Lived
Level 4. Scores 76 to 100. Your values are in your decisions. Are they the company's?
Your values are in your decisions. For every one of your top five you could name a decision in the last month where it cost you something, and the values you reached for instantly are the ones you act on. This is a Lived list, and it is uncommon, so check one thing before you accept it: were the decisions you named real, and expensive? A value that cost you a slightly awkward conversation is not the same as one that cost you a client, a hire, or a quarter. Both count. They do not count the same.
Assuming they were real, the work at this level is not personal. It is about the distance between your values and the company's. A leader with lived values and a company with poster values is a leader who will spend increasing energy on the gap, usually without naming it. Your team sees you act on Candour and sees the company reward silence. They resolve that in one of two ways: they decide you are the exception, or they decide you will not last. Neither is what you want.
The second piece of work is succession, in the widest sense. Values that live in one leader leave with that leader. The test of whether they have become the company's is whether the people under you make the same expensive decisions when you are not in the room.
Values move into a company through three doors. Who you hire. What you tolerate. What you do under pressure, which is the one people remember. Under pressure, you do not rise to your aspirations. You fall to your values, and everyone is watching which ones.
In the company I ran, one value made that trip. We separated the problem from the person, and whoever raised the flag on a mistake was celebrated for speaking up, not blamed for it. That was not a line in a handbook. It was what happened in the room, every time, until the people under me did it without me. You know a value has transferred when you hear about it second hand, from meetings you were not in.
One thing to do this quarter. Find the last three decisions made in your company without you that you would have made on values grounds. Ask who made them and what they were weighing. If your values came up, by name or in substance, they are becoming the company's. If they did not, you have a lived list and a company that has not read it.
Next step: peer groups exist partly for this, leaders whose values are settled and whose companies are not yet. See whether the CEO mastermind fits.
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.
- In UseMost of your values are in your decisions. Check the order.
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.