Most organisations can tell you their values. Ask leaders and managers what they are and you’ll usually get a confident, if sometimes formulaic, answer. Ask employees to explain how those values show up in everyday decisions, on the other hand, and the response is often more hesitant.
That gap; between what an organisation claims to stand for and how it behaves under pressure, is where values-based leadership either thrives or falls apart. Ultimately, values only really exist when they show up in workplace behaviour. When they don’t, they fade into background noise. Why is this? In most cases, it’s not that organisations choose the wrong values, it’s that those values quietly disappear when decisions become uncomfortable. So, what is the best way to align personal, professional, and organisational values?
What Is Values-Based Leadership?
Let’s start with the question of values-based leadership. Values-based leadership is an approach to leading where decisions, behaviours and priorities are guided by clearly understood principles rather than convenience, habit or short-term pressure. At the coal face, it means leaders and managers fall back on values as a reference point when making trade-offs, explaining decisions and setting expectations, especially when there is no obvious right answer. In principle at least, values-based leaders are less defined by what they say they believe and more by what they consistently choose to do, particularly under stress.
Herein lies the difficulty many individuals face with values-based leadership. It involves making decisions that are consistent and explainable, even when they are uncomfortable. This doesn’t mean these decisions are necessarily going to be popular, which is why some leaders shy away from the approach. But long term, people are far more likely to trust their leaders when they understand the reasoning behind their choices, particularly during periods of change.
This is why research from the CIPD links values-led leadership with greater trust, wellbeing and clarity of purpose at work. When leaders behave in ways that are predictable in principle — if not always in outcome — people feel safer and more invested in the organisation’s direction. At its best, values-based leadership isn’t flashy or charismatic. It’s steady, giving people a sense of what to expect from their leaders, even when circumstances are uncertain.
(Mis)Alignment Between Personal, Professional, And Organisational Values
What about when value systems don’t quite line up? Every employee arrives at their new job with personal values shaped by experiences and beliefs, including your managers, leaders, and supervisors at every tier. Organisations bring their own organisational values, often carefully defined at board level. Professional roles add another layer again, with expectations about responsibility and conduct.
When these align, work tends to feel purposeful for the employee, with higher engagement and productivity, largely because they feel their efforts contribute to something meaningful. When they don’t, however, something shifts — usually quietly. People rarely announce a values misalignment publicly or even mention it in their one-to-ones. Instead, they disengage slightly. They stop challenging decisions, do what is required, but little more, maybe grumble to their colleagues. Over time, their energy and enthusiasm for their role drains away, with a notable effect on their output, efficiency, and relationships with their team mates.
There isn’t really anyone at fault here. There is no reason to presume that diverse personal, organisational, and professional values will automatically co-align, and every reason to assume that they won’t. Businesses often simply expect alignment, or for employees to subsume their professional and personal values to organisational principles, but this isn’t realistic or even desirable. To increase alignment, organisations should demonstrate how their values embrace and enhance the personal and professional values held by their employees, not supersede them.
Unfortunately, many organisations unintentionally accelerate a misalignment by treating their values as fixed statements rather than lived expectations. Values lose credibility when they are referenced selectively or disappear when inconvenient. The real test comes during organisational change. Restructures, cost pressures and strategic shifts expose what truly matters in a business, and leaders who abandon their stated values at these moments risk undermining the credibility of the entire value system.
Can Greater Alignment Drive Positive Culture Change In The Workplace?
Embedding values consistently in your leadership behaviour is essential to sustainable culture change. However, organisational culture doesn’t change because people suddenly believe in a set of values (or pretend to). It changes because behaviours shift, slowly, visibly and repeatedly over time. And alignment matters because it removes friction. When what leaders say, what they reward and how they behave start to line up, work feels more predictable and less performative for employees.
When personal and organisational values are broadly aligned, people don’t have to keep second-guessing what really matters to their managers. They understand how decisions will be made, what will be prioritised and where the red lines sit. Real cultural change happens in moments that rarely make headlines: how leaders address an awkward conversation, whether uncomfortable issues are faced or sidelined, and what behaviours are quietly tolerated. When leaders use values to guide these everyday decisions, even when it costs time, popularity or convenience, culture begins to move in a positive direction.
Find Out More
If you would like to find out more, speak to one of our specialists today about how our culture change programmes can help embed values in your leaders’ everyday behaviour and decisions.
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