What Are Your Non-Negotiables?

What do you really value?  Are you sure?

I often challenge leaders to list their top five “core values,” their principles and beliefs that organize their thinking as they deal with difficult situations and decisions.  In one of my workshops, a participant hesitantly proclaimed that a primary core value was “adventure.”  Not 10 minutes later, she also listed “security” on her list of 5.  What? How does that work?

In today’s chaotic marketing zealotry, values are often marginalized as “personal opinions,” or skewed and ritualized for personal or corporate purpose. Rather than being “non-negotiables” in the transaction of life, they have become very negotiable, “depending on the situation” and on what we are selling to whom.  So, it is possible that, while we list “adventure” as a core value, we do not see the inherent contradiction in also listing “security,” both of which can be legitimate core values, but which tend to work against one another.

This “value-fluidity” is a destabilizing factor in public opinion we observe today.  People sort themselves into issue-focused tribes, ready to go to war over differences in what is deemed most important. But then, in the interests of harmony and moving forward, we negotiate away the “non-negotiables” until there are no commonly accepted core values to guide us. In the words of one colleague, “everything is negotiable!”  This is not leadership strength.

What we truly value is revealed in our actions, more than in our words. It is telling that some executives in my challenge ask if they must stop at five, while others struggle to come up with five.  If such fluidity exists among leaders, what must their followers think about their leadership?  How does negotiating away what we proclaim as our core values affect confidence in leadership, and the willingness to follow?

So, what are your top five core values, the non-negotiables?  Do you know? And do those around you know? And are they truly “non-negotiables?