The values advantage – how knowing your values and being interested in the values of others helps you lead better and enjoy sustainable career success.

Values frequently come into the work we do with leaders who are having a challenging time at work or in combining work and home. We do a lot of work with professional women with children who place importance on achieving at work and value being present and emotionally available for their children which can sometimes be very, very hard.

Back in August I was listening to an episode of Scott Barry Kauffman’s excellent psychology podcast (called The Psychology Podcast) when the guest, Adam Galinsky said something that made me stop, rewind and listen again. I couldn’t believe what he’d just said about values.

That dear Bright Mind is the inspiration for episode 114 of COMEBACK COACH, The values advantage – how knowing your values and being interested in the values of others helps you lead better and enjoy sustainable career success. Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and online.

Adam is a social psychologist and professor at Columbia Business School and in 2023 he co-authored a paper about the effects of a brief values-based exercise in helping people get re-employed after they’d lost their job. The research was done in Switzerland where a friend of mine had recently been made redundant from a big job in pharmaceuticals so I was doubly interested. In Switzerland you have to register in-person for unemployment benefits and in this study the researchers randomly assigned job-seekers into one of two conditions. In condition one jobseekers were presented with a list of values and asked to indicate which two or three were most import to them. They were then asked to spend 10-15 minutes reflecting on and writing about why these values are important to them. In the second condition participants were essentially on a waiting list and would get to do the exercise two months later. Staff at the unemployment agency didn’t know which condition the participants were in. The findings were incredible. After just four weeks the probability of finding employment increased by a factor of 3.5 for the group who had done the 15 minute values reflection exercise compared to the group who had not. And not only that, the people who’d done the values exercise received more job offers than the control condition. One other terrific finding in this research was that the exercise was just as effective for job-seekers over the age of 50 who can face additional barriers such as negative age stereotypes as it was for under 50s.

I  start episode 114 by sharing this piece of research to demonstrate unequivocally the powerful and positive link between values and career success.

Listen in full on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and here on our website.

You can download the Values & Team Trust exercise I mentioned of the episode and the full list of values as given in the value frameworks I reference in the episode.

 

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