Welcome to another week of the Transformational Leadership Series. Last week, we discussed Leadership and Values, making specific mention of the role of core values such as integrity in transformational leadership. We explained that core values are timeless guiding principles that influence behaviour and do not change irrespective of whether circumstances are favourable or not.
Today let us discuss values some more.
Our values affect our decisions, goals and behavior. Values are standards to guide your action, judgments, and attitudes. A person cannot be a transformational agent of sustainable change:
- If they have not identified their values
- If they subscribe to one set of values, but their actions are guided by a different set of values
- If their values can bend with the application of external pressure
- If their values do not lead to the improvement of followers, organization or society
Transformational leadership is leadership which lives a life of purpose with meaning and direction and which is sustained by clear cut values.
It is important to know where you get your values from. It is important to understand what has shaped you and influences your behaviour and attitudes. Some of the things that shape our values include but are not limited to:
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Life is such that nature abhors a vacuum. We are all influenced by one or more of the factors stated above—but more importantly, our value systems are shaped by the dominant actors behind the factors. For example, if the media has shaped our value system, then it means the actual shapers of our values may include script writers, movie directors, authors of lyrics, newspaper editors etc. If schools have shaped us, it means the curricula developers, teachers and ministers of education have shaped us … and so on and so forth. Not all of these unseen shapers are necessarily transformational leaders. To imbibe the values of poor leaders will lead to failure in our own leadership experience.
It is important therefore to take stock of our value system and ask where we got them from and also ask if they lead to improvement of our lives, the lives of people around us and of the greater society.
