Authentic Leadership – starter for ten

In our last newsletter, we talked a lot about authentic leadership, what it means and how it could make a difference to your success. We highlighted its three key elements – moral principles, professional values, and the ability to turn these into action. And we said we’d give you a tool to help you pinpoint your values and principles this time round.

Well, here it is. It’s simple, it won’t take you or your team long to do, and it’s a very useful way to start identifying which values you feel are important, and how to apply them to your work more consistently:

1. Throughout the day, write down on a piece of paper the specific moments, jobs
   and situations that felt good
2. In a second column, do the same thing for the moments, jobs and situations that made you
   feel uncomfortable or angry
3. Carry on doing this for a whole week, while trying not to look back at your list from the previous days.

The advantage of doing the exercise for a week is that you'll have a longer list, which will help you see trends in the jobs you do and don't like. This in turn will help you pick out your values underlying these trends.

At the end of the week, take a look at the list in full. The first column will feature things you value. The second will highlight moments where you weren't working in keeping with those values.

Finally, once you've had a look at both columns, think about the jobs you felt uncomfortable about in column two. Could you have done them differently? Are there different ways in which you approached the examples in column one that could have helped? When's the next time you could try out this new approach?

As we said, this is just a start. But hopefully it will help. If you're interested in more 'values' tools for you or your team, then check out our top tip.

Top tip: Working within your values