Before you go any further, and without giving it a lot of thought, write down or at least identify in your mind your top five values. (Be honest – did you continue reading without doing the exercise? If so, do yourself a favor and take a brief moment to do it.) Now of those five, pick one. It doesn’t have to be your “top” value, just one that is important to you. Now put it aside – we will come back to this.
Values in Families
Values are important in families. They underlie almost all of the important decisions and actions of family members. Everything they think, say and do is filtered through a matrix of values. Ironically, the reasons for this are not as most people suspect. Most believe that values lead to virtuous and principled action. This turns out to be superficially true – but it is a dangerous and truly deceptive oversimplification. Without understanding how values actually work in human development, it is difficult to help families function more effectively using values.
There are a lot of ways that family governance advisors help families identify values. One way – which we find to be of some marginal benefit – is through the use of values cards. In this exercise, families pick from a bunch of cards with a diverse array of inevitably noble values printed on them and then the family members prioritize those values. The exercise is usually fun and people have a good time. After a bit of conversation, the exercise is dropped without gaining truly meaningful or deeper insight. Sometimes common values are identified and put into a values statement. These statements are then supposed to guide family behavior – which they rarely do in practice. Consultants can get paid a great deal to go through this exercise.
Unfortunately, unless it is deftly used, this approach is fraught with problems. First of all, a great deal of what passes for values choices is, at one level, self-delusional and self-congratulatory. As the wonderfully entertaining Phil Cubeta notes, this is the joker hidden in values decks. One of the problems Phil sardonically points out is that in our real lives, our vices are at least as important as our virtues and there are no decks that have vices neatly and boldly printed as possible choices to pick and prioritize. He has said in one of his posts: “Sometimes the parents who lament that they did not successfully pass on the family values might console themselves for having done so well in passing on the family vices.”
With these card decks clients can fool themselves and occasionally their naïve consultants (but rarely their families) quite easily. The values exercises many consultants engage in, when not carefully used, can easily become an opportunity to whitewash reality in ways that rival a form of Kabuki Theater. The skilled consultant must know a kind of values jujitsu (part of which we will share below) to make this exercise worthwhile or even basically honest.
A Better Way
A better approach is to use a recognized assessment to determine values. Our favorite is the AVI which is based on the work of Brian Hall and Benjamin Tonna. We personally like the Hall-Tonna model because it is cross-culturally and thoroughly validated and dovetails quite nicely with a great deal of cutting-edge research on adult development. It also has direct, explicit and credible application to learning modalities, leadership styles and communication preferences as well as to group culture so a great deal of information for a basic assessment. We use it whenever a family will let us. We also use it in our coaching and consulting work with advisors.
The Hall-Tonna approach takes a developmental view of values. You might think of this as similar to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – the “lower” values support and drive behavior to meet more basic needs. As one moves up the hierarchy to having more complex and subtle needs – for example self-actualization – one inevitably develops different values that reflect those needs. The AVI provides a map of these individual values across a spectrum of values and puts them in clusters to make sense of them.
The Structure of Values
The instrument identifies foundational values, focus values and vision values. Foundational values are such things as security, health, and family. These are values we mostly learn and incorporate when we are young that serve us well later in life. When individuals take the assessment, some of these values show up as significant, but usually not. This is not because they are unimportant, but because they are basic and, for the most part, are superseded by more salient values chosen by the person taking the assessment.
Depending on where we are in the arc of our human journey, our focus values vary. We might value loyalty, empathy, meaning or wholeness. Living our focus values typically gives us great satisfaction. If they are missing in our workplace or family, then we feel out of sorts and inauthentic. A lot of job dissatisfaction and even divorce can be traced to these values conflicts. Conversely, the more we are able to express our values in our lives, the more effective we become and the closer we are to a state of flow.
Finally there are those values that are at the leading edge of our personal development – the ones that attract and challenge us to be our higher and better selves. These values might include wisdom, synergy, human rights and transcendence.
The interesting thing about this more empirical and nuanced approach is that, unlike the values cards, it is much harder to game the system and hide what is really going on for us.
The Promised Jujitsu
But let’s say you don’t have access to these fancy tests (or your clients wouldn’t take them even if you did). What meaningful work can be done with values? Here are two approaches that can be used with values cards that, in our experience, make them more honest. It is time to pull out your chosen value from the opening exercise.
Exercise 1: The Six Questions
We have come to the promised facilitative jujitsu. For the value you picked from the values you listed above (or that were drawn from a values card deck), here are six questions to apply to that value:
- How does having this value serve me?
- How does having this value impair me?
- How do I react when this value is challenged or violated by others?
- What is the blind spot I have because this value is important to me?
- How does having this value cause me to suffer?
- How does having this value give me peace?
This brief exercise serves to strip values of their varnished nobility and begins to ground them in ways that allow a person to actually benefit from having been through the experience of identifying core values. Allow us to give you an example: one of Matt’s vision values (one he aspires to) is equanimity. Here are his answers to the questions developed in real time without a lot of editing (except for the parentheticals):
- Equanimity gives me a sense of peace and calmness in the middle of difficult circumstances. It grounds me in the present moment. On my good days it allows me to deeply connect with people without blame or judgment. (Sounds pretty good – even noble – right?).
- It can at least appear to cut me off from my own feelings and the feelings of others – it can make me seem uncaring. (Yikes! Not so good.)
- This is tricky – when challenged I tend to get all the more equanimous – sometimes this looks like going blank or detachment. (Because this is a vision value it is not likely to trigger a reptilian response, but if it was a foundation value violation is likely to cause a very strong stress reaction which would typically look like fight, flight or freeze – the going blank or detachment we describe in Matt’s response could be seen as a milder form of internal flight or freezing.)
- On my bad days, I can discount or condescend to other people’s suffering which is not good for them or for my relationship to them.
- Not much suffering here…which is, I guess, a good thing, but I suppose it can tend to make me a bit narcissistic or support a form of navel gazing which is its own form of exquisite torture.
- Well there you go…that is kind of the whole point – a direct way into the peace thing. Pretty efficient.
As you can see, when you start looking closely, holding a particular value – even a value as seemingly noble and innocuous as “inner peace” – it is almost always a mixed bag. The value does contain real strength and purpose, but it also has shadows and blind spots. It gratifies and pains either ourselves or others. It opens us up to life and simultaneously serves to shut parts of life down. In the process of examining these values, we hopefully gain a bit of humility and self-awareness. We also come to understand our own operating system far better than we might otherwise. When done skillfully, it allows us to make choices that will diminish our own suffering and the suffering of those around us.
Exercise 2: The Ultimate Trick of Values
Now here is where the jujitsu gets really interesting. We have dropped a couple of hints along the way. Did you spot them? “Values”, as it turns out, is really code for “needs”. Let that sink in for a minute…this will rock your world if you let it.
This insight alone – when it is deeply grasped and understood – can change family relationships. Marriages can be saved, families can communicate more effectively, expressions of compassion and understanding for oneself and others can multiply, all from this one tiny little insight.
Values = needs. It is as simple as that.
Knowing a person’s values is tantamount to knowing the matrix of needs that runs their thinking, their emotions, their motivations and their actions. It also unlocks where and why they become stuck. To test this, look at your own top five values identified above and ask if they are not needs that must be met for you to be happy, successful and fully engaged. Ask your spouse or partner or a dear friend what their core values are and see if those don’t map directly to what they need from you and from life as well. Simply seeing this in its full glory can be revolutionary.
For advisory relationships this insight can be pivotal. To advisors we say that they should know and understand their clients’ core values (core needs). If you ask a client to share with you their needs, you will either get a blank stare as though this is the first time they ever thought about the question in the context of your relationship or you might get a kind of grocery list of expectations or desires. Either way, the information is not very helpful. Whatever the client shares will be “small picture” stuff in that it will tell you some specific things to do but not give you any insight into the “whys” behind those requests. Serving these clients becomes more like painting by numbers rather than creating beautiful art.
However, if you ask them “What are your five bedrock values?” and really listen to the answers with compassion – you will have uncovered some of their deepest needs. This is truly big picture information and you will find that if you absorb it and allow this information to shape your relationship with your clients, it will transform every interaction you have with them. In the hands of the truly skilled, this can turn the science of advising into an art form.
You will immediately know a great deal about how to best serve your client. Assuming they have been straight with you and actually have enough self-awareness to identify their values (which in some cases is a big assumption), you will have solid information by which to figure out the sources of their core competencies, what will likely trigger them, what their blind spots are likely to be, what will be hard for them to adjust to, what causes them to suffer and what gives them hope and peace. If you learn about the similarities and difference in values between partners and within families, you will know how to approach different people to meet their respective needs within the larger family system.
You will also have a great opening for deeper conversations that will allow you, if you are truly worthy, to become trusted. Having been told a value, you have the perfect opening to inquire about how those values came to be important to them. If asked sincerely with willingness to take the time to hear the answers with an open mind, an open heart and an open will, you will find clients share the most amazing stories. Stan Slapp, a corporate consultant, asks people in his workshops to reveal “a moment of truth” in their character formation, which is really just another way to talk about a core value. Here is the story he shares to spark those conversations in his workshops. If you chose to click the link, prepare to be inspired and moved. This stuff is intellectually and emotionally powerful.
Passing on Values
What many families believe is that values are noble and that actions arising from values are principled and reasoned. In fact, “values” are a seething cauldron of human need. Consider the old saw about “passing on one’s values”. When seen in this re-framing of values as needs, this expression quickly loses it moral veneer and its darker side stands exposed. If one understands the relationship between values and needs, “passing on one’s values” can mean letting the family know what your needs are so that they can meet them and please you. It may be that meeting these needs has served you well in life and that you want the best for others based on your experience. But this exercise is also a way for parents to attempt to make the world a much more comfortable place for themselves. If their children live by the parents’ values, it directly meets the parent’s needs. Rather than being an altruistic move, this passing on of values can easily morph into a selfish power play designed to make the senior generation more comfortable.
What “passing on values” doesn’t necessarily promote is the actual (as opposed to imagined) human development of the children who may have separate and quite different needs (i.e. values) based on their own developmental arc. The better question parents could ask is where their children are in the journey of their own personal development around values. Asking the children what their values are (i.e. what their deepest needs are) and helping them figure out ways to meet those needs allows children to grow into more mature adults. Younger children will likely have slightly different values. Older children certainly do. It turns out that if the children learn to meet their current needs, they will, according to Maslow, develop higher order needs (i.e. “better” or higher order values). Some of the best work parents and grandparents can do to support their children is helping them to deeply fulfill foundational values, find ways to express their focus values and encourage their aspiration to live more into their higher values – or, to shift this slightly, help them meet their foundational needs, focus on their current needs, and support their efforts to meet their higher order needs. This, it turns out, is the core engine for personal and collective development.
— July 15, 2013