Values Based Leadership - Living the Mission not just leading it
Barbra Carlisle • August 21, 2025
What does it mean to truly live your organisation’s values?
I have had a couple of interesting conversations this week about living the organisation's values day in day out.
Values-based leadership is increasingly recognised as a cornerstone of effective organisational culture. Nottingham Trent University’s micro-credential in Values-Driven Leadership teaches leaders to solve ethical dilemmas by leveraging their values, not compromising them.
This approach fosters integrity, trust, and systemic thinking. All qualities essential for navigating complex social challenges.
One way to ensure that you and your team are living your organisation's values daily are to ensure that the values are
1. known acorss the whole employee teams
2. are clear and simple and actually mean something
3. Are translatable and actionable..
One CEO, Sophie Livingstone of Little Village
described to me on The Unlikely Executive Podcast
how their organisational values are lived, revisited, and refined through regular team sessions exploring behaviours and alignment. This mirrors best practice which emphasises the importance of translating values into observable behaviours and embedding them into daily decision-making.
Inclusive and compassionate leadership directly improves staff engagement and organisational outcomes. When leaders embody the values they espouse, they create cultures where people feel seen, heard, and empowered.
Sophie’s vision for scaling Little Village alongside families, and her role in the Baby Bank Alliance, reflects a values-driven strategy that goes beyond operational delivery. It’s about creating political and public will to end child poverty. A goal that requires collective leadership and moral clarity.
In a time when leadership is often measured by metrics and outputs, Sophie’s example reminds us that how we lead is just as important as what we achieve. Values-based leadership is not just a philosophy. It's a practice that transforms organisations from the inside out.
Five Tips for Embedding Values in Leadership Practice:
1. Make Values Visible
Display your organisation’s values in shared spaces and digital platforms. Use them to guide decisions and celebrate behaviours that reflect them.
2. Facilitate Regular Values Workshops
Like Little Village’s triannual sessions, create space for teams to explore how values show up in their work and where alignment can be strengthened.
3. Model Values in Action
Leaders should “muck in” when possible—whether that’s joining frontline work or being transparent in tough decisions. Authenticity builds trust.
4. Use Values in Recruitment and Onboarding
Integrate values into job descriptions, interviews, and induction processes to ensure cultural fit and shared purpose from day one.
5. Create a Values-Based Feedback Culture
Encourage feedback that references values e.g., “I appreciated how you showed compassion in that meeting.” This reinforces desired behaviours and deepens cultural alignment.
If you would like to know more about leadership perspectives sign up and be the first to hear the news.
You can also contact me at barbra@gleecoaching.com if something in the articles resonate.
Ideas and thoughts on how to lead well through complexity and change
The Intergenerational Advantage: Why Construction Firms Who Blend Ages Will Outperform Everyone Else
If you’re worried about not having enough young people, including women coming into construction, you’re asking the wrong question. The real risk is what happens when you don’t use the people you already have properly. The Crisis No One Is Solving Properly Across the UK, the construction workforce is ageing faster than it’s being replenished. There are 20% more workers aged 55+ than under 25. And it gets worse: 35% of the workforce is now over 50, and only 20% is under 30. Yes this presents an industry risk, but closer to home we see organisational risk. Leaders worry about recruitment, apprenticeships, T levels, Skills Bootcamps all useful, but none of them address the real issue: Experience is walking out of the door every single day, and new capability isn’t being integrated fast enough. This is exactly what my conversation with Colin McEllin MCIOB of Clan Contracting highlighted. When a 21 year old commercial graduate joined Clan Contracting, Colin didn’t roll his eyes or think, “another kid who’s never been on a site.” He leaned into it and welcomes thoughts, ideas and advice from 'young Aaron'. Massive benefits for him, and Aaron, and the wider team. Why Intergenerational Leadership Is Now a Strategic Priority The construction sector is staring at a workforce cliff edge: • 140,000+ vacancies lie unfilled. • By 2036, 750,000 skilled workers will retire, stripping the industry of vital capability. • The UK will need nearly 1 million additional construction workers by 2032. Yet recruitment alone isn’t enough. You cannot hire your way out of this crisis. We must integrate generations on purpose, not by accident. What Younger Workers Bring (That Leaders Ignore at Their Peril) Younger talent offers: • Modern thinking around sustainability and digital tooling • Analytical approaches and better documentation habits • A willingness to question processes that haven't been updated since the 90s • A commercial lens shaped by newer training systems In Colin’s words, their thinking “took him right back to when he was 21” eager, energetic, ideas driven. You want that energy before they lose it. What Older Workers Bring (That You Can’t Replace) Your experienced people have: • 30+ years of instinct • Pattern recognition that no textbook teaches • Quiet influence that stabilises teams • Technical fluency on heritage, concrete, structure, sequencing, conservation, problem solving These people are your institutional memory. Once they go, they’re gone. And currently, UK engineering employers admit they only retain knowledge effectively from 57% of retiring staff. That is a crisis hiding in plain sight. Leadership Actions That Works 1. Create deliberate two way mentoring (not hierarchical mentoring). Younger staff teach digital skills, new processes, sustainability thinking. Older staff teach technical judgment, site sense, risk spotting. Both feel valued. 2. Give young people actual responsibility, not token tasks. The CITB plans 40,000+ industry placements a year. It means nothing if leaders hide young people in the corner. Let them make decisions, with support. 3. Systemise knowledge transfer. You cannot afford to rely on “ask Dave if you need help.” You need processes, templates, technical walkthroughs, shared documentation. 4. Remove the “that’s not how we do it here” reflex. 76% of construction workers say current training doesn’t adequately prepare people for the job. So your way probably isn’t the best way anymore. Your Competitive Advantage Is Sitting Right Under Your Nose When generations work in isolation, capability leaks. When generations work together, capability compounds. The firms who win over the next decade won’t be the ones who grab the talent, it will be the ones who blend talent. Listen to the full episode of the podcast here or watch on You Tube here About me I write about topics that my podcast guests bring to the podcast. They have years of experience with challenges and opportunities along the way, highs and lows and are in the thick of leading with purpose and passion, faults an'all. As a coach and trainer I work with leaders and their times to help them thrive, laugh, enjoy their work, be productive and to build teams of all ages.
We love what we do so we grow in that role, we end up as leader with people around us but we want to stay doing the thing we love doing. Balancing leadership is hard.
