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DR JOHN DEMARTINI - Updated 18 hours ago
If you are a leader, aspire to be a leader, and lead or manage an organization. or teams of people, you will probably find the following insights helpful on your journey.
As a human behavior specialist with almost five decades of research and experience, I am certain that inspired and masterful leadership can be learned and achieved. In fact, I have trained tens of thousands of people on how to transform their teams, businesses and global organizations. I almost always begin with human values, because they are the cornerstone of human behavior.
What do I mean when I speak about “values”?
Every individual, including you, lives according to a unique hierarchy of values, a set of priorities that range from most to least important in your life.
Think of a ladder, as an example. Your highest values would form the top few rungs, descending to your increasingly lower and less important values as you go down on the ladder. This hierarchy of values is unique to you, with no one else having the exact same hierarchy of values as you. This is part of what makes you unique (and one of the keys to understanding yourself).
Your perceptions, decisions, actions, and behaviors are all an expression of your hierarchy of values.
So, any actions you take that are congruent with your highest values tend to be INTRINSIC, in that you’re spontaneously inspired from within to perform them. When you’re living by your highest values, you’ll not require external motivation to act on them.
In my case, my highest values include teaching, research/writing and travel. No one has to remind or motivate me to do any of these tasks because I spontaneously take advantage of each opportunity I can to act upon them.
My lower values, on the other hand, include cooking and driving. It would take a lot for me to either cook or drive, which is why I choose to delegate those tasks to someone else who finds them inspiring.
Takeaway #1: Your most meaningful and teleological PURPOSE and your epistemological area of EXPERTISE both revolve around your highest values. In other words, your highest values are the path of your ontological identity or authentic self.
How is this relevant to activating great leadership?
Human beings join organizations, companies, or associations when they believe they will help them fulfill their subset of highest values.
I’d like you to read that again.
No human being, including you or your team members, joins an organization, company, or association unless they believe it will help them fulfill their unique set of highest values, what is most meaningful and most important to them.
In the same way that people are not dedicated to the organization, so too are they not dedicated to YOU individually. As I mentioned earlier, they are dedicated to the fulfillment of their own highest values. If they believe that what you're doing helps them fulfill those values, they will likely appear dedicated to you. If not, they won’t.
Takeaway #2: If you genuinely care about the people in your team or organization, it is wise to understand that if you don't know what is most important to them as individuals, you will most likely face challenges in leading or managing them effectively.
I once conducted a very interesting study at a conference involving 33 groups of couples who did not know each other. Using the Demartini Value Determination process - a free, confidential and private method that is available on my website - I guided them through a series of 13 questions designed to help them narrow down, discern and identify what their life objectively demonstrates as most important to them.
To interject here – in my experience, when people are asked about their values are or what is truly most important to them, they often provide skewed answers around what they may perceive SHOULD be their highest values instead of what their life already demonstrates. Perhaps they perceive that family “should” be their highest value when, in fact, they will spend hours on a mountain bike or at work, given the opportunity. The Demartini Value Determination process was designed to help bypass those “shoulds” or “oughts” and instead look at what IS.
So at this conference, I had 33 pairs go through the Value Determination process, which took about 30 minutes. This process helped them identify what their life demonstrated as most valuable. Once their individual values were identified, we spent almost two hours exploring this question:
“How specifically does the top three highest values of another individual help you fulfill your top three highest values, and vice versa?”
Their task, in pairs, was to find or more fully establish the links or connections. As is your task, if you choose to try this with your teams.
Takeaway #3: If you cannot see how what they’re dedicated to is helping you fulfill what you’re dedicated to, you may devalue them, talk down to them, or try to autocratically project your values onto them in an attempt to correct, fix and change them.
However, nobody wants to be changed - they want to be loved and appreciated for who they are – and who they are revolves around their highest values.
It’s the same with you. Your ontological identity, teleological purpose, epistemological area of knowledge, and core competence revolve around what you value most.
Therefore, knowing the highest values of those you lead is crucial.
If you cannot see how their highest values (what they are dedicated to), is serving you, you may become an autocratic leader and be perceived as someone who leads by dictating and manipulating with force. This is not the most effective or powerful leadership or management style.
It often comes down the fact that the majority of leaders don’t know how to or take the time to or care enough to identify their team members' highest values. However, if you can ask how specifically their top three highest values are helping you fulfill your top three highest values and answer that 20 or 30 times, and vice versa, you will find the connection.
At first, it may seem like there is no link, but your job as their leader is to find it. When you do, the effort required to manage and lead them decreases significantly in proportion because your communication style and content tends to change as a result. In other words, it becomes so much easier to communicate your most important goals in terms of what is most important to them.
An example of this could be – if you know that spending time with their family is one of their highest values, you may say something like, “While this is a big project that needs to be completed on time, I believe that we can achieve it without working overtime or on weekends. So, I’ve put together a detailed project plan that has been broken down into key weekly deliverables that can prevent the need for any of us to work late nights at the office and miss time with our loved ones.”
You’ve communicated your goal – completing the project on deadline, in terms of what is important to them – time with family.
This is a very different approach to not identifying or understanding how their highest values will help you fulfill your own, in which case you will likely end up having an alternating monologue instead of a conversation and dialogue.
You'll be speaking and they won’t be listening because they are only interested in what they value, and vice versa.
Takeaway #4: By LINKING your respective highest values, you can enhance your communication with them, and create dialogue instead of an alternating monologue.
The next step is to keep going. In other words, identify their second highest value: how specifically is their second highest value helping you fulfill your first, and how is your first highest value helping them fulfill their second? And then, how is their first helping your second? How is your second helping their first? You can go even further, asking how their second highest value helps you fulfill your second highest value, and vice versa, 20 or 30 times.
To return to my example of the conference where we went through this process in pairs of individuals who didn’t know each other - at the end of the session, I asked, "How many of you are now deeply appreciating this individual, engaged in a deep conversation, and actually want to further interact and connect with them?"
Every single individual put his or her hand up.
What’s also interesting is that out of 33 pairs, 27 started doing business transactions together, even though they hadn't known each other beforehand. They began doing business together because they took the time to care about what was most important, meaningful, inspiring, and highest priority to each individual, linking those to their own highest values and vice versa.
Anytime two people can link their highest values, the engagement, reflection, and appreciation of each other goes up. This is the wisest way to build a relationship.
If you don't see how what they're dedicated to is helping fulfill your life, you may carelessly talk down to them, becoming an autocrat who tries to project your values onto them – perhaps even trying to motivate with all kinds of extrinsic incentives, which increases the cost of managing people.
If you minimize yourself and exaggerate them, you may end up sacrificing for them.
One approach is narcissistically telling them what to do, and the other is sacrificing altruistically, walking on eggshells. Neither approach is the most effective; you're not getting what you want out of it, nor are they getting what they want.
But when you LINK your highest values, that is when you’ll have genuine caring - not careful, not careless - but genuine caring. This is what keeps rings on fingers in marriages and keeps the dialogue going in organizations.
If you apply this among team members and in leadership roles, you can lead teams more effectively, because you know what's important to them and can communicate what you want, in terms of their highest values.
Takeaway #4: If you do this as a leader, your team's effectiveness, engagement, and productivity will be elevated. Plus, if team members within an organization apply this approach among themselves, they will maximize teamwork, reaping the benefits of working together.
I've been teaching applications of values for 46 years and applying these principles in leadership, management, and communication for decades. The reason I do is because I know it works.
I am certain that when you take the time to care about what's most important to another individual and communicate what's most important to you in terms of what's most important to them, the relationship dynamic will flourish. You create sustainable fair exchange, and all relationships strive for that, whether consciously or not. By maximizing this potential, both parties help each other achieve what they want in life.
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To Sum Up
If you're leading, managing, or organizing a team, knowing each individual team member's highest values and caring enough to communicate what you value most in terms of those highest values makes a huge difference.
It would therefore be wise to identify your OWN highest values. I’d encourage you to go through the FREE Value Determination process on my website and answer the 13 questions by writing down what your life already demonstrates.
Your hierarchy of values is revealed by your ACTIONS, not your words or what you perceive that you “should” value.
The moment you try to be somebody other than yourself, you’re more likely to be a second-class instead of a first-class leader.
Once you have identified your unique set of highest values, I’d encourage you to encourage your team members to work through the process too.
You can then sit together, as a team, and begin the process of sharing your highest values, and linking them. Linking your highest values allows you to communicate respectfully through dialogue instead of alternating monologues, which builds mutual trust and respect and enhances collaboration.
By identifying the top three values of the individual you want to communicate with and your own top three values, and then making links between them, you can change the relationship dynamic. Even if a relationship is on the edge, you can bring it back to center and enhance the relationship dynamics.
This is one of the most significant skills you can learn in life: mastering the art of communicating effectively what you value most in terms of what others value most. This skill will help you in sales, leadership, management, communication, and every other area of your life, enhancing your interactions with any human being.
If you are inspired to further your self-mastery journey and transform your leadership skills, I would love to have you join me on the next 2-day online Breakthrough Experience program. We’ll identify your highest values, work on prioritizing your life and delegation techniques, dissolve emotional baggage that may be weighing you down, and learn a scientific process called the Demartini Method that will help you become present, purposeful, inspired, vitalized, self-governed and masterful.
I’d love to see you there!
Are you ready for the NEXT STEP?
If you’re seriously committed to your own growth, if you’re ready to make a change now and you’d love some help doing so, then book a FREE Discovery call with a member of the Demartini Team so we can take you through your mini power assessment session.
You’ll come away with a 3-step action plan and the foundation to empower your life.
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