The Missing Piece To Defining Your Authentic, Effective Leadership Style

A step-by-step guide to crafting (effective) core values that make you a stronger leader

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We are thrilled to feature a guest post by Robert Glazer, Founder & Board Chair at Acceleration Partners, a #1 WSJ & USA Today bestselling author, the host of the Top-Rated Elevate Podcast, and global Keynote Speaker. You can subscribe to Robert’s Substack on business leadership and personal development, Friday Forward.

In this article, Robert unpacks how the most effective leaders anchor their decisions and behavior in personal core values (and shows you how to identify and define your own). You’ll learn what makes a core value actionable and how to build a leadership style that’s authentic, consistent, and trusted.

Read on to align your leadership with who you really are and unlock your full potential.

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The Missing Piece To Defining Your Authentic, Effective Leadership Style

When Garry Ridge took over as CEO of The WD-40 Company in 1987, the organization was in a bit of a stasis. WD-40 was undeniably successful, with a market capitalization of $300 million and an iconic brand built around its blue and yellow can with a red cap. But it had a cutthroat culture and an employee engagement rate of about 40 percent.

Ridge led WD-40 as CEO for the next 35 years. In that span, he grew the company to a market capitalization of $2.3 billion, nearly a 10X growth. Perhaps more remarkably, he raised employee engagement from 40 percent to 93 percent.

To summarize the transformational effect he had on WD-40’s culture as CEO, Ridge has consistently pointed to two vital things:

• He and his team encouraged team members to make and admit mistakes, rather than projecting false perfection. Ridge even removed the word failure from the company lexicon, replacing it with the term “learning moments.”

• More importantly, he developed organizational core values and made them the backbone of WD-40’s culture.

Ridge believes that, in an organizational context, core values are a far greater dictator of behavior than strict rules. Values create the psychological safety employees need to make autonomous decisions, take calculated risks, and avoid bottlenecks. Ridge specifically had a philosophy as CEO that if someone made a decision or took an action that was supported by one of WD-40’s core values, that person was always safe from negative repercussions. Giving team members the guardrails needed to operate autonomously made a huge difference in employee engagement and satisfaction.

Safe Leadership

Now, let’s pivot to you as a leader: how do you know you are safe when making decisions, either at work or outside of it?

If you are relatively new to your current leadership role—whether it’s your first leadership position, or an elevated role with more responsibility and direct-reports than you’ve had previously—you have probably second-guessed yourself in critical moments. Every leader regularly faces difficult situations and decisions and needs to navigate them without much relevant experience.

For example, imagine being in one of these very common leadership scenarios for the very first time, or for the first time in a while:

• A sales rep misses quota three quarters in a row, and recently appeared unprepared for a major pitch that the company lost.

• A project manager consistently misses deadlines, goes over budget, and fails to communicate these issues proactively.

• Due to a cost-cutting directive, you have to reduce your department headcount by 10 percent and execute the layoffs.

• One of your team members has misrepresented data to a client to make performance appear better than it actually is.

These types of situations are the ones leaders lose sleep over, and newly minted leaders tend to follow a common, but ineffective, blueprint for these scenarios.

Without having the experience to understand what they value most as a leader in difficult moments, many new leaders default to either emulating the practices they’ve admired from their favorite managers or doing the opposite of the managers and managerial tactics that frustrated them most. In fact, many leaders do this several years into their leadership career.

The problem with this approach is that even effective leadership tactics can be unsuccessful if they are not authentic to the leader using them. Consider, for example, the kind, genial person who suddenly becomes intense and demanding because they believe that’s how to command respect.

It’s cliché to say you should be yourself, but clichés exist for a reason. If you don’t think carefully about your own authentic leadership style, you’ll find your approach will become a patchwork quilt of the best practices of others, some of which will feel hollow or inauthentic.

I speak from experience. I remember one specific instance where people on my team had partied way too hard at an industry conference and were unable to function properly the next day. Needing to address the issue, I spoke with a colleague who had a similar issue with his team at that same conference, and I adapted his hard-handed approach. That solution did not sit well with me; right away I felt like I was running someone else’s playbook, and I felt like I’d done something wrong.

This form of emulation is a logical progression of trial and error for managers, but it’s not a recipe for the highest level of leadership. This approach can leave you without a clear compass to navigate difficult situations or make tough choices. Few things feel worse as a leader than feeling like your actions or decisions are not authentic to you at your core. Likewise, few things erode team confidence faster than when a leader appears to barely believe in their own words or actions.

I’ve worked with over 100 companies as a speaker and consultant over the past few years, focusing particularly on leadership development. I’ve seen many cases where companies build their leadership training around tactical leadership standards they expect their managers to follow. Some examples I’ve seen include:

• Communicate Transparently

• Reward Excellent Performance

• Make Timely Decisions

Guidelines like these are a good start. But while leadership standards can set a necessary baseline for what leaders need to do to help the organization grow, there’s no universal approach that can tell every person how they should lead.

Instead, each leader needs to build their own leadership style that is authentic to them.

Let’s return to the example of Garry Ridge and WD-40. Just as Ridge designed WD-40’s core values to give employees the psychological safety needed to make autonomous decisions, leaders must identify their own core values that provide similar guardrails for their own personal behavior. Effective core values keep leaders safe when handling difficult situations, taking risks, or pursuing time-consuming ideas. When people lead according to their principles, they can stand behind their actions and decisions, even if they are unpopular at first

To get the safety and trust that comes from leading authentically, you need to identify and align to your personal core values. Moreover, you need to have values that are unique to you and effectively guide your actions, which means one-word platitudes won’t suffice. Let’s go through what effective core values are, then we’ll explore how to find yours.

What Are Personal Core Values?

Core values are the non-negotiable principles that are most important to you. Even if you aren’t able to name them yet, they exist within you, and you instinctively know when you are doing something that serves those values or conflicts with them.

I’m sure you’ve experienced that distinct gut feeling that something you were doing was simply wrong, as I experienced in the conference story above. In most cases, these are decisions or actions that you get pressured into, either because you are following the crowd, or because someone is specifically pushing you to do something you don’t really want to do. In all likelihood, that feeling was a warning sign that you were violating one of your deeply held core values.

In contrast, if you’ve ever been in a moment of flow, doing something you love and barely noticing the passage of time, that’s probably a sign that you are acting in alignment with your values.

These core values serve as the swim lanes that keep you on track and away from the wrong behaviors in life. Having awareness of your values means that you know where your swim lanes are, so that you don’t keep bumping against them, losing momentum and getting scraped up.

Because each of us is the same person both in and out of work, it’s essential for your personal core values to form the backbone of your professional leadership style. While you don’t need your work to reflect all your core values all the time, there ultimately must be alignment between what you do at work and what you believe most deeply.

To that point, research has found that leaders who talk about and live their values are perceived as three times more trustworthy by their teams.

I was leading a small team before I had even considered what my core values might be. I was just trying to do my best with the best practices and learnings I could cobble together. But eventually, I settled on five values that summarize the non-negotiable descriptors of who I am as a person and a leader.

Those values are below, listed in hierarchical order of importance:

• Find A Better Way and Share It

• Self-Reliance

• Health and Vitality

• Respectful Authenticity

• Long-Term Orientation

Getting this clarity is what allowed me to approach my full potential as a leader. I use my values to lead authentically as myself, and to communicate what matters most to me to the people I lead.

For example, one of my core values, as mentioned above, is “Find A Better Way and Share It.” That’s why I’m writing this article. As a leader, I am not someone who likes to keep the status quo. I expect people on the teams I lead to strive to improve both the business and themselves. Some people excel under this type of leadership, and some people do not, so it’s crucial for the people I lead to know this about me upfront. That clarity is extremely powerful, and pays dividends for me, the people I lead, and our organization.

What Is An Effective Core Value?

When I coach leaders to find their personal core values, I always start by asking them what they believe their values are. In response, I hear these five values remarkably frequently:

• Family

• Integrity

• Honesty

• Respect

• Excellence

These are good sentiments, and these principles are often at the root of effective core values. However, these types of vague, one-word values are often ineffective, especially for decision-making.

For example, core values need to be universally applicable, and Family decidedly is not, especially not in work. In the coaching process, it’s often revealed that there’s an underlying value that applies to how clients show up for family, friends, colleagues, and their community. A person who is devoted to their family may have core values expressing how reliable they are for both their family and their team, such as “Always Show Up.”

To be effective, especially in leadership, your personal core values must fit four key criteria:

• A Constant, Non-Negotiable Principle. In other words, a value can’t be something you do only at work or only at home. It has to apply to everything you do.

• A Distinct Definition and Point of View. Your core values need to be unique to you and the way you see the world. I often say that while two people can often have one or two core values in common, it should be rare to find someone with the exact same list as you.

• An Action-Oriented Phrase. Rather than being a single word, a good value is worded in a way that dictates action. For example, instead of Integrity, someone might have a value of Keep Your Word.

• A Decision-Making Rubric. Your core values need to be principles that make you feel safe and confident navigating difficult decisions. If you don’t feel like your values point you in a particular direction at a decision point, they probably aren’t quite right.

So, if you instinctively thought of a collection of single-word values while reading this, I encourage you to think about how those words could be adapted into action-oriented phrases that are truly unique to you.

If you’ve brainstormed an actionable core value phrase that fits the criteria above, there’s one last step you can take to validate if it’s right for you. It’s a collection of four questions called the Core Validator™. The first two questions validate whether the core value captures the right theme, or idea, and the third and fourth questions validate whether the core value is phrased effectively.

1. Could you use this core value to make a decision, past or present?

2. When you think of the opposite principle or action, does it make you viscerally uncomfortable?

3. Is it a phrase, rather than just one word?

4. Can you objectively rate yourself on whether you’ve followed the value?

If you have a phrase and theme that prompts an affirmative answer to all four of these questions, you have an actionable core value that can be weaved into your leadership style.

How To Find Your Core Values

Hopefully, by now you’re intrigued by the potential of core values. To start the process, you have to think deeply about what’s most important to you and look at the common themes of your responses. I typically facilitate this reflection with six specific questions that drive you to reflect deeply on your personal and professional experiences and principles. Those six questions are available in the link at the end of this post.

Once you answer these questions, responding to each with a bulleted list on a separate sheet of paper, look for common themes in responses. Typically, it is best to group certain themes and ideas together with color coding. For example, you might circle all the bullet points that relate to trust with a red marker, all the bullet points that relate to growth or improvement with a blue marker, and all the bullet points that relate to self-sufficiency or independence with a green marker. Then, you’d combine those bullets onto three new pages, with each representing a core value theme.

Once you have three to five of these theme groups consolidated, you would assign a tentative title phrase for each one and check them against the Core Validator questions shared above. If the theme and phrase pass all four questions, it’s a good core value for you.

From there, you need to road test your new values. Write them down and put them on your desk, then refer to them when you have a decision to make in the next several weeks. Using your values in real situations and seeing how you feel is a great way to confirm they are right for you, as a person and as a leader.

If you are leading an organization, or even a small team, you’ve surely had moments where you’ve wondered if you were doing the right thing. Identifying your core values and aligning your leadership style to them is the best way to erase that doubt and reach your full potential as a leader.

If you need help doing this, start with the six questions I mentioned above, which you can get at this page. If you preorder the hardcover version of my upcoming book on values, The Compass Within, I’ll give you my core values course for free. And if you want to help your team get clarity on their values, reach out to me, as I often do this work with teams and organizations.

If you enjoyed this article, give it a like so we know to write similar types in the future.

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Thank you, Robert, for providing a clear and actionable roadmap on how to lead with authenticity and clarity.

Subscribe to Robert’s Substack, Friday Forward, for more of his insights on leadership and personal growth.

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