Values Under Pressure: Understanding What Drives Our Leadership

Our personal values sit (too) quietly beneath the surface of our leadership. They influence how we make decisions, how we relate to others, and how we behave when things are going well. Unfortunately, it is often under pressure, when time is tight, stakes are high, or uncertainty rises that our values become most visible. 

Values are powerful. They motivate, guide, and anchor us. A leader who values achievement may drive high standards and results. A leader who values compassion may create trust and psychological safety. A leader who values responsibility may bring consistency and reliability. And yet, no value exists without a potential downside.  

The key is knowing them ourselves and that of our team before crisis hits.  

When Values Become Amplified Under Pressure 

Under pressure, values often become exaggerated. What normally serves us well can begin to limit us. Achievement can tip into impatience or burnout. Compassion can slide into avoidance of difficult conversations. Responsibility can turn into overcontrol or micromanagement. Security can lead to risk aversion and stalled innovation. This blurs or biases our decision making and behaviours, often unconsciously. As a leader are we aware of our own and each other's limitations? Can we share them openly? 

This is not a flaw in values themselves, but a reminder that values require awareness, flexibility and, ideally, integration. Leadership effectiveness lies not in suppressing values, but in understanding how they show up, especially when we feel stretched, sharing them and seeking our blind spots to be called out when there is an overextension of what we stand for. 

Different Ways of Understanding Values 

Over the years, several models have helped leaders articulate and explore their values and understand how they shape behaviour in real-world situations: 

• Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values highlights universal values such as achievement, benevolence, power, and security, showing how some values naturally complement each other while others can come into tension. It’s a useful lens for understanding why certain choices or reactions feel intuitive, and why balancing values can sometimes feel challenging. 

• Barrett’s Values Model links personal and organisational values to levels of consciousness and cultural health. It helps leaders see how their own priorities and behaviours influence the broader team or organisational climate, and how alignment—or misalignment—can impact culture. 

• Rokeach’s Values System distinguishes between terminal values (core end-states, like freedom or equality) and instrumental values (the behaviours we use to achieve them, like honesty or diligence). This framework helps leaders clarify not just what matters to them, but how they act on it. 

• Clare W. Graves’ Emergent Cyclical Levels of Existence Theory explores how human values evolve over time in response to changing life conditions and challenges. Graves’ work shows that leaders’ values are not static- they shift as personal and organisational demands change, helping explain why what drives us today may look different from what mattered earlier in our careers. Beck and Cowan later expanded this into Spiral Dynamics, providing a practical framework for understanding how values shift in individuals and organisations, helping leaders recognise why priorities and motivations change across roles and contexts. 

Each of these models offers a different perspective and principles of application, but they share a key insight: values are not abstract ideals. They are lived, prioritised, and frequently tested in the moments that matter most. Understanding them and how they interact between emotions and beliefs can give leaders the clarity to make choices with intention rather than habit. Part of this habit is by seeking values we typically move away from. Decision making requires alternative perspectives that represent other risks and opportunities our own values miss. Some of the best leaders The Glass House has worked with are incredible at creating the space to hold this tension intentionally and openly within their teams. Innovation, creativity and compassionate challenge emerge, and the team can go beyond its individual limitations and find solutions each individual would simply never have seen.  

From Naming Values to Understanding Their Impact 

At The Glass House Leadership Lab, we often listen to leaders who, using our diagnostic, can readily name their values but have had less opportunity to explore how those values influence their behaviour under pressure, or how they are experienced or perceived by others when informing culture design. This is where deeper values work becomes meaningful. 

Our Values Profile Diagnostic is designed to help leaders clarify which values are most prominent for them, how these values interact, and how they may show up positively and less helpfully in leadership contexts. This has been key to enhancing stakeholder management, stepping into the shoes of those leaders are engaged or in conflict with and understanding how they see the world. This allows us to naunce the communication issues that are so often sighted as the most prominent area for leadership development. Equally, used within coaching and leadership development within their own teams, it provides a structured yet reflective way to explore patterns, blind spots, and growth edges. 

The value of this kind of diagnostic is not in labelling or categorising, but in creating insight and recognising that this lens is not static. It supports leaders to move from automatic reactions to more intentional choices (often shifting their own values) and is essential as we move into more complex and high-stakes environments in executive roles. 

Why Values Awareness Matters for Your Next Step 

Leadership starts within.  

When leaders understand their values before they are under pressure, they are better able to regulate themselves, hold boundaries, and respond with wisdom rather than react from a value clash. If you are looking to develop your leadership, values also act as your drivers for that change and if aware, can be the drivers behind your team's growth.  

Values are not static. They evolve with experience, responsibility, and context. Revisiting them is not a one-off exercise, but an ongoing leadership practice that often allows you to deeply understand the causal issues and limitations of effective change and begin to see untapped opportunities for growth, internally and externally. 

References: 

Barrett, R. (2006) Building a values-driven organization. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. 

Barrett, R. (2014) The values-driven organization: Unleashing human potential for performance and profit. Abingdon: Routledge. 

Goleman, D. (1998) Working with emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books. 

Graves, C.W. (1970) ‘Levels of existence: An open system theory of values’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 10(2), pp. 131–155. 

Kegan, R. and Lahey, L.L. (2009) Immunity to change: How to overcome it and unlock potential in yourself and your organization. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press. 

Rokeach, M. (1973) The nature of human values. New York: Free Press. 

Schwartz, S.H. (1992) ‘Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries’, in Zanna, M.P. (ed.) Advances in experimental social psychology. Vol. 25. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 1–65. 

Schwartz, S.H. (2012) ‘An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values’, Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1), pp. 1–20.