How to Identify Your Personal Core Values as a Leader
- Jaime Diglio
- Apr 21
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 24
Most leaders can tell you their company's values. Ask them for their own, and the room goes quiet.
That silence is not a personality flaw. It is a gap in training. Nobody teaches you to identify your personal core values before you step into a leadership role. You're handed a title, a team, and a set of expectations, then left to figure out the rest. So you borrow from leaders you've admired. You default to whoever is loudest in the room. You manage by the version of yourself you think people need you to be.
That is the WAR Room at its most subtle. Working Against Results because you're operating without the one anchor that keeps every decision, every conversation, and every hard moment grounded.
What a Core Value Actually Is
A core value is not a word on a list. "Integrity." "Excellence." "Teamwork." Those are placeholders. They mean nothing until you define what they look like in your actual behavior, in real interactions, on difficult days.
A real core value has three parts:
The word itself. The one that stops you when you see it, not the one you think you should choose.
Your personal definition. Specific to how you actually live and lead, written in your own words.
The behaviors that prove it. The specific things you do, say, choose, tolerate, and refuse when you're living in alignment with that value.
Without all three, you have decoration. With all three, you have a compass.
My core value is courage. My definition is specific:
I speak up even when the conversation is uncomfortable
I'm a voice for people who haven't found theirs yet
If I don’t know something, I don’t pretend that I do
I stay open to ideas that challenge my assumptions, including my assumptions about myself
Those behaviors look simple. In practice, they require constant choice. Courage is a decision you make every day about what kind of leader you're going to be.
Why Your Values Matter More Than Your Title
The neuroscience is direct on this. Under pressure, your prefrontal cortex governs rational thought, decision-making, and complex problem-solving. When stress activates the brain's threat-detection system, it diverts cognitive resources away from higher-order thinking and toward survival response. Your brain defaults to its most-rehearsed patterns.
High-pressure leadership moments feel like they expose you because they do. In those moments, you are not running on strategy. You are running on whatever is wired deepest.
Leaders who have defined their values and practiced behaving in alignment with them perform differently under pressure. They have rehearsed. Their values are behavioral, practiced, and wired in, not saved for aspirational moments. The practice is what makes the performance.
The Conversation Nobody Thinks They're Allowed to Have
Here is what I have learned from years of working with high-achieving leaders: the conversations that change teams are usually the ones nobody thinks they're allowed to have.
Self-doubt. Head trash. The gap between who you're pretending to be at work and who you actually are. The moment you realize your identity has become your job title.
Most professional development programs skip these entirely. They focus on:
Skills and tactics
Tools and frameworks
The performance layer of leadership
They leave the person underneath the performance untouched.
The research is clear: values alignment separates leaders who sustain performance from leaders who burn out. Leaders who rely on their core values when making tough decisions build trust that compounds over time, far more than any shortcut or polished performance of leadership can.
What people need from their leaders, more than strategy or vision, is the experience of someone being real with them. Someone who doesn't pretend to know things they don't. Someone who speaks up when the room needs it, not just when it's safe.
That requires knowing your values well enough to act on them when the stakes are high.
How to Start Defining Yours
This does not have to be complicated. It starts with a single word.
Look at the full spectrum of values: courage, contribution, humor, order, knowledge, self-expression, and dozens more. Notice which ones stand out to you. When you find your word, work through three steps.
Step 1: Write your definition. Your definition of your word. Not the dictionary definition. What the word means specifically to you. ? Make it specific enough that someone who watched you for a week could see it in action.
Step 2: Name your WIN Room behaviors. When you're living this value, what are you doing?
What are you saying?
What are you choosing?
What are you refusing?
What do you notice yourself willing to do that others avoid?
Step 3: Name your WAR Room behaviors. When do you feel the friction of being out of alignment with this value? What do you do when you're working against it?
Those moments are data points, not character flaws. They tell you exactly where the head trash lives and where the practice needs to happen.
Once you do this work on yourself, you become better at noticing where you’re operating from. This then helps you become more intentional in how you read other people. You start seeing what they value even when they haven't articulated it yet. That is a performance skill and the foundation of Return on Interactions, because every conversation you walk into with that level of self-awareness creates value rather than cost.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Consider two leaders facing the same situation: a direct report who is underperforming and doesn't know it.
Leader A:
Delays the conversation
Softens the feedback so it doesn’t even sound like feedback
Leaves the meeting with no direct action item
The direct report walks away with no idea there is a problem
Leader B, with courage as a defined and practiced core value:
Has the real conversation
Names what they're observing, specifically
Asks what's getting in the way
Stays in the conversation getting to the root of the issue
Leader B's team knows where they stand. They trust the feedback they receive because they know it's real. Their team performs better because the leader's values are practiced, visible, and consistent, built on the Mindset, Skillset, and Toolset framework operating from the same foundation.
Your Values Are Performance Data
Self-leadership starts here. Before the goals, before the communication frameworks, before any strategy, there is the question of who you are and what you actually stand for.
98.4% of professionals who work with The WIN Room™ hit their goals. The common thread across all of them:
They get specific about what they value and why
They practice living those values under pressure, not just in comfortable conditions
They close the gap between the WAR Room and the WIN Room™ by building from the inside out
They stop leading from borrowed identity and start leading from genuine alignment
The distance between where most leaders are and where they want to be is a values deficit. When you know what you stand for, you stop asking whether you're doing it right and start asking whether you're doing it true.
That is the shift that changes everything.
If you're ready to do this work with your team, The WIN Room™ corporate programs build exactly this kind of foundation, or you can go deeper 1:1 through personal coaching. Either way, this is where real performance starts.
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