How to Identify Your Core Values to Improve Your Leadership Decisions

October 15, 2025

Published in:

Leadership & Management

Photo courtesy Robert Glazer

Today’s leaders face increasingly complex decisions and moral puzzles, often without a clear compass to navigate them. Many are grappling with cost-cutting measures in addition to dramatic disruptions from artificial intelligence and destabilizing global tensions.

In high-stakes situations where there’s no clear playbook, leaders regularly face tough choices with steep trade-offs. In these moments, personal core values can be a powerful, underutilized guide for making decisions and executing them.

What Are Core Values?

Core values are your closely held, non-negotiable principles. They form the backbone of your authentic leadership. These values are distinct from company values, as each leader has their own personal principles even if they cannot clearly articulate them today.

When the topic of core values comes up, many people default to short, one-word virtues such as “family,” “honesty,” and “integrity.” However, one-word values lack the specificity to serve their most important function: guiding decision-making across different facets of life and work.

However, a stated core value of “family” likely has a more universal underlying principle that guides how a person shows up for family, friends, and colleagues. For example, one person may care deeply about always being present for their family, and has the value, “Always Show Up.” Another person may care deeply about building trust with their partner and family, and has the value, “Build Trusting Relationships.” These short, action-oriented phrases point to specific behaviors that can be displayed in all areas of life.

Personal core values can profoundly shape a leader’s behavior and decisions, creating ripple effects throughout entire organizations. Research shows authentic, values-rooted leadership drives superior performance, trust, and decision-making. An MIT Sloan Management Review article, shows how leaders make better decisions when they’re grounded in their values.

Effective core values are action-oriented, unique to you, and applicable in all areas of life. They also serve as part of a vital decision-making rubric in leadership.

Making Values-Based Leadership Decisions

Values are most effective in justifying arduous short-term decisions that are strategically sound in the long run. In 2018, after learning that Dick’s Sporting Goods (DSG) sold a gun to the Parkland school shooter (though, not the one used in the shooting), then-CEO Ed Stack, stopped selling firearms to people under age 21 and removed assault weapons and high-capacity magazines from DSG stores. DSG also destroyed $5 million worth of firearms in its inventory.

In an interview with Business Insider, Stack explained the decision not with a company value, but with a personal value from his father, founder Richard “Dick” Stack: “You have to do right by and be involved in the community.”

It was hardly a risk-free decision: a Harvard Business School case study reported that DSG’s internal modeling warned Stack’s choice could trigger a financial loss of up to $250 million. But Stack stood by his personal values, and the risk paid off: the company’s stock price rose 9.4% in the month following the announcement and has grown by nearly 600% since 2018, showing how values-driven leadership can result in strong long-term outcomes.

Core values also shape the “how” of difficult decisions. In 2020, when Covid-19 travel bans posed an existential threat to Airbnb, co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky decided to cut 25% of Airbnb’s workforce, but did so with empathy and transparency. In an open-hearted letter to his company, Chesky explained why the layoff occurred, what benefits departing employees would receive, and articulated the principles that guided Airbnb’s response.

Leaders rarely inspire confidence when they justify tough decisions, especially job cuts, by citing strategy or the bottom line alone. But when they clearly connect decisions to their values, they build trust, even with those who may disagree with the decision.

Finding Your Core Values

If you believe that core values could be the missing piece to your leadership effectiveness, but aren’t certain what yours are, start the discovery process with these six questions:

In what non-work environments are you highly engaged? Think of when you are most energized in life and barely notice time passing – maybe even during activities such as volunteering at a food drive or participating in disaster relief. Or more generally, maybe you love bringing people together to solve a problem.
In what professional roles or jobs did you do your best work? Recall the circumstances when you felt most engaged professionally. What were you working on, and how would you describe the work environment, culture, or leadership? For example, you might think back to a role that required you to build strong relationships and recall how much you enjoy building trust with people.
What help, advice, or qualities do others come to you for? Do you help people navigate sensitive situations that require discretion and trust?
What would you want said about you in your eulogy? What impact do you want to make in the lives of people closest to you?
When were you disengaged in a personal or professional setting? Reflecting on the qualities or behaviors you find frustrating can offer clues to your core values, which are often the opposite of those things. Maybe it is being micromanaged or working in a low-trust environment.
What qualities in other people do you struggle with the most? Likewise, imagining a person with qualities you simply cannot stand clarifies what your non-negotiable values may be — imagine a person who is extremely selfish or talks behind other people’s backs.

Answer these six questions on six separate sheets of paper—one answer per sheet. Then search your responses for common themes. For example, a person whose responses look like the examples above could quickly identify themes of generosity, helping others, and building trust. These themes are the foundation of your core values. Find more help with this exercise or examples of these answers on my website.

Once you have grouped together three to five themes, label each with a short phrase, such as “Show Up for Others,” “Be Kind to Others,” or “Build Trusting Relationships.” Then, for each short phrase, ask the four key questions below, which I collectively refer to as “The Core Validator.”

The first two questions help you evaluate whether the theme is a non-negotiable principle that you hold dear, and the third and fourth questions validate whether the phrase is specific and actionable enough to guide your behavior.

Core Validator Questions

Could you use it to make a decision, past or present? A leader with the core value of Build Trusting Relationships would best handle a layoff announcement by being fully transparent about how many people were affected and why, in order to build trust with their team.
When you think of the inverse, does it strike a nerve? Someone whose value is Build Trusting Relationships probably cannot stand to be around someone who can’t keep a secret and regularly breaks people’s trust.
Is it a phrase, rather than just one word? Someone with the example responses above might gravitate toward a one-word value of “trust” or “relationships”. But as noted in the family example in the beginning, there is likely a deeper root of what this means.
Can you objectively rate yourself on whether you’ve followed the value? A person whose value is Build Trusting Relationships can objectively evaluate whether they have been building trust in their relationships by considering whether they have been honest with friends, family, and colleagues, following through on their commitments, or protecting sensitive information.

If you have a phrase and theme that prompts an affirmative answer to all four questions, you have an actionable core value that can inform your leadership style.

To use the example of Building Trusting Relationships one last time: if a leader with this value is trying to decide how to communicate subpar financial results to their company, they might be choosing between being upbeat and hiding the bad news from their team, or communicating honestly about the results and explaining what leadership is doing to turn things around. This leader would want to choose the latter course, as it will feel authentic to them.

Few things are more painful for a leader than making tough decisions without a clear moral compass. You can’t rely on values if you have not defined them or if they are expressed as one-word terms with unclear meanings.

In the long run, values deliver better returns than shortcuts, spin, virtue signaling, and corporate platitudes ever could. Most importantly, they foster trust that compounds over time, strengthening both your own conviction and the confidence others have in you.

To receive a complimentary copy of Robert’s Cover Values Compassion course with the purchase of The Compass Within, visit https://robertglazer.com/compass/#Preorder

Contributed by Robert Glazer, an EO Boston elumni who is the founder and board chair of Acceleration Partners, an award-winning global partner marketing agency. Glazer writes the inspirational Friday Forward newsletter and is the best-selling author of eight books. His latest book, The Compass Within: A Little Story About The Values That Guide Us, is an exploration of personal core values in life and leadership is now available. A version of this post first appeared on Harvard Business Review and is edited and reposted here with permission.