The Values Compass: Paul Ingram on Guiding Leaders Through High-Stakes Decisions

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We are much more satisfied in a job if it's aligned with our values. So, I did a study that found that satisfaction of your top values explains more than 30% of job satisfaction. You might say, "Well, 30%, is that a lot or a little?" It's a lot. There's nothing else about a job that explains 30% of job satisfaction. In the United States, what people are paid explains about 3% of job satisfaction. So, your values are 10 times as important as what you're paid in terms of how you feel about your job.

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Every entrepreneur, every leader, every person building something has a version of this moment. You're at a crossroads, the pressure's on, and you have to make a call. At that moment, what actually guides you? My guest today has spent decades researching exactly that question. He's the Kravis Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, one of the most decorated teachers in Columbia's history, and the author of a brand new book from Harvard Business Review Press, What Do You Really Stand For? The One Question That Will Transform Your Work and Life. His argument is both simple and radical. Your values aren't just a moral compass, they're a strategic advantage that can sharpen your decisions, strengthen your team, and fuel your resilience when things get hard. Please welcome to Your Brand Amplified Columbia Business School Professor Paul Ingram. Paul, thank you so much for being here today.

Anika, thank you. It's a real pleasure to be with you.

As we were talking about before, this is one of my favorite topics and I'm so excited to dive in. And, and I do wanna start with the opening of your book. You open with a US Navy captain facing a life or death situation and decision. During the 2011 Japan earthquake. Obviously, we don't wanna give everything away, but what does that story tell us about what values do in a high-stakes moment?

Yeah, well, that's a really dramatic illustration of the difference that values can make. So the captain in that instance is Captain Matt Feely, who was my student 20 years ago at the Columbia Business School, and he came to my MBA class to talk about leading in crisis. He was the head of logistics or the head of the operational logistics system for the US 7th Fleet, which is the Pacific Fleet during the 2011 Great Japanese Earthquake, East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. So he was at the heart of providing humanitarian aid and relief, his organization, and The story he told my MBAs was that he was a few days into the operation. Things were going well. They were saving lives and property. And he got a call from Pearl Harbor. And it was an admiral on the other end of the line. And the admiral told him something that he knew actually, because he was very steeped in the rules around his work. But what the admiral reminded him of was that he was breaking the letter of US law by providing aid. I'll explain that in a moment. And the admiral The admiral's advice was— if the admiral— Captain Feely didn't report to the admiral, but the admiral said, "Look, if I were in your shoes, I would stop providing aid." The regulatory issue is something called the Anti-Deficiency Act. I won't get into the minutia of it, but it's the rules under which officers of the U.S. government can expend resources. And when it comes to foreign aid, there's an approval system that goes through Congress and the Japanese State Department, and you can imagine that broke down. In fact, in the many months of this operation, It was called Operation Tomodachi, which is freedom in Japanese, or friendship in Japanese, excuse me. There was no official requisites that, that made it through the bureaucracy. But anyway, Captain Feely is faced with this advice and he's got to make a decision, maybe the biggest decision of his, of his career. So my students want to know, what did you decide? How did you decide? And when he was asked that question, he went to his wallet where he has carried for 20 years a laminated card that captures his top values that he received when he was my student so many years ago. And he took it out and he said, look, I actually took this out of my wallet. I looked at it. And in a split second, I knew what I had to do, which was to continue to provide aid. So what's the illustration there? Well, I think you said it very well when you introduced the session that our values really tell us what's most important to us. Now, we have them in us, right? We develop our values in the first 2 or 3 decades of life. So they're always in us. But if we can be really clear about them and access them, it does a lot of really good things for us. And one of them is it allows us to see through the chaos and the stress and the conflicting advice and understand in the moment what is most important to us. So the most important decisions, how else should you make them except according to your values? And to really tap in at those most challenging moments, I think being clear about your values puts you way ahead.

And it's not always easy to do that. I tell, I've told stories to my students at USC or sometimes even on the podcast about, you know, I've been in positions where I merged my PR agency with another firm that seemed like a really great offer because it would give my team a really great place to land. It would give me a great place to land. There's more accessibility to tools and resources to my clients. But without, you know, obviously giving names, I quickly found out that, oh wait, some of the people have the same values that I have, which is what my entire company was based on, those values and that system. But some of the clients don't. And so, this tells me that this company's actually more money-driven than people-focused or equity-focused or any number of things I could say. And I walked away after 6 months without having a backup plan, without having another job lined up because I just, I couldn't be there anymore. And that's not as extreme as the first story, as the story that you shared, but that is also an extreme position because not a lot of people are necessarily willing to do that. I'm not tooting my own horn or anything. I'm just saying that when you do live by a certain value system, it's important to me to stick to those. And I know this makes a lot of hard decision processes and, you know, for entrepreneurs, for people in business, but what is the cost of not standing up for your own values?

Yeah, there— I think you made the right choice. All the evidence that I'm aware of indicates. It's really costly to be even working with people who have good values if they're not aligned with our own, right? Most people are pursuing good values, but you've got your own version of goodness. And the evidence, I think, is just really striking. I mean, you said the cost. Let's start with the personal cost. We are much more satisfied in a job if it's aligned with our values. Values. So, I did a study that found that satisfaction of your top values explains more than 30% of job satisfaction. You might say, "Well, 30%, is that a lot or a little?" It's a lot. There's nothing else about a job that explains 30% of job satisfaction. In the United States, what people are paid explains about 3% of job satisfaction. So, your values are 10 times as important as what you're paid in terms of how you feel about your job. I have also found that Like you, people are much more likely to leave an organization if their values are misaligned. And to kind of the equivalent, what it would take to get them to stay, you'd have to pay them a lot more. I did a study where we could kind of equate value alignment to pay. And you know, you could double someone's salary if their values are misaligned and they might stay, but they're, you know, generally, they're much less satisfied. So, that's the cost to you. But it turns out, and I think that this is a kind of beautiful equilibrium of the world in my view, it turns out that not only do you like it more if your values are aligned, you do better work. So, an employee whose values are aligned contributes more, of course, because they feel part of something they really care about. They share information more thoroughly. They collaborate more effectively. They create more value in internal negotiation. So, you know, it's one of these rare, rare things that what's good for the employee is also good for the organization. I'm glad that you took that choice and I bet you didn't regret it. Am I right? That when you took that choice, you knew it was the right one?

I started teaching shortly after that, which has been absolutely hands down the best thing I've ever done besides my daughter. I should say preface that, but yes, absolutely, because then I was I opened myself up to an opportunity that really was value-aligned and where I got— get a lot of joy and a lot of excitement out of. And I'm probably misquoting this percentage, but I think I saw recently, I wanna say 86%, it could be 68%, but a huge number of employees in corporations today are unhappy. Do you think that is primarily because of the misalignment in values?

I think there's nothing else which is a bigger predictor. You know, there's a number of inputs that go into job satisfaction. How we feel about our boss is important. But again, that's also part values, right? Because if our boss's values align with ours, we feel much better about them. So I think there's nothing better as an explanation because there's no bigger input into job satisfaction.

So I'm interested because you've advised a lot of companies around the world and you've taught at Columbia, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon. What pulled you specifically towards values as the focus out of everything you could have studied?

Yeah, I think I was lucky. It was kind of happenstance. So 20, yeah, about 20 years ago, I started running Columbia's program for senior executives, directing it, organizing faculty, and I would spend 3 months a year in residence with these global executives. And there was a component in that month-long program that predated me. It was a one-on-one coaching session where the executives would surface their values. And up to that point in my career, you know, my back— I study organizations and strategy. I had never studied values. And I, you know, I, like everybody else, I kind of liked values. I thought they were important, but I didn't know much in a concrete way. And what I noticed almost immediately is that the seasoned executives, often soon-to-be CEOs, would come out of this coaching session where they became clear about their values. And they would be walking on air. They would be bouncing off the walls. They thought they had something incredible. And that piqued my curiosity. Now, at the time, you know, I was open to all possibilities. I wasn't sure that they could really do better work because they knew their values. Maybe they just liked it, you know, help make them felt good, but maybe it doesn't affect the bottom line. But I was curious enough that I set out to do my own research, learn about the research of others. And I just got pulled farther and farther into the topic because as soon as you scratch the surface, you discover that there is all of this great evidence, best causal evidence from really hundreds of experiments, that if you are clear to your values, if your values are top of mind, if you connect them to what's in front of you, you have more resilience, you are more ethical, you feel more authentic, others trust you more. It just opens up all of this, really, I think, allows you to access your best self in many ways. So it was some curiosity, and then I suppose the willingness to follow that.

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The 2026 FIFA World Cup meal at McDonald's is underway with one of 9 legendary cups in the lineup. Christian Pulisic, David Beckham, Lamine Yamal, Ronaldinho, Thierry Henry, Son Heung-min, Al Alphonso Davies, Santi Jiménez, and between the posts, it's Grimace! Get one of 9 collectible cups with a FIFA World Cup meal at participating McDonald's for a limited time while supplies last.

All rights reserved. 2026 McDonald's at FIFA World Cup 2026.

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Yeah, it's so fascinating because I think this is also true on the side of, uh, we're seeing that in consumers. Right? People want to know if things are created with AI, for instance, in advertising, marketing, if their products are created with it. And they prefer the humanness. They prefer knowing that there are real people behind a product or service. They want to know what our values are because they want to align with products and services that match their values. So, this isn't only good for the founders and the businesses and the employees, but it's good for all of the key stakeholders, including the customers and consumers.

Yeah, I agree. Relationships of all kinds between people in their private lives, between coworkers, between an organization and a customer are better if they're aligned around values, right? So we can get along with people who have good but different values. I can talk and give some advice about how to do that. Certainly, we do it all the time. But we gravitate towards people, products, teams that share our values. That's when we feel at our best. And, you know, be— values, of course, are the most human thing. There really isn't anything equivalent in the artificial world. So we want this connection on the other end. It's so affirming to us. It's, you know, it's a source of authenticity, of course, which is how we evaluate interaction partners so completely. And, you know, if it— this has implications for an organization of any size, right? Being able to articulate your values, I think, helps the right customers find you. Understanding the values of the customers and the other parties you're transacting with. And if you really want to think about leveraging this for strategy, building your offer around values. One of the organizations I talk about in the book is Real Madrid, the the football or soccer team. Now, I'm not a big soccer fan. I wrote about Real Madrid with a colleague who studied them for years. But I learned that they're incredibly successful. Love them or hate them, they're the world's most valuable sporting franchise. They've won more championships than any other soccer team. They're doing something right. And at the heart of what they do is culture and values are very important in the organization, but they're also very important what they communicate to their customers. Their goal is to be the most popular team on the globe to appeal to fans around the world. And they do it through values, what they represent in terms of the, what the club stands for, professionalism, teamwork, community-mindedness, style and grace. And they, the right fans find them. And actually, you know, one of the most dramatic illustrations of this is, you know, they've got a long history and they've got decades, even centuries of success. And they've been up and down in terms of like any organization, how they represented their values. There was a time in the 1980s where they'd gone through years without winning a championship, and then they got a good team and they started winning championships. They won 2 out of 3 years. And the fans were sending back their season tickets because it wasn't just winning that the fans wanted. They wanted them to win the Real Madrid way. And these players had kind of, you know, they were sort of party boys and they weren't representing the sort of way of engaging the community that the Real Madrid fans had come to expect. And winning wasn't enough, you know, what mattered more was what they were representing.

Oh, that just gave me chills. But what an eloquent way for the fans to share, hey, you're not living up to the promise that you made us.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Was there ever a time that you came to a crossroads with your own value system where your values were tested in a way that changed how you thought about this work?

Mm, tested, tested. Well, absolutely, absolutely. I'm sort of an exemplar of what the book is about, which is a lot of really concrete ideas on how you put your values to work. And I use my values every day. It's literally the case. I also have my values on a card in my wallet, and every day before I enter the Columbia Business School where I work, I stop outside and I take out the card. And if I'm listening to a podcast, I pause it and I look at the values and I think about what they mean for me at this moment. What are some of the challenges to achieving them? If I do things right today, how is it going to be in pursuit of my values? And I think it grounds me and gives me presence and just helps me improvise and handle everything in the moment. And this means there's dozens of moments every day that benefit from that. I'll give you one concrete example. I had an experience. Luckily, it's not the kind of thing that happens every day, but I had an experience where there was an intense conflict. Somebody had lost, somebody in my professional world had lost self-control. And it's one of these instances that anything can happen. And there's certainly times in my life where, you know, if somebody around me lost control, you know, my own self-control, like, because it's natural, might be affected. I would become more anxious and nervous. Maybe I would respond if they were a little bit aggressive, I might be a little bit aggressive. But in this instance, which was well into my self-regulation using my values, you know, I was present, I was calm. I said, oh, where's this person coming from? What's the best way to deal with this situation? And produced what could be in the moment, in a very difficult moment, a success. There was no conflagration. We went on, we went back to our professional lives. And I've often thought that if I didn't have the presence of mind, the openness, if I wasn't grounded, this could have been a career ending or even a kind of— there could be personal threats in these moments when someone just completely loses control. We read about these things every day. The only thing I can attribute my presence of mind to was this self-regulation technique I have. So, you know, your stress goes down if you think about your values. You are less likely to lose self-control because you've got this idea about what matters more to you in the long run. So, you take decisions in the difficult moments that are the things that bring you closer to what matters most to you.

Oh, one of the things that I do, whether it's with my students or with people who are starting podcasts or the world of PR, right? I always have people do an exercise and go back to their purpose, mission, vision, values, their statements or key positioning so that they, we have, we all are on the same page and have a clear understanding of what somebody's about, what their company's about, and what messaging we're trying to put out into the world for them, or what messaging they're trying to put out for themselves. And I've met and I work with a former Zen monk who approaches things, you know, from the inner work. And I realized that, oh, this is just a very different approach. I look at it from the marketing side of things, but we're really trying to get people to the same thing. And that's what I really see here too, is we're trying to get people to really understand if you go from your values base, then you do have a firmer, stronger approach. People understand who you are better and you're able to communicate much more effectively. And you do have an approach. The triad exercise. So I'd love to learn more about that, how it works and why you think it's more effective. Because I will admit, sometimes we— if people are unsure, we say, here's a huge list of things for you to think about, right? And your method is a lot more effective than just picking things off of a list.

Yeah, great. Well, I'd love to engage that.

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Let me start with the list. When I started doing this work, I began with the list and I would show students and executives, I'd show them the list and say, okay, which is appealing to you? So that's very common. What I found, and often from the students that most wanted to engage I teach this technique is they'd be frustrated. They would say, "Oh, these are all good. How do I know what matters most?" So, the truth of the matter is that you have hundreds of values or 100 perhaps. And what matters is which— it's the prioritization. There are lots of things you think are good in the world. So, what matters is the prioritization. And this discernment is trust a little bit more important than friendship? Is honesty more important than impact? They're all good things, but we have to discern really to turn our values into a tool. So I developed other techniques. One of them is the laddering technique that you mentioned, which just help us discern, right? So they help us get at what's already inside us and see the ordering. So if you're game, I think a great way to illustrate that technique would be to take you through a ladder to surface some values. Does that sound okay to you? Sure. Okay, great. So we need a starting place and we can start almost anywhere. But this is something that, you know, I think often generates a good starting place. Do you have like an issue, a decision on your mind right now? It could be some different clients to work with. It could be some different things to bring into your class. It could be something outside of work. It could be potential vacation destinations for the summer with the family. But anything that's on your mind right now.

I would say all of the, all of the above. So yeah, if we're thinking specifically, let the business case, of course. We're on, on a podcast that a lot of people who are entrepreneurs or have businesses listen to. So thinking about the direction of my company.

All right. So to use the laddering, we need to generate some alternatives. So could you give us kind of 3 potential directions and, you know, you don't have to get that, you can just label them, but you don't have to get into like the, the business plan, but what might be kind of 3 options in this space?

And this is difficult, especially on the spot, but yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah. Relying on self with a small team.

Yeah. Good, good.

Helping other people, which I think really maps to probably what I think of as my core values, at least helping other people achieve success to get, get started in the projects, whether it's a business or a podcast or what have you. And the other one would be part of what the work I've been doing, which is kind of more full service, bringing a lot of people, a lot of, having a lot of team members in.

Great. Great. So I have self, relying on self, help others, and full service. Is that okay?

Yeah.

Okay, good. Now, come up with some way, all that matters is that it makes sense to you, but some way that you can put two of those in one bucket and the third in a different one. So in which way are two of them like each other and different from the third?

Well, the, the self one obviously is a differentiator because it's me with a small team of people doing things that I know I can do successfully that will kind of meet my ikigai, right? Something I'm good at that I love to do that will make me money and that people need. So the other two buckets would go together, I guess.

Okay. So the self is, and let's put a label on that. Is that confidence that you you're kind of confident in that space, that it's within your capabilities, it's within your experience.

How might—

what one?

Yeah, it's confidence, competence, skill set, timeliness.

Great. OK, good. So I'm going to pick out of those competence. All right. And what do we call that other bucket? Now, it's not incompetence, but it's, it's maybe— is it exploratory or is it Is it, you know, what do we call that other bucket?

Hmm. It's tested, but it's also, there's more time constraints around it. There's more constrained constraints.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'm gonna call it constrained. Yeah. I'm gonna call it constrained. Good. Now we have competence and we have constrained. At this point, let's leave this where we started and let's just think about competence and constraint. What's better in your view, competence or constrained? Competence. Competence. Why?

I feel like it's a sure thing. There's a strong foundation. It's a, it's a foundation you can build upon more easily.

All right. So let's say foundation. All right. Having a foundation, having something you can build on is opposed to what? What's it distinct from?

I think the constraint comes from it's, it's based on not your own work, but it's based on that foundation. It's based on other people. And their time.

Dependence. Could it be dependence? Yes.

Dependence.

OK, great.

Dependence. OK, so now we have foundation and dependence. Foundation is better. Why is foundation better? What does foundation give you?

Foundation gives a, I mean, a support system to feel that you can build upon it.

OK, support. Support is distinct from what? What's the alternative to support?

Lack of support.

Yeah, that's OK. I think that's good. And why is support good? If you get support, what does that give you? What does that make you feel or allow you to do? Why is it good to you?

Strength, confidence, ability.

I love strength. That's a nice value word. Strength as opposed to?

I don't want to say weakness, but I mean, I guess that would be the right word.

I love your instinct of trying to stay away from weak because that just makes it too easy, doesn't it? So yeah, what's a kind of— what's a value-neutral or even positive way for the alternative of strength? We have strength or flexibility.

Um, yeah, I guess maybe.

Okay, yeah. So you, you like strength. Why? What does it give you?

I think it is something that when I think of strengths, especially in business, I think about confidence. I think about the word competence that we talked about. Yeah. I think that it's something other people can see in you as something.

Okay.

I mean, they're able to see your comp— it's not only about self-confidence, but something other people can play.

Other people can see it. Yeah. And what do we call that? Do we call that recognition? Do we call that acknowledgement? Does that matter because they— you would be valued, or why? What's good about other people seeing it?

Yeah, I mean, this— I feel like I'm doing a PR exercise because then you're being seen as an expert or a thought leader or somebody who has knowledge that you can then share with people.

Okay, great. Expertise. Yeah. Okay, good. Expertise is distinct from lack of knowledge. Okay, lack of knowledge. And if you have expertise, what good things does that bring?

Interesting. Okay. So if you have expertise, then it gets back to one of the things that I, that I think of as my, one of my core values, which is being able to share it with others in a way that helps them see who they really are or be able to then build up their confidence to show who they are, to do with it, you know.

Okay, good. So I've got help others. You said a little bit more and I'd love to try and capture it. Is it help others to thrive? Is it help others to be authentic? Is it help others to express themselves?

Is it— Yes. I mean, I really like, I want to help other people see their light.

Oh, I love that.

The quickest framing that I usually give, I like people to recognize something inside themselves, that spark, so that they can do what they're really meant to do and that they feel excited and happy and passionate and are able then to share what they do with others.

So I think that's a high-level value, right? So this aspiration to help others see their light. So I've got See the Light as kind of the top of this ladder. And I think that I'm going to ask you another question about seeing the light in a moment, but I think we're about at the top of this ladder. And I'm going to tell you what I've kind of discerned from here. So of course, we're asking you to make distinctions, right? And we're asking you to discern, you know, our values are principles of evaluation. So if you think A is better than B, And you answer why, why is A better than B? The whys are values, right? So we asked you to make distinction, then we asked you why, and we go from competence to foundations, to support, to strength, to expertise, to seeing the light. So we're at each level, each of those whys is a value. And I'm just gonna tell, they're all val— they're all in the space of your values. A number of them are, I think, closely related cuz you, I saw quite reasonably, you would go back to certain terms and you would kind of say, oh, they're two sides of the same coin, confidence and competence, for example. But some of the things I took out of this are, I think seeing the light is very, a distinct value, and it's resting on some elements that I would, I picked out maybe confidence, confidence and/or strength and competence being tied up with that, right? So, so you've got this bundle, which we might call any one of those things. We might call it competence or confidence or strength that is the source of your expertise, then for your capacity to help others, and ultimately they see the light. So I would pick out things like see the light, maybe competence or confidence. Expertise, I think, was quite important in, in your account. So I would take those as like potential value. We haven't finalized them yet because a lot of what really lights you up, which is also part of seeing the light, lighting up, is getting exactly the right words. So, we would go back and we would do some kind of playing around. I'll just give you an example to get at exactly the right words. I'll give you an example of a question that we might use to find out, well, which of the words is most powerful? We've got a strange world. You can have competence without strength, or you can have strength without competence. In that strange world, if you had to choose, which would you choose? Strength or competence? Competence. Competence. OK, so we're getting a little bit closer. And then we might try and find out if that's exactly the right lane.

Interesting. Yeah.

Now, so we've got a couple of values that have come out of this. I want to go back to helping others see the light. Illustrate something else, which I think is really useful when we try and surface our values, which is ultimately to get at something intrinsic, right? So, our most powerful motivations, as you know, are intrinsic from within. When we're doing things that are intrinsically important to us, we do them better, we enjoy them more. So, I like to encourage people to see what's internal at the very peak of their value system. And it's completely sensible that something external, like helping people see the light, is a source to that something internal. Most people have that, right? It's not all internal. The good stuff internally happens from doing good stuff externally, right? So that makes complete sense. But by my way of thinking, I think it helps us to find out ultimately what's in it for us, what's the internal state that feels best for us. So I'm going to ask you, if you help others see the light, What do you feel? Joy. Joy. Lovely. And it popped out. So joy is exactly the type of value that people will have at the peak of their value structure. So an ultimate— you get the right conditions like competence, it allows you to help others see the light, it produces joy. So that's the laddering exercise. It's a way of helping people see distinctions, discern, answer why. And you keep asking the whys until you think you you get to the end of it, which is, which is going to be a high-level value. But sometimes the values that we see at the beginning, like in this case, Competence, are really foundational, right? So I would imagine if we, if we worked for an hour and came up with your Top 8 values, I would actually expect probably Competence is going to be one of them.

This is such an interesting exercise. And I mean, I know we just scratched the surface, but it shows that the things that we sometimes would pick out on a piece of paper aren't necessarily the things that are actually our values.

Yeah. Yeah, you're exactly right. And you know, you gotta go a little bit deep and it's the case, you know, just to understand how this kind of reflection helps us. I'll tell you that the first thing I ask people who I work with on their values at the beginning of the process is to articulate how they think and use about values now.? Are you completely clear about a set of top values? Do you never think about values? Are you somewhere in between? I've asked that question of more than 10,000 people from around the world, mature people, successful people. 70% or 80% of them say that they think about 1 or 2 values occasionally. So, it's not that we've got no sense of that. We all have— not all, but almost all of us have some sense of values. But having the clarity, we don't have it because we don't typically have that language. So if I ask you, okay, pick out 5, when you might have 1 in mind, then, you know, it's like you're doing a test and you got to come up with an answer and you might think, well, what's going to look good? What would someone else think I should say? And so on. So we can be distracted. So various exercises that kind of tap into your own evaluation system are really powerful for finding exactly the right labels for your values.

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