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Chapter 11: Method 8: Emphasizing Values

Everybody has values, and these values trigger behaviors. And the complex of our routine behaviors shapes our life. Inner leadership embodies tasks of articulation and institutionalization of new and enduring values in work community members. Inner leaders shape values, articulate them to employees and customers, and persuade these people to accept the articulated values as their own so they will do the work their leaders want done. In a word, inner leadership is a values-endowing activity. Selznick says that leaders infuse the work community with value. The values that seem to work best are those that prize most highly individual work-community members, clients, and their leader.

Defining Values As A Force In Inner Leadership

Inner leaders succeed by putting their lives and their money where their values are. This may be the only way to lead in the twenty-first century world (Fairholm). Leading from a foundation of values requires inner leaders with the courage to act even if they risk offending others, leaders who are willing to stand alone on principle and who voluntarily give voice to ideas that are counter to the cumulative wisdom of their work community (Graham). Inner leaders focus on realizing their values and those of stakeholders, not just on task accomplishment. They lead by changing individual's lives for the better. They do not merely preside over tasks or conduct meetings, they influence followers and constituent groups in a volitional way, not just through formal authority mechanisms.

Values are more basic constructs than rules. They determine a community's rules and rank them. They are the criteria for selecting actions, goals, and methods. Values are learned. Some values are explicit, others are not. They nonetheless trigger some specific behavior and constrain behavior that contravenes preset values. A work community's values are sometimes codified in vision statements or codes of ethics. These statements provide frameworks for transmitting and implementing specific behavior within the work community toward specific goals and results. They are powerful in shaping member behavior and in validating institutional policy. Values define acceptable action, resolve conflicts, determine sanctions systems, and are integral to reward systems. They define the desirable and acceptable for the individual and the work community.

Values are broad, general, and conclusive beliefs about the way people should behave or some end-state they should attain. They connote desirability. Individuals evolve values sets that define for them what is true or beautiful or good about their world. Work communities do this also. Either the putative leader creates a group values set or an informal leader does. Most people's values come out of their early conditioning, experience, and significant events in their lives and are stabilized at a fairly early age.

For Burns the concept of values is crucial to leadership because values indicate desirable end-states. Inner leaders serve as values clarifiers and as communicators of values in the work community. It is only as inner leaders incorporate these values in their vision statements and actions and use them to arbitrate conflict that they attract and keep followers. Burns suggests that values can be a source of vital change in people and work communities. Core values like justice, equality, liberty, security, and respect for human dignity guide most people. As inner leaders reach into this level of follower needs, they induce them to change.

Hodgkinson calls attention to values as a key ingredient in work community interaction. He sees them as akin to work objectives, purposes, and policies. These values become "facts" in the sense they are accepted and acted upon by members. His concern is about the work-community " meta values" of efficiency, effectiveness, and growth, which he concludes corrupt the work community and its members. While they are a problem for social humanists, the very fact of the power of these values reaffirms them as chief determinants of work-community members' interactions with their leader. Nalbandian describes the work of inner leaders in terms of values like representativeness, efficiency, individual rights, and social equity. Rokeach's work identifies values held in common by members of various social disciplines. He identifies eighteen core values and another eighteen values that are instrumental in attaining the core values. These relatively few values guide inner leader actions and behavior on the job. While more research is needed to make these tentative findings explicit, there is indication that values condition much specific professional behavior.

The Values Focus of Leadership

If past leadership theories focused on values at all, they focused on those of efficiency and control. These are fast becoming obsolete as inner leader values, though they still have utility for many chief executives. Rather, inner leaders form relationship patterns that rely not on values of external control but on those that give social and personal meaning to the collective work done, aid collaborative decision making, facilitate shared planning, and foster mutual responsibility for work-community success. Inner leadership is a task of creating and then maintaining work community cultures that support the larger corporate culture's values and the dominant values of its leader.

Experience suggests that successful work communities are those that are defined by values that focus on workers as customers and that help stakeholders become their best selves. It is characteristic of our evolving society today that most workers have more than one choice about the tasks they want to perform or how they will receive help form coworkers or from which colleagues they will accept help. They are demanding to make their own choices about what they do, how they do it, and whether they will accept an order and obey it.

Hard work by itself is not as important anymore (perhaps it never was) as is making a positive impact on results. Values focusing on hard work and on performing work processes, not on attaining results, are only creditable in situations where the work involves repeatable work steps. In today's world, customers' product needs and wants change and mutate almost daily. To accommodate this reality, the work community must become more flexible and responsive. Inner leaders cannot afford complex, staid, slow-to-change workers or systems that cannot easily respond to the increasingly special, unique, constantly changing demands placed on them. Rather, they rely on developing and promulgating shared values to link work, workers, and evolving results.

Forces Shaping Leadership Today

Several forces in society interact to shape the values construct leaders use. At least three forces seem relevant to inner leadership. First, the workforce is changing. People working in the corporation - all social groups - today are older, more educated, more diverse, and more wanting (Plas). Their approach to work also is different from that of their supervisors and bosses. Whereas older corporate employees typically reflect the Protestant work ethic of hard work, dedication, and loyalty, today's worker brings what might be called a bureaucratic or process work ethic characterized by a focus on work per se.

Second, contemporary workers see work as only one of several important aspects of their lives, not as a life-defining "calling." Today, job demands are less powerful incentives for getting workers to do what is required. Job tasks must compete with family, leisure, religious, and social elements of their lives and work does not always come out the winner.

Finally, today's workers often come to the job expecting their work to be much more responsive to their personal predilections than did their predecessors. Workers today have at their fingertips more information about the work they do, the firm they work for, and their industry generally than ever before. They also have knowledge - largely from idealistic media programming - of what is possible in the ways of personal perquisites, benefits, and support. Armed with this dubious knowledge, they come to the job wanting and expecting a work situation vastly different from the one their bosses envisioned as new hires twenty or thirty or forty or more years ago. Leaders in the middle of these new workers' demands cannot rely on sterile system; they must bond people together at the level of their (that is, both leader and led's) spiritual core values.

Workplace Values

Two perspectives on the place of values in work-community life are possible. In one, the individual leader's values are preeminent, and work communities are formed to serve these values. The other viewpoint suggests that work communities themselves also have values that supersede those of individual members. The sense of much of the leadership literature is that values dictate work-community action whether they emanate from the inner leader or from the community's membership. They dominate work-community action, dictate reward systems, and measure individual and community success. Thus, control over values is perhaps the most significant tool inner leaders have to work with.

Much of the contemporary discussion about values still deals with the traditional value of work-community health and survival. It can be summarized by the statement that what is good for the work community is good (Scott and Hart). Supporting this overarching attitude are values of rationality, efficiency, loyalty to the work community, and adaptability. Individual values are largely ignored. Indeed, a purpose of leadership according to this construct is to displace incompatible individual values with the work-community values just listed.

An alternative construction of the contemporary workplace is possible. In this construct, each work community is bound together by a different set of values than those of the parent corporation. Each community sets its own informal rules and ethical standards that serve to guide members and shape its belief systems. In this respect, work ethics are like any other community's ethics, they are a kind of group mind-set. The group's ethics system relies on common values held in common by the members of that work community that set them apart from all other groups.

The following paragraphs summarize the values basis for much of the ethics practiced in American work communities. They seem, however, to fall into several clusters of values centered around ideas of integrity, freedom and fairness, family values, service to others, and personal growth and development (Badaracco and Ellsworth).

Integrity. A key work-community value appears to be integrity - wholeness and internal unity. Integrity involves the inherent knowledge of right and wrong the ability to avoid the wrong, and the willingness to stand up for what is right. A macro perspective of integrity includes abiding by the laws set forth in our formal legal system. A microperspective includes living by known and set values, showing fairness and candor in evaluating a follower's work, and being consistently congruent in words and actions. The integrity value involves ideas such as honor, courage, truth, and continuous learning. It is a combination of discipline and freedom. It is key in any definition of work ethics; indeed, it defines them. Integrity is a prime value guiding leaders in the middle, where they are on more equal terms with followers and cannot hide behind formal authority or the intricacies of complex systems.

Freedom. Inner leaders base their relations with coworkers on respect for their freedom and independence and on treating others with fairness and justice. Values of fairness, justice, and independence have special utility in work situations and help prepare the culture for effective action.

Family Values. Values like family closeness, love, trust, and charity are also important workplace values. The Golden Rule of treating others as we want to be treated is at the core of these values. Faith in God and man, looking out for the other person, working for what you believe in, nonviolent respect for the sanctify of human life, happiness, enjoyment of life, and respect for others comprise for many their core family values. Inner leaders know that their coworkers want to be able to exercise these values in their family associations but also to have them recognized and respected in the workplace. Inner leaders who incorporate security for family, health and well-being, happiness, and fellowship into their work community's values are responding to powerful ethical needs of their followers.

Service. Inner leaders practice the service value and use it as a bonding tool to secure coworker acquiescence. Service - that is, helping people realize their own power and using that newly realized strength to win improvements in their situations - is an important part of the complex of work-community values. This value embraces ideas of commitment, perseverance, and persistence in rendering service through work. Inner leaders see work as a place and a way to demonstrate kindness and goodness and communicate this value to coworkers. Belief in their own ability and that of coworkers and feeling that work is a place where both leaders and led can live up to their potential for service define this values cluster.

Growth. The opportunity for personal growth and self-development is also a part of the values mix inner leaders live by and seek to share with followers. These leaders see a need for opportunity to experience the full meaning of life in their workplace relationships. They want to find opportunity to continue their pursuit of truth and learning at work and foster similar actions by their followers. They see work as a time to find ways to let their talents mature and then use them to make positive contributions to society. Personal growth is a combination of discipline and freedom. Those leaders and those work communities that foster these values and provide this regimen may add to their fund of enabling tools.

The Ethics of Inner leadership

There is an ethical connotation in inner leadership. These leaders articulate and confirm a clear work-community ethic. They use values in defining and focusing work-community effort toward acceptable and ethical goals using means consistent with these underlying values. Inner leaders differ from top leaders in recognizing and even emphasizing this ethical dimension.

Unfortunately, theory, literature, and reported practice are remarkably free from overt statements of values, except reiterations of the conventional wisdom of efficiency, effectiveness, and control.

Except for efficiency, many top leaders, like managers, advocate a values free workplace. The result is that the rise of management systems coincides with the demise of ethics in America. Many business entities and their top leaders have ignored ethics and the values premises upon which they are based. Hart suggests that society has assumed that, since we formed our nation on the basis of certain "unalienable rights," present practice should still reflect them. While they profess them as benchmarks, many leaders and most theories ignore them as integral aspects (conditions) of leader behavior. Even a cursory look at ethics in America leads to the conclusion that many workers have taken ethics - and their values-basis - for granted. The result is a loss of ethical integrity.

In the long term, we can solve the really hard problems facing our work communities only if we behave ethically. Staff selection and training, culture maintenance, vision setting, and other tasks that ensure work-community success all have ethical dimensions. Top leaders have largely ignored ethics. So also has most contemporary leadership theory. The inner leadership model prioritizes ethical behavior defined by the group's values.

Methods Of Using Values

As noted, values are standards that are learned and internalized from the various institutions of society, not just from work cultures. An individual's values change not only as a result of changes in self-concept and with increasing self-awareness but also as his or her environmental context changes. This change is sometimes externally motivated but often is motivated by a need for self-actualization. People change their values when they feel dissatisfaction with their current values as they are applied in their several social contacts.

No one, including inner leaders rises, like Venus, with a full-blown values system that lasts a lifetime. Each individual naturally undergoes continual change as the result of everyday living. Traditional theory suggests that our value programming is relatively rapid in the early years of our maturation but slows until, by our majority, it is set and changes slowly thereafter. Many suggest that setting our values and changing them over time is an intensely personal undertaking, one not normally usurped by corporate leaders. Indeed, except for parents, the clergy, and maybe a few other intimate associates, those with whom one has relationships, many believe, should not be party to values changes - certainly not people in one's work community. Inner leadership - and simple observation of real life - suggests that this perception of values change is faulty to the extent of being pointless.

Setting and Changing Values

Contemporary research is concluding that pressure to shape an individual's values set comes from many sources - parents, ministers, teachers, leaders, friends, colleagues, leaders, and significant life events. It also affirms that many people share many of the same values and that these values can be known and altered both by individuals and by people external to them. Rokeach suggests that our list of desired terminal values is formed out of the ideas we come into contact with and the larger-scoped beliefs we come to accept. That is, the profession we select, the level of religiousness we adopt, our ethnicity and the ideology we subscribe to dictate in large part the end-state values we honor and toward which we seek to gauge our life.

The power of values lies in the scope of their impact on individuals' attitudes and behavior. Values thus become operational standards that are important not as abstract ideals but in their use as guides to what individuals think about, how they think about it, and how they behave toward others.

Individuals select unique sets of values among alternatives after considering the probable effects of the alternatives on their lives. Therefore, one can say a particular value is "owned" when the individual acts consistently in terms of it and publicly acknowledges it.

For something to be a value for someone, it must fulfill the following criteria:

It must be chosen freely from alternatives.
The effects of the various alternative values must be considered.
It must be acted upon by the person.
It must be acted upon repeatedly.
It must help the person achieve his or her potential.
It must be publicly affirmed by the person.

Unless a value meets all six of these criteria, it is a partial value, a value being formed by a person.

Inner leaders use this values-setting process in setting the work community's guiding values. In essence, it is a task of choosing, acting, and prizing.

Choosing is consciously considering and deliberately and freely choosing a value over other possible values, the consequences of each being known. A value becomes set when the individual acts consistently on the basis of it. Initially the action may be tentative and sporadic, but with experiences it becomes the trigger of repeated behavior. Finally individuals must "prize" the value as an effective source of support for their goals of self-development and maturation and share and affirm it publicly.

The Process of Values Change

The need for inner leaders to understand how values are changed and the mechanisms they can use is critical to their success. As noted, the process consists of six parts. Knowing this process, inner leaders can abandon the traditional policy of hands off and begin to shape their work community's values in the same way teachers, priests, parents, managers, and friends - even strangers - have been doing for generations. There are six ideal phases of values change.

Choosing the value. Except in rare circumstances, the ideal way to choose a value is by voluntary selecting it. That is, the choice is ideally freely made after thinking about alternatives and considering their consequences. Inner leaders create opportunities for their followers to choose values they want them to select by couching them in ways that attract the followers.
Acting upon the value. Since people select their values after having experimented with them by acting in terms of new values in isolated situations, inner leaders provide work opportunities to let followers exercise the new value in ways that lead to success.
Esteeming. People adopt a new value if they see it as something to esteem, prize, appreciate, or cherish. For followers to esteem a value, inner leaders must find ways to let followers see that the new value helps them achieve their potential.
Publicly affirming. Part of inculcating a new value into other people's value sets includes getting them to publicly accept the value as theirs and to attest to its utility for them. Inner leaders take steps to insure that all work-community members know the new value. They build discussions about work-community values into as many contacts with followers as possible and also let followers defend and support the emerging values set.
Acting in isolated situations. A new value becomes a guiding standard as the leader, or the individual himself or herself, builds involvement in work activities that prioritizes the new value at times and in ways that maximize the potential for followers to have a success experience.
Acting according to a routine pattern. As experience in using the new value as a guide builds, inner leaders act to incorporate it into all appropriate work-unit actions.

Values Displacement

The sense of values theory is that an individual's values are set fairly early in life and change slowly over a long time. This stable-state nature of human values is disturbed, except for incremental alteration, only by experiencing a significant emotional event. Such an event may be either a positive or negative crisis or a personal catharsis, a kind of epiphany. In fact, any major life event can trigger values change - marriage, divorce, having a child, winning or losing a job, or even reading a book, having a new idea, meeting a personal hero, or some other personally impactful event. And followers sometimes change their values merely by the acquisition of new knowledge. Indeed, the mechanisms for change are multiple.

From the point of view of leading from the middle of the corporation, before there can be purposeful participation, coworkers must share certain values and pictures about where they are trying to go (Senge). Creating shared-values workplaces is a task of nurturing some values among followers and downplaying others. One's central standard of right conduct comes from core, often spiritual values (Bjerke). People form these values in the family, in religion, in school, and in other social interaction. More and more work communities are surfacing leaders who lead from this kind of spiritual values orientation rather than management by objectives, TQM, or some other participatory model. Actually, all these leadership fads, and all the others, find their utility in some kind of sharing of values among group members. Inner leaders lead through shared values. They ensure that, insofar as possible, all coworkers accept the work community's values, goals, and methods. They articulate values that followers also hold, or they help followers shape their values system so they come to desire the leader's values.

Inner leadership, therefore, becomes a task of values displacement (Bjerke). A values leader displaces unwanted - even if morally okay - values held by the work community or its individual members and replaces them with values the leader honors - values he or she thinks will enhance his or her personal success or that of the work community.

Values and related changes in attitudes and behavior can come about in two ways. They change as a result of changes in the individual's self-conception (self-definition). One's values change also because of increased self-awareness of incongruencies, inconsistencies, contradictions, even hypocrisies, between self conceptions and self-ideals, on the one hand, and on the other, their present values-related attitudes and behavior.

The general order of the creation of our individual values set is from pre-moral to conventional conformity to self-accepted values. That is, we move from a value neutral state to conventional community values to a unique and individually set code of values. As noted, the process need not be necessarily slow. Rokeach's research suggests that it can happen in as little as forty minutes. All that is necessary for someone's values to change is an inner need to make his or her self-concept match his or her desired behavior.

Values-based behavior modification has implications for many human social issues - alcoholism, drug abuse, obesity, and a range of achievement related tension disorders like unsafe driving or physical inactivity. It has special interest to inner leaders for it is the basis of the leader–follower dynamic, and while key to the conduct of leadership, it has not been discussed until very recently. Research in values change theory suggests that inner leaders can change follower values in a variety of ways such as the following:

Creation of a new standard of belief - publication of a code of values.
Abrupt destruction of previously held orientations - hiring a new boss.
Attenuation or slow withdrawal of effort and commitments - boredom with the status quo.
Extension of values held into new situations or spheres of influence - cross-training.
Elaboration of held values via progressive rationalization into a new area - training.
Specification of more explicit context in which a value is considered applicable - training.
Limitation of the use of the value via confrontation with other opposing values - controlling the environment.
Explication of an implicit value - persuasion.
Constancy, or greater systematic application of a value in many circumstances - adapting new policies and procedures.
Intensifying or changing a value from one among many to the center of our life - forcing focus, paying attention to one part of the work.

Long-term values change can be induced by machines, as well as by human experimenters. Such is the power of the mass media in the form of music, television, and the Internet that leaders may and do employ them to bring about value change.

Determining Which Values to Use

Rushworth Kidder identified several values he says are held in common by people regardless of culture or nationality. According to Kidder's research, knowing these universal values "gives leaders a foundation for building goals, plans, and tactics, so that things really happen and the world really changes. Using these values in their relationships with others unifies the work community, giving it a home territory of consensus and agreement.

Knowledge of some universal values gives inner leaders another way to reply when asked, Whose values will you teach? Answering this question, as we plunge into the twenty-first century with the twentieth's sense of ethics, may be one of the most valuable mental activities of our time.

Kidder's "universal" values include:

Love	Truthfulness	Fairness	Freedom
Unity	Tolerance	Responsibility	Respect For Life

He also implies others such as courage, wisdom, hospitality, peace, and stability.

Some of these universal values seem to be self-evident. They are reflected in the everyday experience of people of good will the world over. People in American society and in most other societies in the world commonly include them in lists of core values. They may form at least a skeleton guide inner leaders use to help create their work community's values in a growingly diverse, complex, and differentiated work world. Based on these few universal values, inner leaders construct a values foundation that appeals to the soul of many. For example:

Nobody considers it moral to abuse children.
Nobody considers it moral to rape.
Nobody considers it moral to steal.
Nobody considers it moral to commit murder.
Nobody considers it moral to discriminate.
Nobody considers it moral to be disrespectful.
Nobody considers it moral to lie.
Nobody considers it moral to be dishonest.

On the other hand, people think it is right and proper to

care for and love family and friends.
treat all people fairly.
respect the right of all to free moral choice.
be bone honest in our dealing with others.
conduct our lives so others will see us as worthy.

As inner leaders enforce these standards by both edict and expectations they help assure that followers will positively respond.

Discussion Issues And Questions

Issues

Inner leadership bases its utility on the power to excite, motivate, and coopt work-community members who come to share the leader's values.
Inner leaders clarify work-community values, displace incongruent individual values, and maintain the set of common values shared by both leader and led.
Values are more basic constructs than rules of conduct. They determine rules and rank them. They are the criteria people use in selecting actions, goals, and methods.
Traditional leadership tasks and skills are not useful to inner leaders. Rather, their tasks are of the mind, the soul, the spirit, asking them to get in touch with themselves in intimate ways as a necessary first step in changing followers in intimate ways.
Inner leadership deals with the whole person, with maturation of the spiritual, physical, and emotional, as well as economic dimensions of stakeholders.
Values define acceptable behavior as well as acceptable personal or corporate traits or characteristics.
Values displacement is a hallmark of inner leadership.
Leaders in the middle of the corporation prioritize traditional American values like respect for life, freedom of action, unity, justice, and happiness along with other values.
Values define both expectation and actual experience; and for this reason, the community's values system is an important dimension in defining and differentiating cultures.
Values are not rules of conduct; they are criteria for selecting rules that guide actions, goals, and methods.
The sense of much of the inner leadership literature is that values dictate work-community action and shape reward systems and measure individual and work-community success.

Questions

Do I watch for signs of helpful–hurtful values in my followers, as well as productivity and efficiency ones?
Do I understand that personal values are more powerful in shaping corporate action than formal rules and regulations?
Do I listen for values as well as information?
Have I developed a keen eye for what is happening in the office? Do I take the time to watch the processes, interactions, and relationships in the office?

Values-Based Learning Activities

Inner leadership engages the leader in specific behaviors to change the value measures of individual followers and the nature of their goals. The following activities may be useful to leaders as they try to gain experience and comfort in displacing the values of their coworkers.

Activity 1: Valuing

Instructions. The individual's set of values is naturally undergoing continual incremental - sometimes revolutionary - change. Yet, for most of this generation, values displacement has been ignored. The reason is the mistaken belief that setting one's values is a personal, private action with which process externals should not engage. The reality is that a lot of people and events impact on everyone's values and serve to change them. Inner leaders bring values displacement "out of the closet" of neglect and into the light of leadership action. They reveal the need for expertise in this preeminent leadership activity.

Assume you are the inner leader of a work community in your present work environment.
Develop a plan to induce your coworkers to change their values respecting habitual punctual attendance (or any other value you think is needed in your present work situation).
Follow the six-step guideline found in this chapter.
Include in your plan specific actions you will take in each step and that you will ask coworkers to take to insure that this new value guides the life of your coworkers.
Share this plan with a colleague who can help you refine - and maybe implement - it.

Activity 2: Where Do Our Values Come From?

Introduction. Inner leaders internalize one (or a very few) of these founding values in their work-community values set and in their strategic vision statements. The value adopted in the vision is the basis for individual and work community action. It is the source for inspiring commitment and mobilizing action toward its realization in the life of the work community and its members because everyone has values, and they affect our behavior. But, where do your values come from?

Think about your values and their origins.
In the spaces provided below, write down as many sources of your values as you can. (Add to the diagram as needed.)

Activity 3: Core Values Ranking

Instructions. Milton Rokeach identified eighteen core or terminal values and another eighteen instrumental values that help us in attaining our core values. Use his model to determine what your values are as of today that guide your actions and behavior, both on the job and off.

Sources of My Values

1. __________	6. __________
2. __________	7. __________
3. __________	8. __________
4. __________	9. __________
5. __________	10. __________

Complete the following two questionnaires for yourself. You may also complete the questionnaire as it applied to your work community or to another coworker.

Complete the ranking for yourself first. Then complete the ranking as you see your coworkers (collectively) back home would rank them.

Your Core Value System

Core Values	My Ranking of Values	As My Associates Would Rank Them
A Comfortable life	__________	__________
An Exciting Life	__________	__________
A Sense of Accomplishment	__________	__________
A World at Peace	__________	__________
A World of Beauty	__________	__________
Equality	__________	__________
Family Security	__________	__________
Freedom	__________	__________
Happiness	__________	__________
Inner Harmony	__________	__________
Mature Love	__________	__________
National Security	__________	__________
Pleasure	__________	__________
Salvation	__________	__________
Self-Respect	__________	__________
Social Recognition	__________	__________
True Friendship	__________	__________
Wisdom	__________	__________

Your Instrumental Value System

InstrumentalValues	My Ranking of Them	As My Associates Would Rank them
Ambitious	__________	__________
Broad-Minded	__________	__________
Capable	__________	__________
Cheerful	__________	__________
Clean	__________	__________
Courageous	__________	__________
Forgiving	__________	__________
Helpful	__________	__________
Honest	__________	__________
Imaginative	__________	__________
Independent	__________	__________
Intellectual	__________	__________
Logical	__________	__________
Loving	__________	__________
Obedient	__________	__________
Polite	__________	__________
Responsible	__________	__________
Self-Controlled	__________	__________
__________	__________	__________
__________	__________	__________

Identify the three values you ranked highest and the three you ranked lowest of both core and instrumental values for yourself and for your work community. Then respond to the following questions.
- What did you learn about yourself when you analyzed your highest and lowest ranked values?
- How do your rankings of your core values compare with the composite of your perception of colleagues' rankings?
- How were your instrumental values similar to or different from the composite ranking?
- What does this mean to you about your relationships in this group?

Can you make some conclusions about the impact of individual and work community values on your individual fit with the team.

the power of values in shaping corporate success.
the power of values in shaping your individual success.

What can you do as a leader with this kind of information? Be explicit.

Activity 4: The Values Supporting Personal Professional Ethics

Instructions. An effective way of thinking about what you want for the future is to write your own obituary. This may seem a strange thing to do - especially for younger people, or those at the end of their careers, but it is a way of really thinking about what you want to do with your life. Writing your own obituary will take some thinking and reflecting on your part. It should be done in quiet.

Write your own obituary. Use any format you desire, but here is a made up example:

Mr. John Smith died at his home yesterday after a short illness. He was 83. Before his retirement eleven years ago, he was executive vice president of the Sloan Hospital. According to hospital officials, Mr. Smith began his rise to prominence when he undertook research (on his own time) and sold plans for the hospital's expansion into international health care. He was in charge of testing for the project, and when it was successful he was assigned to a key position in the international division. He later became vice president/international.

Mr. Smith was active in civic and service work communities in the city and served on many boards and committees for public betterment. Among other notable volunteer activities was his work with small businesses begun by people of minority groups. He believed that know-how was the biggest lack in making a success of these small business ventures. It is to be noted that the failure rates for our city are much lower than those in other cities of comparable sizes.

Mr. Smith attended Tulane University for three years and later completed his B.A. degree and the MBA degree through the University of Chicago Extension. He and Mrs. Smith were active participants in local college evening classes, taking a wide range of subjects such as geography, foreign languages, geopolitics, painting, and sculpture.

When his two boys were younger, he was active in their activities, including Boy Scouts and Little League Football. (In working with the Little League, he was able to persuade the other parents to deemphasize winning and emphasize sportsmanship and skill.)

Mr. Smith is survived by his wife, Edith, and two sons: Robert J., an attorney in Richmond, and Peter. L., an oceanographer now working in Florida.

Note: Some items are not yet even begun by our Mr. Smith. Please think through what you have done to date in your life and what you want yet to accomplish. Include both in your obituary.
When you have completed your obituary, lay it aside for a few days.
Then review it carefully and analyze why you wrote the words your wrote, why you recorded the events and activities you recorded, and which of the values you hold are reflected in the content of the obituary.
- Why do you think you would write the words you did in your obituary?
- What values are reflected in the kind of accomplishments you listed for yourself?

List those values you believe form the foundation of your life based on your obituary.

Your list may contain some of the following values that other people have listed as the reason for their activities. Which of these values reflect your present values set? (Circle those that apply and write in other values you listed in step 4.)

Achievement	Growth	Joy/Peace	Choice
Health	Security	Wealth	Service
Spirituality	Work	Recreation	Fun
Power	Creativity	Immortality	Brotherhood
Tradition/Culture	Affiliation	Freedom	Independence

If any of these values (or others) are the base cause of your writing any part of your obituary document, write that value in the margin near the appropriate phrase or sentence. One activity or event may be caused by several values. If this is the case in your situation, record each appropriate value in the margin.
Review your marked-up obituary document and determine which values are most important in your life, at least as they precipitated significant behavior in your past, present, and potential future actions.

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