How to Realign Your Leadership Values Without Abandoning Your Success
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Ellen Van Driessche is an Online Executive & Leadership Coach helping leaders, high-performers and entrepreneurs cultivate personal and professional leadership excellence. She combines psychology, business insight, and systemic thinking to help them lead authentically and create sustainable success.
You have built a career, the title, the team, the results. And somewhere between the last promotion and this morning's leadership meeting, a question has arrived that you have not quite been able to shake loose, "Is this it?" That question is not a warning sign. It is the most important leadership signal you have had in years.
If you recognize the signs described in my previous article, 5 Signs Your Leadership Success Is No Longer Aligned, you are likely already experiencing this shift. The loyalty you feel toward your role and the loyalty you feel toward your own values are no longer aligned.
Recognizing that your leadership is evolving is the beginning, not the conclusion. This article gives you a practical framework for identifying your current values, naming the conflict, and making conscious choices that move you toward alignment, one deliberate step at a time.
What core values actually are, and why they shift
The word "values" is used frequently in leadership contexts and rarely defined precisely. Before examining how to realign them, it is worth being clear about what they are and where they operate.
Robert Dilts, whose work on neurological levels has been influential in both coaching and organizational psychology, describes a hierarchy of factors shaping human behavior. At the most visible level are environment and behavior, what we do and where we do it. Deeper are capability and strategy, how we do what we do. Deeper still are values and beliefs, why we do what we do. And at the deepest level, identity sits, who we are in relation to what we do.
The critical insight of this model for leaders is that lasting change at the behavioral level, like how you lead, what decisions you make, and how you show up in difficult conversations, is only sustainable when it is supported by alignment at the values level. A leadership style that contradicts your core values will eventually produce friction, regardless of how skilled you are at enacting it.
Why values shift over time
Steven Hayes draws a distinction that is highly relevant here, the difference between chosen values and inherited values.
Inherited values are those absorbed from the environment, institution, and culture, often unconsciously. They feel like your own because you have held them for so long.
Chosen values are those you arrive at through deliberate reflection and lived experience.
Many leaders reach mid-career having built a highly successful life on inherited values, only to find that their chosen values (the ones emerging from who they have actually become) are pulling in a different direction.
Recognizing the emerging values
Not only can you acknowledge your values in the past and present, but you can also recognize emerging ones:
Past values: Early career, achievement, recognition, progression
Present values: Now, integrity, impact, team wellbeing
Emerging values (that are emerging, not yet dominant): Meaning, legacy, authenticity
So the question is not, "Why have my values changed?" The question is, "Which of my current values were always mine, and which ones am I now ready to choose consciously?"
Conflicting values and the cost of leaving them unnamed
Once you have a clearer picture of your values, the next step is to look honestly at where they conflict.
Most senior leaders carry, simultaneously, three distinct layers of loyalty, loyalty to the organization, to the team, and to themselves. If you want to know more about your loyalties, I advise you to read 5 Signs Your Leadership Success Is No Longer Aligned.
When your loyalties are broadly aligned, leadership feels coherent and energizing. When they diverge, you enter a state of sustained values conflict. A portion of your cognitive and emotional energy is continuously redirected toward managing the tension rather than leading from genuine conviction.
The organizational cost of this is rarely visible from the outside. The personal cost is significant. Research by Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School on psychological safety consistently shows that leaders who experience sustained misalignment between their stated role and their internal values report lower decision quality over time, not because they lose capability, but because the cognitive load of managing the gap steadily erodes the mental bandwidth available for genuine leadership.
Insight into your loyalty conflict
Think of a decision you made in the past three months that left you with a residue of discomfort, not because it was wrong, but because it felt misaligned.
Which loyalty were you serving?
Which one did you set aside?
What did that cost you, even if no one else could see it?
Redefining success in your leadership and your life
Success is not only about performance and titles. It is also about who you are becoming and the legacy you choose to leave behind. Let’s look at two ways of defining success:
Externally authored success (validated by external standards):
Role & status: Title and position within the hierarchy
Reward & recognition: Compensation and material acknowledgment
Approval & reputation: Institutional validation and external credibility
Self-authored success (grounded in internal standards):
Role & identity: Alignment between your role and personal values
Reward & fulfillment: A sense of integrity in how results are achieved
Approval & self-trust: Internal coherence and trust in your own judgment
The question is not which definition is correct, since both contain legitimate elements of a full professional life. Where would you position yourself?
A leader who finds that the right column increasingly describes what they are reaching for, while the left column describes how they are still being evaluated, is experiencing exactly the misalignment.
Making authentic leadership choices
One of the most common and most limiting assumptions about values misalignment is that the only meaningful response is a dramatic structural change, a new role, a new organization, a fundamental rerouting of a career. This assumption keeps many leaders stuck. It frames a developmental transition as a binary choice between the status quo and an upheaval that feels both uncertain and disloyal.
The reality is considerably more nuanced. Alignment is not usually rebuilt in one large decision. Susan David, psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Emotional Agility, describes how lasting behavioral and values-based change happens through what she calls values-based micro-decisions. These are small, deliberate choices, made consistently over time, that gradually shift the system from the inside. Each decision may seem modest. Cumulatively, they reorient the direction of travel.
Redefining the role: You shift the center of gravity within your current position toward work that reflects your emerging values. It is a deliberate, strategic way of shaping your role from within.
Setting new boundaries: It is one of the most concrete and often most underused tools available to senior leaders. Naming what you are no longer willing to compromise on is not a limitation on your leadership. It is a definition of it.
Leading differently: You bring your evolving values into your daily decisions and conversations. It is the gradual alignment between who you are privately and how you lead publicly. Reshaping the environment means influencing the culture, the team, or the organizational context in ways that make alignment more possible, not only for yourself but for the people around you.
Career transition: Only consider a career transition when the other options have been genuinely explored.
The development gap
The practical steps described in this article are genuinely useful. But it is worth being honest about their limits. Values realignment is not primarily a strategic challenge, it is a developmental one. And most leadership development, as I have written about in detail in The Missing Step in Most Leadership Development, addresses the strategic layer while leaving the developmental layer largely untouched.
Research supports this shift in focus:
70% of executives who engaged in professional coaching report measurable improvement in overall leadership effectiveness.[1]
80% report increased self-confidence, along with greater clarity in values-based decision-making.[2]
These figures do not simply show that coaching improves performance. They point to something deeper, meaningful leadership growth happens when internal development catches up with external expectations.
Accelerate your growth as a leader
I work with senior leaders who are navigating exactly this transition, typically at the point where the internal shift is already clear, but the path forward is not.
In a complimentary clarity call, we identify the core dynamic in your leadership and explore how to realign it with your values and impact.
This is not a sales conversation. It is a focused, confidential thinking space designed for leaders who are ready to take their own development seriously.
Read more from Ellen Van Driessche
Ellen Van Driessche, Executive and Leadership Coach
Ellen Van Driessche is an Online Executive & Leadership Coach and has more than 20 years of experience in corporate HR and Occupational Psychology. She offers strong expertise in leadership development, human behaviour, and complex organisational systems. She supports high-performing professionals who seem successful on the outside but internally feel stressed, disconnected, or uncertain about their next step. She combines a European depth of insight with results-driven strategies, giving you the best of both worlds, clarity & performance, resilience & results.
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