Dogs Are For Life But Values Aren't

Hi there, I'm Ben Morton and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. It's the weekly micro edition of my podcast. Each episode is just six minutes long and is designed to provide you with tips, tools and tactics around specific aspects of leadership and management. It addresses some of the most common, common challenges you will face as a leader or manager. They are all recorded unscripted whilst I'm out walking in the countryside. So you'll probably hear birds tweeting in the background or just ambient noise as the people around me are going about their day to day life. That's all I'm going to say by way of an introduction. So let's dive straight in to this week's episode. Hey there and welcome to this third Leader's Kit Bag episode in this four part miniseries on values. So far we've looked at what values are, why they matter, and the number one trap that people fall into when trying to identify their values. In today's episode we're going to look at how they change over time and the importance of reviewing them or on a regular basis. Many years ago when I was writing my book Mission Leadership, I'd handed the manuscript in to the publishers and there was a sentence or two in there that said our values change over time. And in a very nice way my publishers challenged me on that and said do they? Which caused me to go down a route of doing a lot more research into core values. And here's what I discovered and what I've learned as a result. If you look at any organization's set of values or you do reading around personal values, there seems to be this magic number that says we should have an organization should have five or six values. Now I haven't been able to find any research or evidence that backs that up that says five or six is the number. And this led me to deduce to work out to understand I don't think we do have five or six core values. I think we have somewhere between eight and 10. And that eight or 10 is broken down into a set of what I call primary values and secondary values. And what changes is that over time? Values move between those primary or move between the primary and and secondary list. Here's an example of what I mean. In my 20s touching in to my 30s, if you had asked me what my values are, you wouldn't have heard me say family. Despite being really close to my mum and dad, family just would not have been in there. Instead, during that time the things that were most important to me were were Learning and growth, building a good career and finding a partner. But as time moves on and after my daughter was born, if you now ask me, or if you 12 years ago asked me what my values were, family would absolutely be one of my top values. It's always been there. Just before my daughter was born in, it was in my secondary list. It's common for people in their late 30s and 40s for their values to shift. Often family comes in. Often the things that are most important to us is supporting our children or working towards financial security. And this is really important because comparing our values to other people's values can be really dangerous. On nearly every leadership program I run, when we're talking about core values and a break or at lunchtime, someone will come up to me and say, oh, Ben, I'm a little bit worried. I was chatting to some other people during the exercise and they've all got family on their values list and it's not on there for me. Like, what does that say about me? It doesn't matter. Every person's values, their own values and reflect their current life stage and their current aspirations. So get really clear on your own values and don't worry about other people's. The final thing I'll share in this episode of the Leaders Kit Bag with you is just why it is so important, therefore, to regularly review our own values. Sorry if we don't regularly check in with them, understanding that our values change over time, like the shifting sands of time. If we're not reviewing them, we'll find that we are judging ourself against our own outdated set of values and we're going to feel frustration or some sort of challenge, even unhappiness as a result. That's it for this episode of the Leaders Kit Bag. As always, I hope it's been useful. If it has, click the link wherever you are watching or listening, and you can access for free a values download toolkit that will help you identify your own values. And there's some exercises to conduct with your team. And if you've not seen this already, do also click on the link to add your name to the wait list to get early access to Ben in your pocket, which is my AI clone that I'm going to be launching later this year where you can literally at any moment, on any day ask me a question and you will get an answer from my clone based on my 20 plus years of leadership experience. I know you're going to love it. That's it for this episode. Look after yourself. Look after those you've got the privilege and responsibility to lead. And until next time, folks, lead on.