In Use
Level 3. Scores 51 to 75. Most of your values are in your decisions. Check the order.
Most of your values are showing up in your decisions. You could name a decision in the last month for four of your top five, or a near miss for all of them, and the values you reached for early in the sort are the ones you act on. That is an In Use list. It means the values are doing their job, which is to make hard decisions easier by deciding some of them in advance.
What is worth looking at now is the one that did not pass, and the order. The value with the weakest evidence is usually one of two things. Either it is a value you hold and rarely get to act on because your role does not test it, in which case it is fine and you should stop feeling guilty about it. Or it is one you put on the list because it sounded right next to the others, in which case it should go and the sixth card, the one that just missed, should come in.
The order matters more than leaders think. Two real values conflict regularly, Candour and Care, Pace and Craft, Ambition and Balance, and the rank you gave them is a prediction of which one wins when they do. Check the last time two of your values conflicted. Did the higher ranked one win? If not, your list is in the wrong order, and your team has already noticed which one actually comes first.
The pair I see collide most in founders is Loyalty and Accountability. The early employee who got the company to where it is and cannot take it further. The founder values both, and Loyalty wins every week the conversation does not happen. The second pair is Care and Candour, which in a Nordic room usually resolves as silence and gets called kindness.
I do not ask a client to rank values in the abstract, because everyone ranks well in the abstract. I ask for the three behaviours on their team that frustrate them most. Each one points at a value being violated. Then I ask why they have tolerated it. That answer is the competing value. It is the one that is actually ranked higher.
One thing to do this quarter. Write your top five, in order, on one line, and show it to your leadership team. Ask them to write what they think your top five are, without seeing yours. Compare. The differences are not a problem with them. They are a description of what you show.
Next step: a leader whose values are in use can usually say what they will not delegate and why. Test that with the management style quiz.
Next step
The other results
- On PaperYour values are preferred, not yet chosen.
- Half LivedSome of your values are real and some are on the poster.
- LivedYour values are in your decisions. Are they the company's?
About this result
This is one of 4 results from the Core Values Quiz for Leaders, a free tool that shows the score without an email. Aggregate figures are at the statistics page once 30 completions have been reached. More free tools are at the tools shelf.