What Are Your Core Values? What Were Dr. King’s?
My friends, all I’m trying to say is that if we are to go forward today, we’ve got to go back and rediscover some mighty precious values that we’ve left behind. That’s the only way that we would be able to make of our world a better world.
—Martin Luther King Jr.
Intro
“Take 10,000 managers from seventy countries, at various levels, in different companies and lines of business,” begins the first book of Stan Slap’s trilogy, Bury My Heart at Conference Room B. “The personal values that an overwhelming number of managers in every position in every country reported as being most important to them:
1. Family
2. Integrity
“The personal values that those same managers reported as being the most under pressure to compromise in order to do their jobs successfully:
1. Family
2. Integrity”
Uh oh.
Stan Slap’s Cultural Values Insights
Stan Slap
In my literature review preceding the launch of the Jazz Leadership Project, Stan Slap’s work became very special. Folks in corporate business, such as organizational culture change consultant Maureen Hunter, will mention Edgar Schein’s Organizational Culture and Leadership as an influential work. But I was more drawn to Slap’s style: deep business insights suffused with humor and humanity. Stan is soulful. His organic models of a managerial culture, an employee culture, and a customer culture, each with their own “shared beliefs about the rules of survival and emotional prosperity,” make so much sense—beyond metrics and strategic planning.
Icing on the cake for me was his adoration of Charlie Parker.
I revere all legends of jazz but this is mostly because of Charlie Parker. His remarkable natural prowess and dauntless vision earned him a reputation as the best alto saxophone player in jazz history, and one of the founding fathers of modern music . . . I love Parker’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the established mathematics of his field, his unrelenting passionate pursuit of the new, and the profound humanity that infuses his playing. It’s the same way I like to approach what I do in my own company, which is closed on Charlie Parker’s birthday every year as a paid employee holiday.
—Stan Slap
In Slap’s work with top companies around the world, he and his team urge managers to discover their core personal values so they can live their values at work. True leaders, says Slap, by definition already do that.
The irreducible essence of leadership is that leaders are people who live their deepest personal values without compromise, and they use those values to make life better for others—this is why people become leaders and why people follow leaders.
—Stan Slap
This definition of leadership begins to reveal Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s appeal.
For the sake of my own work as an aspiring leader, I decided to go through the process Slap lays out in his first book. There he defined values as “deeply held personal beliefs that form your own priority code for living,” and “the definition of what life looks like when you live it exactly the way you want to. Values are your very own source of safety, hope, and renewal.”
He presented 50 values, out of which you take ten minutes to pick ten that mean the most to you. Then you pick the top five of ten, and, finally, cut the list from five to three.
My top three: Freedom, Wisdom, and Service.
As I reflected on growing up with my family in the North and the South; going to church, learning Protestant Christian values; gaining a liberal arts education and later some grad school experience; embedding myself (in my late 20s to early 30s) into a neo-African spiritual community that integrated esoteric knowledge from the East and the West; all while swimming deep into the blue waters of jazz and the blues, I realized that those concepts do indeed represent my core values.
Jewel Was There First
In several posts last year, Jewel pursued how core values relate the personal and the political with leadership, connecting individual meaning and intention with group and organizational behavior through a cultural values assessment by the Barrett Values Centre.
Jewel took then discussed Barrett’s Personal Values Assessment with our readers. I took it also, then compared the results to my experience with Slap’s values orientation.
[Click here to take the Barrett Personal Values Assessment for free—it’ll take about five minutes.]
My value set around deep listening registered at level 2 above, while the rest clustered from 4-7. Affirming my sense of core values were statements on the report such as: “You appreciate the freedom of autonomy and not being reliant on others,” “You show a strong sense of caring and feel empathy for others,” and “Experience has provided you with insight and understanding, enabling you to think clearly and to guide others.”
Dr. King’s Core Values
As seen above, knowing your core values is crucial to becoming a mature adult and effective leader. Today we celebrate a holiday in honor of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Think for a moment: what were Dr. King’s core values? Another angle on core values is what theologian Paul Tillich called “matters of ultimate concern.”
Many of the conflicts tearing apart the fabric of American society today could be better managed if leaders of the warring groups understood and honored the matters of ultimate concern they actually share in common with the leaders of their opponents.
The following quotes, shared in honor of Dr. King’s legacy and living memory, point to his core values, transcendent spiritual insights from the Black American religious heritage he derived from, higher octaves of possibility for the nation whose promise he died for:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
“We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.”
Love is creative and redemptive. Love builds up and unites; hate tears down and destroys. The aftermath of the ‘fight with fire’ method which you suggest is bitterness and chaos, the aftermath of the love method is reconciliation and creation of the beloved community. Physical force can repress, restrain, coerce, destroy, but it cannot create and organize anything permanent; only love can do that. Yes, love—which means understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill, even for one’s enemies—is the solution to the race problem.
“Everybody can be great … because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.”
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction.
“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”
In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
“Our goal is to create a beloved community—this will require a qualitative change in our souls. as well as a quantitative change in our lives.”