developed

9. What Is Leadership For You

10. Important Role of Leadership Quality and Professionalism

11. The Meaning Of Leadership To Me: Qualities That Create A Leader

12. The Definition Of Leadership: What Does Leadership Mean To Me

13. Chelladurai’s Model Of The Leadership

14. Example Of Effective Leadership In Jeff Bezos Life Path

15. Leadership Style Of Jeff Bezos

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• The Best Leadership Essay Examples and Writing...

The Best Leadership Essay Examples and Writing Guide

Whether for college admissions or scholarship applications, a successful leadership essay is intriguing and flawless. There are tricks and tips you can use to ensure your essays stand out and show you are a leader that inspires. Besides, leadership is a skill that is revered in academics. However, not all bosses are good leaders. 

Good leadership comes from the impact you have on those around you and the people you are doing a project or working with. The admissions or scholarship board understand this. That is why they ask applicants to write and submit a leadership paper. 

The board wants to understand whether the applicant understands the concept of leadership. They also want to gauge writing and critical thinking skills. This guide will tell you what makes a good leader essay, how to write it, and even give examples to help make your writing process easier. 

What is Good Leadership Essay?

A well-written leadership essay emphasizes leadership concepts and their impact on real-life situations. It should indicate what makes a good leader, follow a precise structure to create a logical flow of information, and be free of errors. Some crucial traits of a leader that are more likely to be described in this type of essay are:

• Communication skills
• Exceptional at delegating
• Emotional intelligence
• Accountability
• Self-confidence

This is not the only list of the qualities of a good leader. You only need to read personal leadership essay examples to get more characteristics. This can include charisma, impartiality, dedication, and influence. Much of the information you should include in your essay may come from your experience in a leadership role. 

How Do You Write a College Leadership Essay?

The first step is to come up with a good topic. The choice of topic can be based on a leadership style. For example, the servant leadership style, where the leader has a people-first mindset, emphasizes collaboration, teamwork, and employee satisfaction. 

You will know you are a servant leader if you often motivate your team, have excellent communication skills and commit to knowing the people around you personally and professionally. 

Another example of leadership style is hands-off leadership. In this case, the leader believes in freedom of choice; they effectively delegate and offer constructive criticism. This leadership style encourages creativity, accountability, and often leads to higher employee retention because of the relaxed work atmosphere. An example of an essay would be:

Is leadership an innate skill or a result of experience? Many people, including researchers, have been struggling to answer this question. One assumption is that leaders acquire specific skills over time. Another assumption is that some people are built for leadership, or leadership is built around inborn personality traits.

You can then use this introduction to create an essay that makes a stand on whether a leader is born or made. Here are more useful tips on how to write a leadership essay.

Have a Good Structure for the Essay

Look at any sample essay on leadership, and you will see that it is organized to have three main crucial parts:

• Introduction
• Body section made of three or more paragraphs

So how do you start a leadership essay? Use the first sentence to grab attention. To further enhance interest and connect with the reader, personalize the text and integrate a story that will further unravel in the body section. 

Ensure your leadership essay introduction has a hook or an attention grabber, which can be a thought-provoking question, intriguing fact, a famous quote, or shocking statistics. A thesis statement should follow and set the tone for the essay. 

The Body Should Back Up the Story

Use the body paragraphs to support the claims to the main idea/thesis statement. Focus on leadership qualities and how they are important to you or how they relate to your core values. Use examples to strengthen your arguments. 

End With a Compelling Conclusion

The final paragraph should provide an overview of each main point discussed in the essay. Restate the leadership values and make them personal by talking about what you have learned. Wrap up the essay with an inspiring sentence about leadership. 

Think Outside the Box

What is a leadership short essay? This is a short essay, preferably one page long, that is personal and showcases the writer’s leadership abilities. Whether you are writing a short or long essay to ace a leadership essay, you should think out of the box to avoid handing in predictable or, worse, boring essays. 

If you play it safe, you might end up with an average grade. So come up with new and innovative topics that get the reader's attention.

Stick to the Point

You will quickly confuse the reader if you digress from your topic. That is why you should always give yourself a break after completing the essay then come back and edit it. With a relaxed mind and a fresh pair of eyes, you will notice points that are off-topic. 

In case you have included different opinions, use transitions to create cohesion. Don’t forget to remove unnecessary facts and remain within the specified word count limit. 

Follow All the Instructions

Adhere to all the requirements for a leadership essay; otherwise, your paper will end up in the rejection pile or get a low grade. So before submitting it, read the instructions again and check that your essay adheres to all of them, including the formatting, tone, and style. 

Final Thoughts

A good leadership essay gives practical experiences in a relatable manner and connects to the audience on a deeper level. It shows the qualities you denote with leadership and allows your writing skills to shine. 

Even after reading this post and several examples writing a leadership essay could prove to be difficult. Luckily, we have writers experienced in writing leadership essays. We never miss a deadline. All essays are original and free of errors. So contact us today and let our writer give you a stellar leadership essay.

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Whether for college admissions or scholarship applications, a successful leadership essay is intriguing and flawless. There are tricks and tips you can use to ensure your essays st...

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The Most Important Leadership Competencies, According to Leaders Around the World

• Sunnie Giles

They’re all hard to improve because they run counter to our instincts.

Research over the past few decades has shown us that the most important leadership qualities are centered around soft skills and emotional intelligence. But do these skills point to deeper competencies? A survey of 195 leaders from more than 30 global organizations suggests that there are five major themes of competencies that strong leaders exhibit:

• High ethical standards and providing a safe environment
• Empowering individuals to self-organize
• Promoting connection and belonging among employees
• Open to new ideas and experimentation
• Committed to the professional and intellectual growth of employees

While many of these competencies may seem obvious, they are difficult for leaders to master because to do so would require them to act against their nature. Individuals are not hardwired to relinquish control or be open to small failures. The ability to actively improve these competencies should be a priority for leaders.

What makes an effective leader? This question is a focus of my research as an organizational scientist, executive coach, and leadership development consultant. Looking for answers, I recently completed the first round of a study of 195 leaders in 15 countries over 30 global organizations. Participants were asked to choose the 15 most important leadership competencies from a list of 74. I’ve grouped the top ones into five major themes that suggest a set of priorities for leaders and leadership development programs. While some may not surprise you, they’re all difficult to master, in part because improving them requires acting against our nature.

• SG Sunnie Giles is a partner at Ridgepine Capital Partners (an alternatives fund of funds), professionally certified executive coach, leadership development consultant, and organizational scientist. She has an MBA from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Brigham Young University.

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A LEADER'S CORE VALUES ESSAY

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SHIVAM GUPTA

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Core Values and Leadership

Personal values and beliefs are of immense importance to an individual since they dictate what a person judges to be of importance or worth in their lives. Pandey and Singh (2008, p.310) define personal values as “the deepest beliefs and sentiments we subscribe to” and state that values have a direct bearing on a person’s success and accomplishments in life. A person’s core values are also central to their leadership abilities. It therefore makes sense for a person to be aware of their personal values. Clark (2008) theorizes that an understanding of one’s values and beliefs can result in excellence in leadership. With this in mind, I shall through this discussion highlight my core values and how they apply to my leadership role in nursing.

I can authoritatively state my being in the nursing profession is as a direct result of my core values. It has always been my goal to positively impact the lives of other people through my career. My first career was in the computer industry and I began by studying for a degree in computer sciences. While I excelled in the profession, it was not fulfilling to me since I was not making any significant difference in people’s lives. I therefore opted out of this career and chose to pursue a course in the health services industry where I was certain that I would make a tremendous difference in the lives of others. My interest in leadership stems from the understanding that it is only through exemplary leadership that one can make optimal impact in any organization

One of my core personal values is altruism which is defined as the unreserved concern for the wellbeing of other people. This personal value is very well reflected in my choice of profession as the nursing field affords one with numerous opportunities to be beneficial to the lives of others. As a result of my personal value of altruism, I show high levels of concern both for my patients and my staff members. A study on leadership by Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe (2001) demonstrated that the single most important positive leadership factor was whether the leaders showed genuine concern for their staff.

Another value that I posses is having a positive attitude. As human beings, we are constantly predisposed to think the worse of situations and adopt a cynical view of life. I had an upbringing that instilled in me the value of positive attitude from a very tender age. For most times, I work with patients who have had mastectomies and have chosen to undergo breast reconstruction. In these situations, I find myself going out of my way to ensure that the patient is well taken care of and optimistic about the success of the procedure. My leadership abilities are also enhanced by my recognition of my value of positive attitude since I am able to inspire the other employees.

The most significant lesson that I leant through self-reflection is that my core values and beliefs directly impact my leadership capabilities. As such, my effectiveness as a leader is inherently tied to my core values. This is a truth that is corroborated by Carroll (2005) who articulates that an effective leader must be in touch with their core values and beliefs. Knowing one’s values enables a person to be self-aware and he/she is therefore able to inspire other people through his/her values. Through the self-reflection of my personal values and beliefs, I have developed a greater self-awareness which I can use to enhance my leadership.

Alimo-Metcalfe, B & Alban-Metcalfe, R. (2001). “The Development of a new transformational Leadership questionnaire” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology , 74, 1-27.

Carroll, T.L. (2005). “Leadership skills and attributes of women and nurse executives: Challenges for the 21st century”. Nursing Administration Quarterly, 29(2): 146-153.

Clark L. (2008). “Clinical leadership: Values, beliefs and vision”. Nursing Management, 15(7): 30-35.

Pandey, S. & Singh, M. (2008). “Women Empowerment and Personal Values as Predictors of Reproductive Health”. Journal of the Indian Academy of Applied Psychology , Vol. 34, No.2, 309-316.

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Guide to Writing a Stellar Leadership Essay (With Essay on Leadership Examples)

Apr 5, 2024 | 0 comments

Apr 5, 2024 | Blog | 0 comments

 Writing a leadership essay can be daunting for many students, as it requires a deep understanding of what makes a great leader and how to effectively convey those characteristics to a reader. To excel in this type of assignment, one must first understand the qualities that make a good leader, such as communication skills, problem-solving abilities, and the ability to inspire others. Additionally, it is important to provide specific examples and anecdotes supporting your claims and demonstrating your leadership experience. This article will explore the key components of a successful leadership essay, including how to structure your essay, develop a strong thesis statement, and effectively incorporate evidence to support your arguments. By following these tips and guidelines, you will be well on your way to crafting a compelling and persuasive leadership essay that showcases your unique qualities as a leader. 

Table of Contents

How To Write A Leadership Essay: Step-by-Step Guide

Crafting a standout leadership essay requires a methodical approach that covers key stages, from understanding the prompt to polishing your final draft. In the sections below, we’ll guide you through the step-by-step process of writing an impactful leadership essay that showcases your unique perspective and qualifications.

College Application Essay Writing Help

Are you struggling to craft a leadership essay that truly captures your unique experiences and qualifications? Our step-by-step guide and expert college application essay writing help will transform your leadership narrative and propel you towards your dreams!

Step 1: Understanding the Essay Prompt

When crafting a standout leadership essay, the first step is to understand the prompt or instructions given thoroughly. Whether you’re writing a college application essay, a scholarship essay, or a general essay on leadership, it’s crucial to analyze the prompt and identify the key points and requirements.

What exactly are the admissions officers or evaluators looking for? Are they interested in your leadership abilities, experiences in a leadership position, or your idea of leadership in general? Carefully dissecting the prompt will help you determine the focus of your essay and ensure that you address all the necessary elements.

Once you have a solid grasp of the prompt, it’s time to start brainstorming ideas. What are the most significant leadership roles you’ve held? What examples of leadership best showcase your kind of leadership and leadership style? Jot down any relevant experiences, skills, or insights you can potentially incorporate into your essay.

Step 2: Research and Preparation

With the prompt in mind, it’s time to dive into your research and preparation. Start by gathering relevant information and sources to help you build a strong foundation for your essay. This might include academic articles on leadership and management, biographies of influential leaders, or even interviews with team members who have witnessed your good leadership in action.

Consider conducting your interviews or surveys to gain first-hand insights into your leadership abilities. Talking to members of the team you’ve led or colleagues who have observed your ways of leading can provide valuable perspectives that you can weave into your essay.

As you gather your research, begin organizing and outlining your essay. This will help you structure your thoughts and ensure that your essay flows logically from one point to the next. Consider the key elements of a well-structured leadership essay: the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion.

Step 3: Structure of a Leadership Essay

Introduction

The introduction of your leadership essay is your chance to hook the reader and set the tone for the rest of your writing. It’s important to start strong and grab the reader’s attention from the first sentence.

One effective way to begin is with a compelling hook. This could be a thought-provoking quote about leadership, an anecdote that illustrates your unique leadership style, or a startling statistic highlighting the importance of good leadership. The goal is to pique the reader’s interest and make them eager to learn more about your perspective on leadership.

After the hook, you’ll want to provide some background information on leadership. This could include a brief overview of the concept of leadership, the key traits of a leader, or the significance of leadership and management in various contexts. Aim to give the reader a solid foundation for understanding the core themes and ideas you’ll explore in your essay.

Finally, you’ll want to introduce your thesis statement. This single sentence should clearly articulate your essay’s central message or argument, setting the stage for the rest of your writing. Your thesis should reflect your unique idea of leadership and the specific leadership abilities or experiences you plan to highlight.

Body Paragraphs

The body of your leadership essay is where you’ll explore your examples of leadership and leadership experiences in more detail. Each body paragraph should focus on a specific aspect of your kind of leadership, using concrete examples to support your claims.

Begin each paragraph with a clear topic sentence introducing the main idea or argument you’ll explore. From there, use vivid details, anecdotes, and evidence to paint a picture of your leadership style in action.

For instance, you might dedicate a paragraph to discussing when you had to lead a group and inspire others to achieve a common goal. Describe the situation, the challenges you faced, the actions you took, and the outcomes you achieved. This will demonstrate your leadership abilities and give the reader a deeper understanding of what your leadership means.

Another body paragraph might explore the leadership theories or styles that have influenced your own kind of leader. How have these ideas shaped your approach to problem-solving and decision-making? What examples of leadership can you draw upon to illustrate these principles in practice?

Throughout your body paragraphs, maintain a clear and logical flow. Use smooth transitions to guide the reader from one idea to the next and ensure that each paragraph builds upon the previous one to create a cohesive and compelling narrative.

The conclusion of your leadership essay is your final opportunity to leave a lasting impression on the reader. Here, you’ll want to synthesize the key points of your essay and reinforce the significance of your leadership in essential experiences.

Begin by freshly restating your thesis statement , reminding the reader of the central message or argument you’ve been exploring. This helps to bring your essay full circle and solidify the main takeaway for the reader.

Next, summarize the most important examples of leadership and leadership abilities you’ve discussed throughout your essay. Highlight the key lessons you’ve learned and how your idea of leadership has evolved. This demonstrates your leadership ability and commitment to continuous growth and improvement.

Finally, conclude your essay by reflecting on the broader importance of good leadership. How do your personal experiences and insights relate to the larger concept of leadership? Why is it crucial for individuals to develop strong leadership skills to inspire people and accomplish the task? By connecting your essay to a larger societal or global context, you’ll leave the reader with a deeper appreciation for the value of leadership.

School Application Essay Writing Help

Feeling overwhelmed by the task of writing a standout school application essay that highlights your leadership abilities? Our proven step-by-step guide and personalized essay writing assistance will help you craft a compelling narrative that leaves a lasting impression on admissions committees.

Dos and Don’ts of Writing a Leadership Essay

As you craft your leadership essay, keep the following dos and don’ts in mind:

• Maintain a professional yet engaging tone throughout your writing.
• Provide specific, real-life examples of your leadership roles and experiences.
• Demonstrate your emotional intelligence and ability to solve problems effectively.
• Highlight your personal growth and how your leadership style has evolved over time.
• Proofread your essay thoroughly to ensure it is free of grammatical and spelling errors.

Don’ts:

• Avoid using clichés or generic statements about leadership.
• Refrain from making unsupported claims or exaggerating your experiences.
• Don’t simply recite your resume or list your achievements; focus on the why and how behind your leadership abilities.
• Steer clear of overly personal or irrelevant information that doesn’t directly support your main argument.
• Remember to address any potential weaknesses or challenges you’ve faced as a leader and how you’ve learned from them.

Tips for Writing a Successful Leadership Essay

• Be Authentic and Genuine in Your Writing: Avoid sounding like you’re trying to fit a certain mold or meet expectations. Let your unique leadership style and personality shine through in your writing. Share personal anecdotes and reflections that showcase your leadership abilities. Demonstrate your emotional intelligence by being vulnerable and self-aware. Your writing allows the reader to experience your leadership roles and various leadership experiences.
• Show Rather Than Tell Your Leadership Qualities: Use vivid descriptions and specific examples of leadership to illustrate how you’ve exhibited effective leadership qualities. Avoid generic statements or clichés about what it means to be a successful leader. Demonstrate your ability to lead by showing the impact of your actions and decisions. Incorporate data, statistics, quotes from essay samples or other credible sources to bolster your arguments. Provide specific details about the challenges you faced, your actions, and the outcomes you achieved as a leader.
• Use Concrete Examples and Evidence: Support your claims about your leadership abilities with real-life anecdotes and experiences. Use vivid language and sensory details to help the reader visualize your leadership experiences. Avoid vague or generalized statements that lack substance or ability to make a strong impact. Highlight the leadership abilities and styles most relevant to the role model or opportunity you’re seeking. Demonstrate how your use of my leadership experiences and qualities make you the ideal candidate for the leadership position or application essay you’re pursuing.
• Tailor Your Essay to the Specific Audience or Purpose: Research the admissions officers or business environment you’re writing for and understand their idea of leadership. Align your essay with the specific requirements or type of essay outlined in the prompt. Adjust your tone, language, and focus to resonate with the intended audience and their leadership is often expected. Demonstrate how your leadership abilities and unique leadership style can contribute to the organization or institution you’re applying to. Emphasize the specific leadership qualities and traits of a leader most valued in the type of leadership you’re pursuing.

Leadership Essay Examples

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My Leadership Philosophy: A Leader Essay

Personal leadership application essay, leadership application essay sample, 500+ words essay on leadership, what leadership means to me essay, nursing leadership philosophy essay, leadership application essay examples, get help with your leadership essay paper.

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How To Write A Leadership Essay FAQs

How should i start a leadership essay.

To begin a leadership essay, define what effective leadership means to you. Consider what qualities a true leader must possess and how you have experienced or observed leadership. A captivating anecdote or leadership essay example can grab the reader’s attention and set the tone for your essay.

What is the structure of a leadership essay?

A typical leader essay should have a well-organized structure. Start with an engaging introduction introducing your thesis statement about what makes a strong leader. Then, support your argument with specific examples and detail different leadership styles. Conclude your essay by summarizing your main points and reinforcing your stance on leadership development.

How do you write an introduction for leadership?

When crafting an introduction for a leader essay, grab the reader’s attention with a compelling hook related to leadership. Clearly state your thesis on what qualities make an effective leader. You can also tease some of the main points you will discuss in your essay, such as leading by example, leadership allows, and bad leadership.

How do I write about my leadership?

In writing about your leadership experiences, focus on specific instances where you demonstrated leadership qualities. Reflect on how you could look inward and recognize areas for improvement. Explain how you were able to inspire others and develop your leadership skills. Avoid vague statements and instead provide concrete examples.

What makes an effective leader?

An effective leader possesses strong technical skills and can develop people and teams. A true leader should lead by example and inspire others through their actions. Understanding different leadership styles and adapting to situations is crucial for a successful leader.

Through my engaging and informative blog posts, I aim to provide helpful tips on topics such as essay writing, research skills, and academic planning, empowering students to thrive in their academic pursuits.

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Dean Kibbe’s UVA Health Leadership Institute Fireside Chat: A Leader’s Journey

July 9, 2024 by [email protected]

Melina Kibbe, MD, Dean, UVA School of Medicine, James Carroll Flippin Professor of Medical Science, Chief Health Affairs Officer, UVA Health.

Last month Dean Kibbe visited the second cohort of the UVA Health Leadership Institute (HLI) for a Fireside Chat with Mike Valentine, MD, Chair of Heart and Vascular Service Line and Faculty Director of HLI. The day was a kickoff of the “leading teams” module of the HLI curriculum. 33 cohort members, representing all UVA Health entities and a wide range of professional backgrounds (nurses, physicians, administration, staff, etc.) listened to Dean Kibbe reflect on her journey to becoming the Dean of the UVA School of Medicine and lessons learned along the way.

Core Leadership Values

Dean Kibbe began the Fireside sharing the importance of trust, integrity, and transparency in her leadership style. She stressed the critical alignment between one’s internal values and how they are perceived externally, encouraging the cohort to consider both their intent and impact.

In managing teams, “having a good understanding of personalities you work with is critical,” Kibbe reflected. She described herself as a “huge believer in a transparent manner, setting expectations and holding people accountable,” recommending leaders delegate tasks based on individual strengths and values.

Role of Mentorship

Mentorship has played a crucial role in Dean Kibbe’s career. She continues to collect mentors, adapting to her evolving professional needs. Navigating a male-dominated specialty where only a small percentage of cardiothoracic surgeons were women, she initially had male mentors. As her career progressed, however, she was exposed to female mentors whose blend of guidance significantly shaped her leadership style.

Dean Kibbe recommended the cohort to reach out to mentors organically: “When you see someone who has a career you aspire to or doing something you admire… verbalize your admiration and ask if it would be okay to call for advice.”

Early Leadership Challenges

“Every leader is going to make mistakes. It is also a quality of a leader to admit it and talk about it out loud,” Dean Kibbe noted. She recounted challenges in her career that taught her the importance of seeking input from various stakeholders and managing up. “When you talk about [each mistake] out loud,” she reflected, “other people learn from it; error is human.” In emphasizing the importance of transparency and vulnerability, she encouraged the cohort to create safe zones for their team members while recognizing power differentials that might exist.

In the end, Dean Kibbe emphasized staying true to one’s values, paying it forward, and supporting one another along the way. She suggested aspiring leaders tackle hard issues: “People want the doers. The best way to get yourself into leadership is to tackle something you know is a problem and leadership will notice.” Her Fireside offered valuable lessons on integrity, mentorship, and navigating complex leadership scenarios.

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More From Forbes

What is authentic leadership and how do you become an authentic leader.

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Today’s world of work, marked by a diverse, multigenerational workforce, the vast and rapid infusion of technology, and virtual/hybrid work environments require a leader who is focused on people at least as much as they are on KPIs. There’s a humanity deficit at work. Loneliness and burnout are up, while the sense of cohesion and connection is decreasing. This environment requires the skills of an authentic leader.

Authentic leadership emphasizes genuineness, transparency, and integrity. Authentic leaders are true to their values, and they lead with a high level of self-awareness and emotional intelligence. Unlike other leadership styles that may rely on positional power, authentic leadership is rooted in the leader's character and ethics. Authentic leaders are genuinely interested in nurturing meaningful relationships with team members. They engage their team in the organization's mission. They are true to the word ‘authentic’ in that they are honest, open, vulnerable, and genuine. A Harvard Business Review study revealed that a majority of employees believe authenticity at work leads to higher levels of trust and a more positive workplace.

Attributes That Are Core To Authentic Leaders

1. self-awareness.

Authentic leaders have a deep understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, values, and beliefs. They are clear about their biases and seek to get clear on their blindspots. This makes them aware of how their actions and behaviors affect others. They continuously seek to align their leadership approach with their authentic self. “Companies that employ professionals with high levels of self-awareness tend to perform better financially,” according to research from Korn Ferry .

2. Relational Transparency

Authentic leaders are open and honest in their interactions with others. They are curious about those around them and are excellent listeners. They build trust by being transparent about their intentions and decisions. They are comfortable with being vulnerable and open about their mistakes. This openness fosters a culture of trust and collaboration within their teams.

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Authentic leaders objectively analyze information and consider multiple perspectives before making decisions. They encourage input, feedback, and critical thinking, ensuring that their choices are well-informed and balanced.

4. Internalized Moral Perspective

Authentic leaders are guided by strong ethical standards and a sense of morality. Their actions are consistent with their values, and they strive to do what is right, even when it is challenging or unpopular.

How To Become An Authentic Leader

Becoming an authentic leader is a journey that involves continuous self-reflection, personal growth, and a commitment to living your values. Here are some practical steps to help you develop authentic leadership:

Develop Self-Awareness

The foundation of authentic leadership is self-awareness, especially in virtual/hybrid workplaces. Take the time to understand yourself deeply. Reflect on your experiences, values, strengths, and weaknesses. Tools like journaling, mindfulness practices, and seeking feedback from trusted peers can help you gain insights into your authentic self.

Cultivate Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EQ) is crucial for authentic leaders. Work on understanding and managing your emotions, as well as recognizing and empathizing with the emotions of others. High EQ allows you to connect with your team on a deeper level so you can navigate interpersonal dynamics effectively.

Be True to Your Values

Identify your core values and let them guide your actions and decisions. Authentic leaders do not compromise their principles for short-term gains. Consistently living your values will build trust and credibility with your team.

Practice Transparency

Transparency is key to building trust. Be open about your goals, challenges, and decisions. Share your thought process and be honest about your mistakes. This openness encourages others to be equally transparent and fosters a culture of mutual respect.

Encourage Diverse Perspectives

Authentic leaders value diverse perspectives and encourage open dialogue. Create an environment where team members feel safe to express their opinions and ideas. Consider different viewpoints and involve your team in decision-making processes. Ask them what they think.

Lead with Empathy

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Show genuine concern for your team members' well-being and take the time to listen to their concerns. Leading with empathy builds strong, supportive relationships and promotes a positive work culture. A core aspect of empathy is deep listening to understand exactly what’s going on with your people. Make time to meet with all of your team members individually.

Be Purpose Driven

Most leaders know what they do and are likely aware of how they do it. But not all leaders are clear about why they do what they do. When you’re purpose driven, you can engage your team in your mission. Almost nine out of ten executives say that a sense of collective purpose drives employee engagement, according to a Harvard Business Review study . Take time to understand and articulate your purpose.

Commit to Continuous Growth

Authentic leaders are committed to lifelong learning and personal growth. Seek out opportunities for professional development, mentorship, and self-improvement. Embrace feedback and use it as a tool for growth.

The journey to authentic leadership is ongoing, requiring continuous self-reflection and growth. However, the rewards are profound. As an authentic leader, you can create a positive and empowering work environment, build strong and trusting relationships, and lead your team to achieve meaningful and lasting success. So, embrace your authentic self and start your journey towards becoming an authentic leader today.

William Arruda is a keynote speaker , co-founder of CareerBlast.TV and co-creator of BrandBoost - a virtual, video-fueled course to help you grow your self-awareness and amp up your personal brand.

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How to Let Your Values Guide You as a School Leader

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Self-reflection is an essential part of the leadership journey. One of the biggest challenges school leaders face is the disconnect between their actions and core values. When this disconnect occurs, they may find themselves leading haphazardly, without a clear sense of direction or purpose.

Feelings of mental exhaustion and burnout can easily seep into the picture, which is when you most need a mindset alignment. By maintaining a solid connection between values and work, you can ensure you are leading with purpose and clarity.

School leaders are shaped by many rich personal and professional experiences that teach them what effective school leadership looks, sounds, and feels like. As a school leader, you should always look to other principals, assistant principals, deans, and others in leadership positions for examples of what to do and, very often, what not to do.

In this biweekly column , principals and other authorities on school leadership—including researchers, education professors, district administrators, and assistant principals—offer timely and timeless advice for their peers.

Reflecting on past experiences as teachers, instructional coaches, deans, or assistant principals can help principals reconnect with the emotions and motivations that led you to school leadership. Speaking as a former district and school leader, I recognize that our experiences as students in school, how our students’ families felt about school, and our own children’s experiences with school can influence how we engage as school leaders. Those experiences shaped us as people and educators.

These reflections reinforce a leader’s reason why. It can be easy to forget that “why” while immersed in the work, but reflection can help keep us motivated and moving forward, especially during challenging times. Reflective practice is necessary to grow, evolve, and lead with confidence as a school leader.

For example, growing up in a low-income, single-parent household, my family and I were rich in our beliefs about school and the value it could bring to our lives. In my mother’s eyes, school and education were the golden ticket to help break the cycle of poverty, and, as a result, she was very strict about school. She also instilled the importance of commitment. Our belief was that following through on commitments was an indicator of character.

When I became a leader, I found myself bringing a lot of my family values into my leadership and had to sort through the realities of fairness and leading justly. I’ve carried the value of school and commitment throughout my life.

As a principal, I realized how my value of commitment became a challenge with how I led early on in my career. There was a pattern developing in how I reacted to teachers each time one would come to my office to share that they couldn’t handle teaching and “quit” on our students.

I took it personally. I mean, after all, these are our students. How could you leave them like that?

As I became more self-aware of my emotions and the how and why of their existence, I realized those expectations were bringing negativity into the space. My conversations then shifted from judging those teachers unfairly to listening and responding with empathy and support. I led with my personal experiences, which shaped my values as an adult; the personal influenced the professional.

Without developing the practice of reflection and a willingness to receive feedback, I could never have evolved as a school leader.

Reflecting on the values that matter to us most is an important step in that evolution. Sometimes, this can feel like peeling back layers of an onion, and the revelations may be painful. However, the more you ask yourself why and peel back those layers, the closer you will get to identifying your true values—the things that drive you as a person, as an individual, as a family member, or as a leader.

This process can be uncomfortable, but if there are no feelings of discomfort, your self-reflection is not being done right. To begin understanding yourself and evolving as a school leader, I encourage you to start with L.O.V.E.—list, organize, value, and evaluate.

List your core values, the ones closest to your heart and mind.

Organize those values by theme. This is where the discomfort may emerge. Ask the question why for each theme. Get to the root of why the core values are important. This may bring up some painful memories or possibly joyful ones. Understanding the why of your values is important here.

After deep reflection and introspection, think about how those values can show up in leadership actions. For example, after peeling back the layers, you may identify that honesty is a core value because experience has taught you that honest people are reliable and trustworthy. You may then reflect that value in leadership actions with transparent communication about budget, district messaging, systems. It will become an expectation and commitment to be transparent with staff at all times.

Each week, take time to evaluate how your value-led actions and decisions are aligned with core values. How does it feel when decisions or actions are made in opposition to values? Take note. Commit to actions that create self-awareness before taking action or making decisions.

Our values are shaped by our positive and negative experiences, which eventually shape us as individuals. Identifying those core values is essential to establishing one’s leadership style.

As school leaders, it’s easy to get caught up in the day to day and forget to check in with ourselves. That’s why it’s important to set aside time on the calendar and prioritize reflection. The more time is prioritized, the more opportunity we have to align our values with our leadership. We have the power to choose when and how to invest in ourselves to let our values guide transformational leadership practices.

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How to Let Your Values Guide You as a School Leader

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Self-reflection is an essential part of the leadership journey. One of the biggest challenges school leaders face is the disconnect between their actions and core values. When this disconnect occurs, they may find themselves leading haphazardly, without a clear sense of direction or purpose.

Feelings of mental exhaustion and burnout can easily seep into the picture, which is when you most need a mindset alignment. By maintaining a solid connection between values and work, you can ensure you are leading with purpose and clarity.

School leaders are shaped by many rich personal and professional experiences that teach them what effective school leadership looks, sounds, and feels like. As a school leader, you should always look to other principals, assistant principals, deans, and others in leadership positions for examples of what to do and, very often, what not to do.

In this biweekly column , principals and other authorities on school leadership—including researchers, education professors, district administrators, and assistant principals—offer timely and timeless advice for their peers.

Reflecting on past experiences as teachers, instructional coaches, deans, or assistant principals can help principals reconnect with the emotions and motivations that led you to school leadership. Speaking as a former district and school leader, I recognize that our experiences as students in school, how our students’ families felt about school, and our own children’s experiences with school can influence how we engage as school leaders. Those experiences shaped us as people and educators.

These reflections reinforce a leader’s reason why. It can be easy to forget that “why” while immersed in the work, but reflection can help keep us motivated and moving forward, especially during challenging times. Reflective practice is necessary to grow, evolve, and lead with confidence as a school leader.

For example, growing up in a low-income, single-parent household, my family and I were rich in our beliefs about school and the value it could bring to our lives. In my mother’s eyes, school and education were the golden ticket to help break the cycle of poverty, and, as a result, she was very strict about school. She also instilled the importance of commitment. Our belief was that following through on commitments was an indicator of character.

When I became a leader, I found myself bringing a lot of my family values into my leadership and had to sort through the realities of fairness and leading justly. I’ve carried the value of school and commitment throughout my life.

As a principal, I realized how my value of commitment became a challenge with how I led early on in my career. There was a pattern developing in how I reacted to teachers each time one would come to my office to share that they couldn’t handle teaching and “quit” on our students.

I took it personally. I mean, after all, these are our students. How could you leave them like that?

As I became more self-aware of my emotions and the how and why of their existence, I realized those expectations were bringing negativity into the space. My conversations then shifted from judging those teachers unfairly to listening and responding with empathy and support. I led with my personal experiences, which shaped my values as an adult; the personal influenced the professional.

Without developing the practice of reflection and a willingness to receive feedback, I could never have evolved as a school leader.

Reflecting on the values that matter to us most is an important step in that evolution. Sometimes, this can feel like peeling back layers of an onion, and the revelations may be painful. However, the more you ask yourself why and peel back those layers, the closer you will get to identifying your true values—the things that drive you as a person, as an individual, as a family member, or as a leader.

This process can be uncomfortable, but if there are no feelings of discomfort, your self-reflection is not being done right. To begin understanding yourself and evolving as a school leader, I encourage you to start with L.O.V.E.—list, organize, value, and evaluate.

List your core values, the ones closest to your heart and mind.

Organize those values by theme. This is where the discomfort may emerge. Ask the question why for each theme. Get to the root of why the core values are important. This may bring up some painful memories or possibly joyful ones. Understanding the why of your values is important here.

After deep reflection and introspection, think about how those values can show up in leadership actions. For example, after peeling back the layers, you may identify that honesty is a core value because experience has taught you that honest people are reliable and trustworthy. You may then reflect that value in leadership actions with transparent communication about budget, district messaging, systems. It will become an expectation and commitment to be transparent with staff at all times.

Each week, take time to evaluate how your value-led actions and decisions are aligned with core values. How does it feel when decisions or actions are made in opposition to values? Take note. Commit to actions that create self-awareness before taking action or making decisions.

Our values are shaped by our positive and negative experiences, which eventually shape us as individuals. Identifying those core values is essential to establishing one’s leadership style.

As school leaders, it’s easy to get caught up in the day to day and forget to check in with ourselves. That’s why it’s important to set aside time on the calendar and prioritize reflection. The more time is prioritized, the more opportunity we have to align our values with our leadership. We have the power to choose when and how to invest in ourselves to let our values guide transformational leadership practices.

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More leadership changes at Hertz as new batch of executives named

• By Louis Llovio
• | 12:15 p.m. July 8, 2024
• | 2 Free Articles Remaining!

• Charlotte–Lee–Collier

Mere weeks after again replacing its CEO and CFO and announcing its chief operating officer had resigned, The Hertz Co. on Monday named five new executives to a leadership team that has been in upheaval for several years now.

The new hires include a new chief commercial officer and a new general counsel as well as executive vice presidents for operations in North America, fleet management and technical operations.

The company, in a news release announcing the changes, says the hires “will strengthen its leadership team and sharpen the company's focus on driving enhanced profitability through operational excellence, superior customer service, strategic fleet management, cost control, and premium revenue.”

In just the past couple months , the Estero-based rental car giant named is its fifth CEO in seven years, Gil West; its third CFO in 15 months, Scott Haralson; and lost its second COO in a year, Justin Keppy.

This all has mostly happened since Hertz exited bankruptcy in 2021 and then bailed on an ambitious electric vehicle program earlier this year.

West, in the release announcing the that new hires, says they “add capacity and capabilities that complement our existing leadership team's deep institutional knowledge of the rental car industry.”

None of the five, at least according to the biographical information released by the company, have worked in the rental car industry before coming to Hertz.

Hertz’s revenue rose 2% to $2.1 billion the first quarter of this year when compared with the same period last year according to the company’s most recent earnings statement released in April. Its second quarter earnings call is scheduled for August 1.

The new hires are:

• Sandeep Dube was named executive vice president, chief commercial officer. Dube most recently served as chief operating officer at Intuit Mailchimp. Before that, he was chief commercial officer at Activision Blizzard and held senior leadership roles at Delta Air Lines, including CEO of Delta Vacations.
• Katherine Lee Martin was named executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary. She has served as the company's interim general counsel and assistant corporate secretary since April after joining Hertz in May 2023. Before coming to the company, she held senior leadership positions at X Corp. and Twitter. Before Twitter, she spent more than a decade as an assistant U.S. Attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice.
• Henry Kuykendall was named executive vice president, North America operations. He spent 33 years at Delta Air Lines, most recently as senior vice president of airport operations, overseeing Boston Logan International Airport, Detroit Metropolitan Airport, LaGuardia Airport and John F. Kennedy International Airport.
• Greg May was named executive vice president, fleet management. He served as president and chief executive officer at Valkyrie BTO Aviation, a commercial aircraft investment company for Blackstone. He has held leadership positions at Delta Air Lines, Northwest Airlines and United Airlines and founded aircraft leasing company Q Aviation.
• Mike Moore was named executive vice president, technical operations. He most recently served as executive vice president for spaceline technical operations at Virgin Galactic. He has held leadership positions at Delta Air Lines, where he spent a decade in operations-focused roles of increasing responsibility, and at Northwest Airlines.

Louis Llovio

Louis Llovio is the deputy managing editor at the Business Observer. Before going to work at the Observer, the longtime business writer worked at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Maryland Daily Record and for the Baltimore Sun Media Group. He lives in Tampa.

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