Being a Leader you must Walk the Talk, if not, you loose the trust among your followers, and the credibility they had on you, furthermore, the purpose of your leadership will be lost too.
Thus leading with values is critical, first you must make sure everyone should understand the values, and secondly, you must guide the people to practice them, most importantly however you must walk the talk, and lead as an example to all others.
When Talking about values I remember one of the great quotes said by Albert Einstein,
"Try not to become a person of success, but rather try to be a person of values."
Bud Bilanich, in his book leading with values, says, Values ground an organization - providing direction for people who find themselves in ambitious situations. They are guides for decision making, many leaders fail, however, by opting for the values they never really believed. They sound good, but no heart.
Putting values first always don't come easy, sometimes it takes courage, recently i read a book about leadership when I visited the Powell's book store, the book was named as The Essence of Leadership, by Mac Anderson, the founder of Successories, I like the simple and clear writing style of his, he broke the values/ attributes of leadership into simple topics and presented them with great real life examples, since we are talking about the values of leadership I want to share one of the interesting topics which he wrote about how one great CEO had to put the value first with great courage on an economic crisis situation.
In 1982, James Burke, the CEO at Johnson and Johnson made a courageous decision to pull Tylenol capsules off the shelves in response to a cyanide-poisoning crisis. He took a $100 Million hit to the bottom line.
When he called for meeting with his key executives, he brought a copy of the company Credo, which was written in 1943 by R.W. Johnson Jr, on the Credo, it clearly spelled out, " We believe our first responsibility is..... to our mothers and fathers and all others who use our products." Burke said, "here is the Credo. If we are not going to live by it, let's tear it off the wall, If we are, however, we know what we have to do." The team didn't need to debate whether customer safety outweighed the short term financial concerns, because the debating has been done decades earlier.
The Alignment with their core value cost the company dearly in financial terms, but the return on the investment came through increased customer confidence and loyalty, boosting the product to an even greater market share than it had before the crisis.
Never forget, as a leader the values starts with you and ends with you, whether your example is good or bad, expect most to follow your lead, as Bud Bilanich said, "You need to know the way, show the way, and go the way. By doing this you will have earned the right to insist that others do the same."
