Defining Your Core Values Can Make You a Better Leader - Here's How

Analysing systems to catalyse growth within a business is a key focus for all leaders. But how invested are you in looking inward at your own processes and values? Taking time to reflect properly on what these are can improve both your personal efficiency and self-awareness, and in turn transform the way your business operates. Here's some benefits to adopting this within your leadership.

Maria Dimitropoulou writes in Entrepreneur that your core values are the ‘compass of your vision’, acting as the central point for your missions and growth goals to stem from. She also suggests the importance of physically noting them in the form of a handwritten list, a simple habit which can assist in using your core values as an ‘accountability checker’ of sorts, to ensure your business is headed in the right direction.?

Acting with integrity is essential to building trust, loyalty and confidence with your workforce, as well as with your clients. And this begins to happen as your behaviours reflect your values.?

Additionally, the more authentic your style of leadership is, the more respect you will likely gain within your workforce, bettering interpersonal relationships. This offers some affirmation to your position as leader and gives a sense of purpose and drive to further represent and defend these values cohesively throughout your role.?

As a leader, making informed and committed decisions is often a daily part of the role, and requires consistent strategic thinking. Knowing your core values inside out can help with prioritising this often overwhelming list of tasks, as it acts as a prompt to assess what is most important in the given context, and helps to eliminate or adapt anything that doesn’t align with this. This will provide method to the madness that often surrounds the everyday running of a business, and draws out a clear roadmap of how to reach those eventual goals.?

In fact, it should be updated regularly! You might think writing something down feels permanent, but your core values can change with your experiences, being it testing and measuring processes or client models, or via reviewing systems within your business. Like anything else within your business, your identity as a leader expands and grows with each new chapter encountered.

For more information on how to define your core values and design an effective roadmap to success, please don’t hesitate to contact me at [email protected].

Original ideas by Maria Dimitropoulou as published in Entrepreneur