An Example of Leadership Success: Leading through Core Values and Mission

The tenth and final blog in this series is dedicated to one leader’s commitment to supporting one of his life’s missions—ensuring people live their best lives. 

Many leaders go through life without much thought into why they are there.  This allows a leader’s behavior to be more susceptible to organizational whims, short-term incentives, or simply minimizing hassles in the daily grind.  While that might seem helpful in the moment it often leads to problems in the future, a lack of motivation, and eventual burnout.  Pat is not this kind of leader.  Pat is a leader who knows why he comes to work every day and has clarity on his role as a leader.  When talking about his mission, he has so much enthusiasm and passion about his role it’s infectious to the people around him. 

Pat is a senior manager inside an organization and has spent his career supporting his core values and mission.  This was not by accident. Pat will tell you it was an investment from another leader early in his career that helped him identify his core values and leadership behaviors that he could do to support those values.  But that is not the story I will be telling today.  The leadership behaviors we will be discussing are the ones that are happening present day, ones that have been cultivated and refined over decades of purposeful practice.  These are the behaviors that Pat identified as crucial in the success in his career as a leader:

Aligning values and leadership behaviors.  Pat uses his mission and personal core values as a guide for everything he does on a daily/weekly basis.  This includes everything from purposefully building relationships with his team and investing in his own leadership development to leading the organization to making large-scale investments in technology to help support desired behaviors.  To help drive consistency, Pat uses the following strategies:

  • He starts every day/meeting talking about his mission and what it means to him. 
  • He reflects on his own behavior and determines if it’s in alignment with supporting his mission and core values.
  • He talks with his team members on a regular basis to ensure he is actively supporting them in achieving their goals.
  • When making decisions that affect others in the organization, he asks himself what needs to be done to support his mission. While this sounds easy, Pat will tell you there have been times when he had to stand his ground against organizational decisions or objectives that were not aligned.

Helping people identify what’s truly important to them.  Like someone did with Pat many years ago, Pat helps his team members identify their own core values and what’s truly important in their lives.  To do this, Pat utilizes a similar process that I wrote about here to help people identify their own core values and long-term reinforcers they want to achieve.  He also uses those stated values on a regular basis, asking his team members for examples of how they are living out their values and working towards those values through their work at the company.  Having his team review and talk about their values on a regular basis has multiple benefits.  First, it helps make someone’s stated core values important to them.  It also helps people work towards those long-term reinforcers, like an accountability buddy.  Lastly, it shows Pat cares about others achieving their goals in life. 

Using the success of others as his success indicator.  Pat recognized that if he was successful in leading his people to achieve their core values, then his mission would also be achieved.  This became the ultimate results measure for Pat and he is able to use that to help develop his people, or help them move towards something different if that better supported their personal missions. By using their success as a measure of his own success, Pat has been able to produce other highly successful leaders and developed a team that gives him discretionary effort. 

These critical behaviors have allowed Pat to live out his personal core values and life’s mission. While not always easy, Pat still finds leading people as exciting as he did decades ago when his career began. He has also produced other great leaders who continue to support his mission by achieving their own.  Any leader or organization who wants to align their leadership practices with their own core value and mission should consider emulating these critical behaviors. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series on Examples of Leadership Success.  It has been exciting for me to profile different leaders and pinpoint some specific behaviors that make them stand out.  It’s been an honor to work with all of them.   

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Posted by Bryan Shelton

Bryan applies his knowledge and expertise in strategic planning to help organizations align employee performance with company goals. Bryan helps clients create improvement across a variety of business metrics including company growth, profitability, customer service, vision alignment, leadership development, and culture change. He also helps clients implement process improvement initiatives, improve sales results and using performance-pay systems to help drive company results. His behavior-based approaches and applications have supported clients’ improvement initiatives, leadership development, and the design and implementation of performance pay systems.