One manager told us, "Under the surface there's always been a bit of insecurity about whether or not I belong at the level I'm at.... As a result of this insecurity, I've been withholding part of myself in my business interactions, and that is actually seen as a problem."

Many executives come to CCL's leadership development programs wondering, "Is this when they will find out that I've been fooling people about my abilities? Is this when they will know I don't belong in this role as leader?"

Validation refers to the confirmations you receive that you can lead. Most people are concerned initially with whether they can be a leader at all or whether they can be a leader in a specific organization. Will others follow their direction? Will they be accepted as a person of authority? Do they have what is needed to take an organization to new heights? Are they motivated by the confirmation of other people?

Validation is crucial. It isn't difficult to imagine the impact on one new partner in a firm whom we recently coached. Her boss said that her greatest strength was her willingness and ability to take on the most complex, undefined, messiest challenges. Moreover, no other new partners he'd known had this skill set and desire.

Some people have received enough validation in earlier years. Others want the opportunity to continue to confirm their ability to lead in more complex situations and environments. How do you get that confirmation? If you are new to leadership, try experimenting in several leadership situations. You'll probably find that you can lead effectively at least some of the time. The feeling of "I'm okay" may come in a flash or gradually, or perhaps with qualifications and some developmental needs, but it's likely to be present in some degree if you pay attention to how you are feeling and what you are thinking. If you have already been leading, you may want to try new challenges that bring additional validation. As you take them on, listen for positive feedback. Do you receive confirmation that you have landed in the right role? Are you told about the value you are bringing? All too often, leaders focus too much on responding to negative feedback. By failing to embrace their assets, they can easily lose sight of the range of their abilities, from strengths to developmental needs. If this happens, a leader's strengths can become underused, which can lead to performance degradation.

Some people are powerfully motivated by the typical rewards of a leadership position: prestige, status, respect, inclusion, recognition, money, and other remuneration.

Admitting to oneself or others that these are important is hard for some who enjoy these rewards but wouldn't publicly admit to being motivated by them. But some leaders truly are humble and don't care much about the perks. Among senior executives who have long enjoyed the rewards, some pay increasingly less attention to external rewards, while others see them as an automatic, natural outcome of carrying the leadership burden.

Nonmonetary rewards include training opportunities, exposure to top executives, travel, credit for projects, increased responsibility, opportunities for creative expression, control over their work schedules, and intellectual growth. Often these nonmonetary rewards can have more value than the monetary ones. In multiple surveys, workplace flexibility outranks pay as a benefit.

Do you know what rewards are important to you and how much of a driver they might be? What rewards are you currently receiving? Why are they of value to you? What other kinds of rewards do you desire? What will it take to achieve these? In Chapter Six, you will have the opportunity to look at these rewards or benefits in more depth.

The urge to make a difference is powerful. One hears this constantly during hiring interviews:"I want to have impact. I want to see the results of my efforts." One young bank vice president described to us the impact she wanted to have in clear and measurable terms: "Uniformity within the bank when it comes to groupware technologies—having a central place for the four hundred or so technical administrators throughout the bank to be able to come to know they're getting superior support, superior information. A pristine technology center is important to me, and getting a lot of respect from the people that ultimately come to us for guidance." People who have an impact, change things, and get things done garner respect. Leaders can achieve these things on a large scale.

Most of us spend our early years in organizations learning how to get things done with what we have learned in school and on the job and making individual contributions in areas such as technology, finance, and marketing. Then perhaps we are chosen temporarily as supervisors or given some duties along those lines. We start in such roles as crew chief, team leader, or "working manager," still making our own individual contribution. Eventually we slip into a role in which our individual technical contribution is small and our impact must come from being a leader. This transitionis very important. Not all new leaders like what they find when they get there; some of them back out. Most professionals, however, find that they can shift gears and let go of their former ways of making an impact.

A leader's impact is quite different from that of technical experts, craftsmen, sales representatives, and other individual contributors. It typically comes through other people, which is what makes it potentially more powerful and gratifying. One leader we interviewed began her career in human resources and progressed through roles of expanding opportunity to make a broader impact:

Sometimes the leap from individual contributor to leader is less of a progression and more akin to being thrown into the fire. For example, a young business professor, recently granted tenure, was a member of the hiring team for her university's new associate dean, and the committee could not find the right qualified candidate. One day the committee happened to meet without her. When she subsequently joined the meeting, they told her they thought she was the best person for the job. After some consideration, she agreed to take on the job. Now she manages sixty faculty members in both the graduate and undergraduate schools of business. She took the role because she thought she could make a difference, and this thought takes her past occasional bouts of panic and uncertainty as she forges ahead to help reshape the university.

Is impact important to you? Why? What kind of impact are you having now? Is it the kind you wish to have? What kind of impact do you want to make in the future?

A retail industry manager we know expresses his leadership motivation mainly in terms of service: "I lead from behind. I don't have a large ego; I don't consider myself needing the glory that comes with victories. I'd rather see myself with a group of people, behind a group of people, making it easier or possible for them to do the right thing."

To look back and see that we've helped others—made the world a better place by following our vision and doing the work—is often reported as the ultimate reward of leadership.

John Wood (2006) exemplifies service as a motivation. He was a senior executive with Microsoft, logging thousands of travel miles and spending long hours at his job. A transforming trek though the mountains in Nepal led to a significant life change and the start of Room to Read, a global nonprofit organization building schools and libraries in Third World countries. To date, his organization has served over 4.1 million children in eight countries and has a goal of reaching 10 million children by 2020.

Service is the foundation for servant leadership, a philosophy of leadership development associated with the work of Robert Greenleaf (1991). In contrast to a top-down hierarchical approach, servant leadership emphasizes collaboration, trust, empathy, and the ethical use of power. The leader is a servant first who keenly desires to serve others. The objective is to contribute to the growth of individuals through teamwork and personal involvement, so leadership is not about personal gain.

Some individuals who don't use the phrase nevertheless express it in their leadership style. This is often true of people who wish to be leaders in a just cause, as in hospital or medical organizations, environmental groups, political campaigns, or government agencies. Service may also motivate a leader who wants to help talented young women, fellow immigrants, people in her hometown, or some other specific group.

Do you find yourself motivated to help a particular group such as children, single moms, entrepreneurs, or teachers? When are you most attracted to serve? In what ways do you want to serve? Do you know others who are servant leaders? Do you want to be known as a servant leader?

Wilfred Drath and Charles Palus (1994) write, "One thing we all share—across cultures, geography, and time—is the ability, and the hunger, to make things make sense" (p. 2). Some individuals seek leadership in order to find meaning for themselves and others. With increased learning and development, they gain greater clarity about life's meaning. One senior executive ponders, "How to craft a meaningful life over the next ten years? That is the essential question. I feel lucky to be able to sit back and give this issue thought and direction."

But meaning is elusive and evolving. Rapid change across our lives, organizations, and society often makes it hard to see. For reflective, continuously learning individuals, motivation to make meaning is a powerful drive in their leadership roles. It is meaning that turns a job into a calling or a passion.

A sense of meaning is one great antidote to drift. It can give you an overall sense of being in the right place. It can lead you to set high goals, make clear choices, and overcome obstacles. Meaning is often the reason individuals are able to transcend major hardships; they find meaning amid great tragedies.

Where do you find meaning? Have you lost the meaning in your current role? What makes you happiest? What makes sense about the life you have created for yourself? How and why have you ended up where you are now?

It is important to understand your leadership motivations as best you can. Validation, rewards, impact, service, and meaning can all be sources of drive for leaders, giving them a sense of purpose, a rationale, or logic. Awareness of their importance to you will help you see where leadership fits into your life. What gives you energy, direction, and reward as a person will, in your leadership work, be a signal to others of what is important to you and what you value. In time, these forces can become the basis for the vision for an organization or community. Try to answer the following questions now:

In some situations, your core values may conflict, meaning that in a particular case, serving one may preclude another. At those points, it is helpful to write out the dilemma, talk to friends and colleagues, mull over the consequences of the various choices, or prioritize among those values. Learning from that choice can help you in making future choices.

One executive we spoke with talked about the excitement of being able to achieve partner in his firm (meeting values of ambition, financial success, and competence) but also the long hours and travel that kept him from spending time with his family (competing values of love and affiliation in this situation). Another executive noted that mounting pressures to do well at work (competence) denied her time to develop the less experienced members of her team (help others). Still another spoke of the conflict in terms of people skills that he values but abandons under performance pressures:

Time is often short when important demands compete, and stress can lead us to operate in ways we later regret. Although you may not be able to eliminate such conflicts, it's important to know what they are in order to make the best choice possible or to articulate your dilemma to others. Here are some other examples to help you in your own reflection:

Do you see potential conflicts in your core values? Have you already experienced conflict? How did you handle them?

Core values tend to be relatively stable over the course of our lives, although how we act on them may change, and what tops your list at age thirty might be lower down at age fifty-five. For example, early in our lives, we often take our health for granted. Later in life, we resonate with the statement, "If you have your health, you have just about everything." At different points, you might change the amount of time you spend in relation to one core value. At one point in your life, achievement might be always on your mind; years later, you might not value it quite so much and might value more personal time. You might also change where and how you demonstrate a value, perhaps moving it from a career setting into the domain of a hobby.

Think about the core values you held ten years ago, and compare them to your values today. What is different, and what is the same? To what do you attribute the differences? Perhaps a spouse or long-time friend can give you insights in this regard.

It is also useful to think about from where your specific core values come. From one of your parents? From a teacher, friend, coach, or mentor? Or does the value seem to reflect a norm of your surrounding culture? As an American manager, is individualism or entrepreneurship high on your list, in contrast to the Japanese manager who dwells on hierarchy and status? In addition, there are socially imposed values (those shoulds of life) that may not be conscious or important to us personally, yet we rank them high—for example, being considerate, helping others, or career advancement.

Our profession is sometimes an influence. You may have chosen to be a lawyer because of core values you already had, or that choice may have developed or strengthened a value you didn't always strongly espouse. Either way, it is likely that creativity is a core value for the artist, and duty is one for a police officer.

Your current context also influences the importance you assign to certain values. Has economic security become a higher priority for you in this global recession? Or, after devoting twenty years to your career and neglecting friends to some extent, has the value of friendship become more important? Clearly your organizational context has an influence as well (more about this later in the chapter).

In summary, where our values come from is influenced by our personal history, family, current context, vocation, and organization, to name a few key factors. It is always a good idea to stop, analyze, and reflect on the origin of your core values. Why are these values important to you? Where did they come from? Are they truly yours or someone else's?

A deeper understanding of your core values comes by testing the congruence between a value and how you talk about it and act it out. Are what you say and do congruent with what you believe is important?

First, reflect on the principles by which you are actually living. At some level, you are deciding, consciously or not, how to spend your time, energy, money, and focus. Does how you are spending these valuable resources correspond with what you think you most value? If you value education and expertise, do you spend time learning, talking to other experts, and staying abreast of the latest advancements in a particular field? If you believe you value friendship, how often are you in touch with your close friends? While you may value helping others, when have you offered a helping hand?

You can also test your congruence by asking others about it. Often they are better able to see how you actually behave and what messages you actually send. You can poll friends, family, and colleagues about your values and how you demonstrate them.

Colleagues willing to tell you the truth are great sources of feedback about how you do or do not uphold and convey the values of your organization. For example, if innovation is paramount in driving its future success, do you publicly acknowledge innovative employees? Do you also provide coaching to those who need more help in learning how to innovate or money to support new ventures?

Personal congruence of belief, statement, and action is often called authenticity. Today employees want authentic leaders who are in touch with their employees, tell them the truth, and engage them in the organization's pursuits. They don't want leaders who toe the corporate line or mainly just pick up the latest jargon espoused in the latest business book.

Authenticity can awaken the passions of others and bring deeper emotional meaning to the work. In Leading Out Loud (1995) Terry Pearce calls this "speaking from the inside out": "Can leaders touch deeper values in themselves as well as in their audiences? Can they communicate practical solutions with greater substance and meaning?" (p. 23). Being in touch with your own values as a leader and able to represent the values of others and the organization are critical leadership qualities, enabling you to help others lead. As Tom Peters (2001) wrote, "Leaders don'tcreate followers, they create more leaders" (para. 26).

One executive who attended Leadership at the Peak advised himself in this vein:

But congruence must be accompanied by balance. Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky (2002) write about the double-edged sword of overloyalty to particular values. How might overemphasizing a core value get in the way? For example, you may value responsibility, but might you also become overly responsible, taking on the problems of others rather than coaching them to solve the problem for themselves? Might you, because you value loyalty, stay in one organization or one part of the organization too long instead of diversifying your experience?

There is no list of values to which all effective leaders subscribe and no one set for any given field, industry, or organization. But it is important to choose the field, industry, and, especially, the organization that you believe fit your own core values.

Most organizations have well-defined values; they might be the written values hung on awall at headquarters or printed in an annual report, or the unwritten values that show up in the behaviors of staff and are reinforced by company culture. Employees may be unable to tell you what the written ones are, but they'll know the unwritten ones. Do you know the stated values of your organization and the extent to which they align with your own values and the behaviors of the people in the organization? When you work in an organization that has fundamentally different values, both your job satisfaction and ability to lead are likely to suffer. Consider this remark from one executive, known for taking risks, who was hired to help an organization surpass its cautious, conservative ways: "The company is not necessarily rewarding my kind of behavior. They talk a lot about taking risks, but they don't reward that behavior. They reward the success but not the risk. So if you take a risk and it doesn't quite work out, there are consequences."

Why give so much attention to values? For much the same reason that we dwelled on vision in Chapter Three. Clear and conscious values inform why you do or do not want to be in a leadership role, the kind of leadership role you choose, your style of leading, what motivates you, what to do when you experience conflict, and how you go about making decisions. Clarity about values also gives you insight into reasons for drift. Clarity has many benefits:

In another example, the needs of a colleague were in conflict with the needs of the organization. An executive was leading a new product development group with high pressure, high visibility, critical deadlines, and resource constraints, and the product was running behind schedule. Then the project manager for a new key product, which was behind schedule, asked for a week off. The demands of the project kept him working seventy hours a week, and he had neglected his family. Tension had arisen with his spouse, and he needed time to salvage the marriage. The executive shared this family value but also valued high quality, which included on-time results, and there was no one else to replace this manager in lean times. The executive worried over how to help the manager without putting his own job on the line. The problem was hard to resolve. After multiple conversations and shifting of other people resources, they were able to the meet the deadlines and give the manager the time that he needed.

An organization's values can also conflict: its financial health versus job security for employees; managing an organizational partnership that has collaborative and competitive components; conservatism or risk in times of economic uncertainty. Often the best answer is situational and requires considerable analysis.

These situations of tough calls and lack of clarity over the right decisions are common. Leaders often face choices between seemingly equally important values. By knowing their own values well, they can more readily identify these conflicts and work to find optimal solutions.

Will life be kind to you, handing you only leadership questions with obvious right answers? Probably not. With today's complexity, no one right answer may exist. You may just need to apply your values and judgment to finding the best solution. Often only hindsight will tell whether the decision was right. Did I take the right job? Did we invest in the right product? Open the new office in the right location? Form the right partnership? Sell off the right business? This is always complex work; when values compete or conflict, it's even harder.

It is tempting to try to name appropriate and inappropriate leadership values. Isn't it always better to be fair, loyal, or honest? Can manipulative, autocratic, narcissistic, greedy, or selfish people be effective leaders? We'd like to answer yes and no, but we've seen situations in which the latter people are nevertheless considered reasonably good leaders.

We can report on one case study of leaders who led their companies to success. In Good to Great (2001), Jim Collins reported on companies and their leaders who sustained outstanding performance over multiple years. He found that all of what he called "level 5 leaders" valued two qualities: professional will and personal humility. These leaders were ambitious—but for the company, not themselves. They were self-effacing and understated. They were driven to produce results and took responsibility for any mistakes but widely shared any credit. From this study and what we know from Enron, WorldCom, Arthur Andersen, Bernie Madoff, and the various recent political scandals, it appears that taking action and making decisions based on personal gainand ego is how leaders lose their way.

Whether there are right and wrong values for leaders may not be the question to ask. Some tried-and-true values, such as honesty and integrity, do guide good and great leaders. Buthere isn't one right way to be a leader. The same goes for values. There isn't one right ombination or set of values that determines how effective a person will be as a leader. What mattersis that leaders understand and can manage multiple sets of operating values: their individual values, the values of others for whom they are responsible, and the values of the organization. Conflict will arise among these three sets of values and will need to be sorted out. To manage this complexity, you must know your own core values and how they guide your choices.