A Values-Based Leadership Style

Anna Zawilska
Last updated on:
July 1, 2022
Anna Zawilska

This is an article co-written by Anna and Flora about using values to define your leadership style. Flora is a product leadership coach and co-founder of LEAD, as well as being ex-product leader at Monzo and Intercom. Anna heads up product at Suvera, a health-tech startup transforming long-term condition management. Flora has been coaching Anna, and this article captures both of our perspectives.

Anna

Navigating your first product leadership role can be incredibly exciting and fulfilling.

However, without a clear leadership style (or at least a starting point for one), you may feel lost, doubtful, and unsettled. If you google leadership styles, there’s so much written about the topic, and many pre-existing leadership personas, but it can all feel overwhelming and inauthentic. It can even lead you to doubt whether leadership is right for you.

This is what happened to me as I transitioned into a Product Director role at Suvera. For example, as I started to take on more line management duties, I felt I wasn’t creating the best situation possible for my reports to thrive and flourish as people and product managers. I had a feeling in particular that I wasn’t using my one-to-ones well, but couldn’t figure out how and why.  Luckily, I worked with my wonderful coach, Flora, to come up with a better approach and to find clarity on my leadership style.

Flora

Before sharing the journey that Anna and I went on with values, I think it’s helpful to back up and explain how I came to appreciate and believe in values.

I heard about the concept of defining leadership values long before I sat down and wrote mine. At the time, I was leading product teams at Monzo and it felt like I had endless demands on my time. Writing out values felt like a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

Then I got a piece of feedback in my performance review: “It’s not that you aren’t compassionate, but sometimes people seem to be a little bit thrown by your challenge or directness.” This didn’t feel inline with how I thought I was showing up and how I wanted to lead.

I was relying on my reactive, intuitive mind which clearly wasn’t getting it right all the time. I decided that it was time to give this values thing a go.

For me, defining values allowed me to have a framework to adjust my quick-thinking, reactive mindset. I took some time to be more deliberate and logical about how I wanted to show up in the moment. It was about the type of leader I wanted to be, not the type of leader I was being under pressure.

One of the values I defined was empathy. This meant making sure I listened and understood someone else’s perspective before giving feedback. It meant being aware of how I deliver that feedback and taking the time to share it 1:1 vs in a big meeting. That value of empathy became a guide. It reminded me to do the right thing, not the easy and reactive thing.

Defining values worked for me. That didn’t mean that they would also work for Anna. Introducing an exercise or a challenge needs to strike a balance between challenging your client and meeting your client where they are. I knew I was challenging Anna with this exercise, as she was feeling disillusioned rather than inspired with the concept of leadership styles. But Anna and I have built a level of trust in our relationship that I felt confident that this exercise would help change her perspective and shape her leadership style.

Anna was on board and we went through the following process together.

Step by step approach

1. Define some leadership scenarios

Write down those situations where you most need to show up as a leader (e.g. one-to-ones, creating a new process, hiring interviews). If useful, to make the list of scenarios more digestible, see if you’d like to group these scenarios into categories (e.g. line management, thought leadership, team).

2. Define your values

This is the hardest but most important step in the process. It’s important not to rush this, but take the time you need to reflect and connect with yourself. However, values can and will change over time so it’s okay to not feel fully comfortable committing to them forever. There are a few steps here:

2a. Brainstorm a long list of values

Use these prompts to create your initial values list:

1️⃣ Think about a meaningful moments in your career that have been positive.

What was happening to you? What values were you living at this time?

2️⃣ Think about a negative times in your career, where you were frustrated, angry or upset.

What behaviours caused that situation? What values are the opposite of those behaviours?

3️⃣ What’s important to you in leadership? What values must you have to experience fulfilment?

At this stage, don’t worry about prioritising or filtering the list as this will happen in the next step. Your goal is just to surface all the values that may be important to you.

2b. Pick the key 3-5 values for you

Taking your long list, pick 3-5 that stand out most to you, using gut feeling. Sit with these 3-5 values for a moment: take a deep breath and see how they feel in your gut. Take the values that sit the least well and consider swapping them out for another one: does the swap feel better/worse? Continue doing swaps until you have 3-5 values that feel the best.

3. Define the desired behaviours that reflect those values

Your behaviours are a reflection of your values, and should be aligned with them.

For each of the leadership scenarios, ask yourself: what behaviours would align with my values?

This behaviour and how you show up is effectively your leadership style!

4. Bonus - Identify and prioritise aspirational behaviours

Once you’ve got the behaviours for leadership scenarios listed, ask yourself:

  • Which of these behaviours are you already doing?
  • Which behaviours are aspirational?
  • Of those that are aspiration, which feel the most important to me in my gut?

Here’s a template for going through these steps including a couple illustrative examples: https://iron-pantry-d5e.notion.site/Template-Defining-my-values-based-leadership-style-1a188a6784bc4961a6daa9816163ceaa

It’s important to repeat this exercise regularly to ensure your values and leadership style stay true to you.

Anna

Working with Flora on this helped me find a leadership style that feels right and exciting, which has given me more peace and confidence as a leader.

On a day-to-day basis, holding my values in mind has helped me respond and not react to situations. This helps me feel more at peace and confident in how I’m navigating my role. For example, in the past I would sometimes jump straight into discussing a project in my one-to-ones with my reports. This was a reaction to a project feeling like it was going off-track, and a tendency of mine to want to fix this as soon as possible. Now, one of my defined values is connection, which means that in my one-to-ones I make the intentional choice to always carve out time to first check in with my reports. I’ll see how they’re feeling in general, make an effort to provide them with support, and nurture our connection. I do this even if there is a pressing project that needs to be discussed. This is a more intentional response that feels right. Longer-term, I have a clearer path forward on how to improve my leadership style. Beyond this, I’m excited to experiment with how my values can help guide my professional path more generally.

Flora

The values exercise proved to be so powerful for Anna and allowed her to understand what it means to be authentic and genuine as a leader.

Going through the values exercise also had a few clear benefits for me, as a coach:

  • It helped me learn the best ways to explain values - this idea that they provide a guide for our reactive, quick thinking mind to do the right thing not the easy thing
  • It inspired me to focus on values as a powerful tool in coaching sessions and in LEAD - the cohort based leadership programme I’ve co-founded.
  • I learnt about a new benefit of values - adaptability - that Anna shared with me. She shared that values can help when moving to a new role or a new company. They give you a guide or framework when everything else is new.

These journeys are why I love coaching so much. You offer someone a tool and it makes a significant shift in their perspective that allows them to move forward with confidence.