The CEO looked exhausted. Three major team members had just given notice in the same week, the board was breathing down her neck about revenue projections, and she’d just learned that her biggest competitor had landed the client she’d been courting for months.

“I don’t even know what I’m doing anymore,” she told me. “Everything feels like it’s falling apart.”

Sound familiar?

If you’re leading in 2025, you know this feeling. Whether it’s economic uncertainty, rapid technological change, social upheaval, or just the relentless pace of modern business, leaders today are navigating more turbulence than ever before.

But here’s what I’ve learned from coaching everyone from tech startup CEOs to nonprofit leaders to executives at Michelin: The leaders who thrive in chaos aren’t the ones with the best crisis management plans—they’re the ones who know exactly what they stand for.

Your Values Are Your Leadership GPS

Think of your values as your internal GPS system. When you’re driving through unfamiliar territory (or when construction has changed all the roads you thought you knew), you don’t panic—you trust your GPS to recalculate and get you where you need to go.

The same is true in leadership. When external circumstances shift faster than you can keep up, your values become your navigation system. They help you make decisions quickly, communicate authentically, and lead with integrity even when you don’t have all the answers.

But here’s the catch: Most leaders have never actually done the work to identify their core values.

In our research for The Wake Up Call, we found that while leaders generally express confidence in their abilities (rating themselves around 5.7 on a 7-point scale), the mechanisms for actually assessing and developing that leadership are often missing. Only about a third of leaders have formal performance assessment processes in place, and even fewer have clarity on the values driving their decisions.

The Problem With “Borrowed” Values

I see this all the time in my coaching work. Leaders who are trying to lead according to someone else’s playbook. They’ve adopted the values they think they should have based on:

• What their organization’s poster in the lobby says
• What worked for their last boss
• What they read in the latest business book
• What sounds good in a board meeting
• What their faith tradition says is important

But borrowed values are like borrowed clothes—they never quite fit right, and they certainly won’t hold up under pressure.

When the heat is on, when you’re facing a decision that could make or break your organization, when stakeholders are pulling you in different directions—that’s when you need values that are genuinely yours. Values you’ve wrestled with, tested, and claimed as your own.

How to Discover Your Real Values (Not the Ones You Think You Should Have)

Here’s a simple but powerful exercise you could use to start your uncovering your real values:

The Three Stories Exercise:

1. Think of a time when you felt most proud of a decision you made as a leader. What was happening? What did you choose to do? What made you feel proud?
2. Remember a time when you felt angry or frustrated about something happening in your workplace. What was violating your sense of “how things should be”?
3. Imagine you’re at your retirement party. What do you hope people will say about how you led? What legacy do you want to leave?

Write down your answers. Then look for the themes. What values keep showing up? Those recurring themes? That’s where your real values live.

Brant Menswar gives a useful tool in his book on values, Black Sheep. If you can tell a story about your living out the value, then it’s a candidate for your core values. If you don’t have a story of your living out the value, it’s an aspirational value. To lead in unpredictable times, I help my clients get in touch with their core values. Those are the ones that will ground you and bring clarity.

Values in Action: Beyond the Poster on the Wall

Identifying your values is just the beginning. The real work is learning to use them as a decision-making filter, especially when the pressure is on.

Consider this scenario: A leader discovers that “respect for people” is one of her core values. When budget cuts force difficult staffing decisions, instead of just looking at numbers, she asks: “How can we handle this in a way that honors the dignity of everyone involved?”

That values-filter might lead to creative solutions: offering unpaid sabbaticals, helping departing staff find new opportunities, being radically transparent about the financial situation, or finding ways to preserve benefits even when reducing hours.

The key is that the decision-making process starts with values, not just spreadsheets.

When Your Values Conflict (Because They Will)

Here’s something the leadership books don’t always tell you: Sometimes your values will conflict with each other.

Maybe you value both “family” and “excellence,” and you’re facing a choice between attending your kid’s game and preparing for a make-or-break presentation. Maybe you believe in “transparency” and “loyalty,” and you’ve learned something that could damage a colleague’s reputation.

This is where the real leadership growth happens. Not in avoiding these conflicts, but in learning to navigate them thoughtfully. Ask yourself:

• Which value, in this specific situation, will lead to outcomes I can live with long-term?
• How can I honor both values, even if I can’t satisfy them equally?
• What would the person I want to become do in this situation?

Your Values Are Your Doubt-Fighting Superpower

In The Surprising Gift of Doubt, I write about how self-doubt can actually be a gift—a signal that you’re ready to grow as a leader. But doubt becomes destructive when you have no anchor, no sense of who you are at your core.

When you know your values, doubt shifts from “I don’t know what I’m doing” to “I know who I am, even if I don’t know exactly what comes next.” That’s a fundamentally different kind of uncertainty—one that leads to growth instead of paralysis.

The Daily Practice of Values-Based Leadership

Living your values isn’t a one-time decision. It’s a daily practice. Here are three ways you might keep your values front and center:

1. The Monday Morning Check-In: Start each week by asking, “How can I live my values through my leadership this week?”
2. The Decision Filter: Before major decisions, literally ask yourself, “Which option best aligns with my core values?”
3. The Friday Reflection: End each week by noting when you felt most aligned with your values and when you felt most out of sync. What can you learn from both?

Or you could put them where you’ll see them each day. I’ve added my core values to my phone’s daily reminder for me to take my vitamins. Along with the vitamin B and omega fatty acids, I’ve listed my core values too.

Keeping your values in front of you helps you lean on them when the pressure’s on.

Leading Through the Storm

The world isn’t going to slow down. The challenges aren’t going to get easier. If anything, the pace of change is accelerating.

But you have something more powerful than any crisis management plan or strategic framework: You have the ability to lead from a place of deep personal clarity about what matters most to you.

When you know your values—really know them, not just the ones that sound good—you can make decisions quickly, communicate authentically, and sleep well at night knowing you’re leading with integrity.

Your team needs that kind of grounded leadership. Your organization needs it. And honestly? You need it too.

The storm may be raging, but when you’re anchored to your values, you’re not just surviving the turbulence—you’re using it to become the leader you were always meant to be.

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Want to start discovering your core values? Use our free leadership values assessment at https://concordleadershipgroup.com/values/