The Question Most Leaders Never Get Asked

There's a scenario I've seen repeat itself. A leader sits across from me, they’re accomplished, driven, often successful by every external measure, and says some version of the same thing: "I don't even recognize myself anymore." 

They started their career with a fire and had a set of beliefs about how they wanted to show up and the kind of leader they wanted to be. And s

omewhere along the way, they drifted. Slowly but surely. Just a little bit every time an external pressure won out over something internal. Until one day they look in the mirror or make a decision and feel like a stranger to themselves. 

I spent a long time thinking about what the missing ingredient was. It wasn't skills, as we know most of these leaders had plenty of those. It also wasn't information or frameworks; they'd done the programs, read the books. What was missing was clarity on who they wanted to be and a real, workable answer to the question of how to bring that to life daily and when things get hard. 

That's where values really kick in. 

The Research That Changed How I Think About Leadership 

A big part of my background is in behaviour change, both the academic literature and the applied work of actually trying to help people do things differently. One of the most consistent findings across that body of research is that external motivation can start change, but it is not great at sustaining it over time. 

You can tell someone they have to develop a certain skill. You can build structures and incentives and accountability mechanisms around them. And that might work… for a while. But if we do not address the underlying mental model and have no internal reason behind the change, no connection to something the person genuinely cares about, it tends not to stick. They just go through the motions. 

What actually sustains long-term change is when the behaviour connects to something a person has identified as important to them, and the environment around them supports it.  

The other factor that really changed how I think about leadership came from my own personal work with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT. The central insight of ACT is that situations happen, emotions bubble up, and you don't always have control over what you feel when this happens. Your colleague undermines you in a meeting, or when a decision gets made over your head, or when someone on your team makes a mistake that costs you. But what you do have control over is what you choose to do next, and having a clear set of values gives you a frame of reference for making that choice intentionally rather than reactively. 

Without that frame, it's very easy to just... default. To let the automated responses take over. The ones that were wired in long before you were in a leadership role, often long before you were an adult. This wired response is more about how we learnt to deal with our emotions (more on this later). And as a leader, those unproductive defaults can have consequences. 

​​​What Actually Happens in the Work 

Most leaders don't spend a lot of time thinking about their values. The day-to-day doesn't exactly create space for it. There's always something more immediately demanding of attention. 

But when leaders do take the time to get clear on what they actually value, decisions actually get easier. There's a clearer frame for thinking through hard situations. The constant energy spent wondering how to respond to conflict, how to show up when things get uncomfortable, that starts to quiet down.  

That process usually starts broader than people expect. It helps to begin by casting a wide net, looking at a long list of words or qualities and noticing what resonates versus what just sounds good. From there the work is about focusing in, getting to three to five values that actually feel like yours. You start to identify language that describes how you actually want to move through the world as a leader, in your own words.  

One of my own values went through several iterations before I landed on "find ways to amplify others." Before that, it was something that included "lift others." And for a while, that felt right. But as I did more work on privilege and power dynamics and what it actually means to support people well, I realized that "lifting" implied something I didn't want; it centered me as the person with the power to pull someone up, almost a savior framing. Amplifying is different. Amplifying means the other person already has something worth making louder. My role is to help that happen, not to rescue.  

Then comes the part that makes it practical: translating those values into behaviour. What does this value look like when I'm giving feedback? When I'm in conflict? When I'm making a decision under pressure? That's where values stop being a reflection exercise and start becoming a daily leadership tool. Something you can actually return to in the middle of a hard day rather than something that lives in a journal somewhere. 

The leaders who do this work, in whatever form that takes, tend to show up more consistently and intentionally. They are more authentic and have with more energy left over for the people around them, because they're spending less of it on internal noise. 

The Compass  

The thing about leadership that I think gets underestimated in a lot of development programs is that it's inherently triggering. You hold power. People around you have feelings about that, and you have feelings about their feelings. And if you've got anything in your history (which all of us do) there are situations that will activate responses in you that have nothing to do with what's actually happening in the room. 

Say you grew up in an environment where admitting a mistake brought punishment. That wiring doesn't disappear when you become an adult and get a title. When someone on your team makes an error, you're not just responding to the error, you're responding through all of that history. And the responses that come out of that history aren't always the ones you'd choose if you were making a clear-eyed decision about who you want to be. 

That's where our values become a compass for our behaviours and actions that are practical rather than philosophical. It’s a way to create a moment between the trigger and the behaviour. A way to ask: in this moment, what would "find ways to amplify others" look like? What action can I take that moves me toward the leader I'm trying to be, rather than away from it? 

At first, that process feels clunky and takes effort. But over time, with practice, it starts to become more automated.  

Why This Is Different, And Who It's Actually For 

Realistically, this approach doesn't suit everyone, and I think that's important to note. 

Most leadership programs are built around frameworks. They tell you the five things effective leaders do, or the four quadrants of some model, or the behaviours that distinguish high performers. And those frameworks can be great, but context matters enormously. What looked like "good leadership" in the 1970s is sometimes actively harmful today. What works in a Navy SEAL operation mode looks completely different from what works in the planning phase or debrief afterward. A framework that tries to be universal will always be making someone fit the mold rather than helping them find their own. 

​​​The alternative is doing the harder, slower work of figuring out who you actually want to be as a leader. When you have that clarity, you get to choose what's worth changing and why. That internal motivation is a fundamentally more durable engine than “because I was told to.” 

But that kind of work requires a genuine willingness to be wrong and to sit with uncomfortable things that might be true about how they're currently showing up. The leaders who get the most out of this are the ones who arrive with real openness and who are ready to do the work between sessions. Often they're people who are already functioning pretty well and have arrived at a point where they want to go deeper. 

If you're willing to bring that kind of commitment, what you end up with is a leadership compass that's built from your own values and your own understanding of what it means to show up the way you actually want to. You end up with something that works in the complicated gray areas where most of leadership actually happens, and that keeps pointing you home when everything else is pulling you in different directions.