Why do values matter so much at work?
One of the core philosophies behind my coaching practice is that some of our deepest misery at work comes from pursuing a career in a way that is far removed from our values.
You can have an impressive title, earn great money, win company awards, climb the corporate ladder, and do work other people admire while spending your days compromising the things that matter most to you. From the outside, to everyone around you, the career looks successful and amazing. To you? Inside? It can feel very different.
“No! I’m miserable because my boss is toxic”
Values misalignment doesn’t discredit the reality of toxic and unhealthy workplaces. Those environments exist and their effects are very real. But in my experience with coaching clients (and my past clinical experience), the distance between someone’s values and their daily work can compound what they are already experiencing.
A difficult environment becomes even harder to navigate when being successful requires abandoning yourself.
So it’s this compounding problem… and we typically see toxic work environments going hand in hand with requiring you to abandon your values.
I’ve also seen the other side. When people find ways to do work that aligns with their values, or protect the parts of their lives where those values are expressed, they sometimes gain a little space from the chaos. The environment may still be difficult, the manager may still behave badly, the deadlines may still be unmanageable. But the person has something firmer to stand on.
That is what I mean when I talk about values offering a protective barrier. Knowing yourself can help you recognize what is happening, why it affects you, and where you still have some agency. It does not make a harmful workplace harmless.
What happens when your work becomes your identity?
One example of why this matters is what I call career and identity fusion.
Our work can become so entangled with who we are that we struggle to tell the two apart. We become our work and our work becomes us.
Then someone criticizes a project or gives us difficult feedback, and instead of us seeing it as criticism of our work, we experience that judgment as a referendum on our value and worth as a human being.
The work needing improvement becomes I am not good enough. A disappointing performance review becomes I am a disappointment.
When that happens, other people’s assessments of our work become a source of external validation that we use to judge ourselves. And in an unhealthy environment, that leaves a lot of our sense of worth in other people’s hands.
Knowing who you are can help create some separation. When you know the ground you stand on, what you believe in, and what matters to you… you have a much stronger and healthier place to see the feedback for what it really is.
You can ask what is useful about the criticism, whether it is fair (or not), and what you want to do with it. You can also recognize when the way someone treated you crossed something important to you. And… here’s the awesome part… when a manager actually does attack you personally (which does happen, believe me) you know that it says way more about them than it does about you, because you actually know who you are and what you stand for.
Through all of that, you remain a full and complete and amazing and wonderful unique human being, completely independent of any job title, promotion, bonus, salary, project, or performance review.
Understanding your values is one way of getting more grounded in yourself.
What is a values card sort?
A values card sort gives you a collection of words on cards and asks you to consider how much each one matters to you. The cards might include things like honesty, integrity, justice, equity, diversity, power, learning, or freedom.
You can do it with physical cards or an online tool. The Personal Values Card Sort available through the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers is one freely available printable example.
I’ve also built a free values card sort, with a more in-depth version inside Innervates. You don’t have to use mine. What matters is giving yourself time to explore the words and what they mean to you.
Different tools use different decks and sorting instructions. I’ll walk through the approach I use, which starts broadly and gradually brings you toward five core values.
How do you choose which values to keep?
On the first pass, look at each card and ask: Does this resonate with me? Just that simply… do you feel drawn to it, do you recognize it, does it feel like a tiny bit of you on that card (or a tiny bit you wish was you).
If it does, put it in one pile. If it doesn’t, put it in another.
A word might resonate because it has always felt important to you. It might be especially important in your life right now. Or it might describe something you admire and wish you lived more fully.
All of those are worth exploring.
This first pass is not a judgment about whether a value is good or bad or right or wrong. You aren’t deciding which words make you sound like a respectable person. You’re noticing which ones pull you toward them. Many times in a session with a client I’ve heard the words “I feel like I should keep this as a value.” And usually because there’s some rule associated with it on who you should or shouldn’t be.
So pay attention when the thought I should keep this appears.
Does it reflect something you want for yourself? Or are you imagining what your family, colleagues, friends, social media, or community would think if you left that card behind?
You don’t have to automatically reject a value because someone else taught it to you. But you do get to pause and ask whether it belongs in your selection.
Once you have gone through the deck, set aside the cards that didn’t resonate and continue with the ones that did.
What if two values sound like the same thing?
You might see autonomy and freedom and think they mean the same thing. Someone else might see a significant difference between them.
That is one reason it can be useful to have both words available.
In the way I use this exercise, your interpretation matters. You might associate autonomy with having discretion over how you do your work. Freedom might mean having room to choose a different direction in your life. Or those distinctions might mean nothing to you, and one word simply feels more fitting than the other.
The same thing can happen with learning and knowledge. Some people experience those as closely related. Others are drawn to the process of learning, while the word knowledge carries a different meaning for them.
You don’t need to settle on a definition that everyone else agrees with. You need to understand what you mean when you choose the word.
That personal meaning becomes important when you start looking at how the value shows up in your life.
How do you narrow the list without dismissing other values?
Spread out the cards you kept and choose the 15 that feel most important to you. Some tools use a different number at this stage; the principle is to make a more deliberate selection from the broader group.
I use a dartboard image with clients to explain this.
Imagine each value is a dart. The darts that miss the board represent words that don’t resonate. The ones that land somewhere on the board represent values that have some importance to you.
Now you’re looking more closely at where those darts sit. Which ones belong nearer the center?
Choosing your top 15 doesn’t mean everything outside that group suddenly stops mattering. Those other values can still be on the board, they’re just farther from the center (for now).
Once you have chosen your top 15, set the rest aside, and then repeat the exercise. This time, choosing your top 10.
Then set the rest aside, repeat one last time, but this time choosing your top 5.
Those final five are your core values: the ones you have identified as most central in this exercise.
The narrowing process asks you to distinguish between the many things you appreciate and the things that feel especially important to who you are or who you want to become.
Remember, just because a value didn’t make it into the top 5, doesn’t mean it’s not still important to you or isn’t a value that still guides your life.
Why do I keep proximity and perimeter values too?
My free card sort (among many others) finishes with your five core values. Which I think still gives you a very useful starting point.
But from working with both coaching clients and therapy clients on values, I’ve come to believe that stopping there leaves part of the story out.
Humans are flexible. We change. We exist in different situations, and we don’t fit neatly into five-word boxes. Context is critical!!
In my more in-depth approach, I keep all 15 values in three groups:
- Core values: Your final five, closest to the center.
- Proximity values: The next five, which made your top 10.
- Perimeter values: The remaining five from your top 15.
These are the names I use for the layers around that center.
A situation might not call directly on one of your five core values. You may have to instead reach for a proximity value to help make a decision, or find that a perimeter value matters more in that particular context. That’s okay, you’re allowed to.
Keeping those values visible gives you more room to understand yourself. It also gives you permission to be flexible without treating every change as evidence that you don’t know who you are.
The card sort captures something useful about you, but most importantly it doesn’t have to become a box you spend the rest of your life trying to fit inside. Don’t like what you see? Start the card sort again, or change the box entirely. The point is getting to know yourself a bit better.
Where did your values come from?
Another part of my approach is asking people to consider the origin of each value. I use three descriptions: inherited, adopted, and wanted.
Inherited values are the ones passed to you through the family, community, and culture you grew up in. They were part of the world you entered, often before you had much opportunity to examine or question them. They were just there, already part of your life.
As you get older, you can decide which of those values you want to keep. Something being inherited doesn’t make it wrong, but over time it does make it worth asking whether you still choose it.
Adopted values are ones you have consciously taken on as your own. You may have encountered them later in life, maybe it’s something that felt missing for a long time and when you encountered it, you felt it light something up inside of you.
Wanted values describe something you wish you lived more fully. Perhaps you admire it in someone else. Perhaps the few times you have expressed it felt meaningful, and you want more of that in your life.
A wanted value might sit in your proximity group while you begin making more room for it. An inherited value may become less central as you examine whether it still fits. Something you have consciously adopted may become more important.
You are allowed to make those decisions, and you’re allowed to keep making them as you move through life. Your results can evolve with you.
What do you do with your values after the card sort?
Once you have your values, you can start comparing them with the life you are actually living.
For career work, I often begin with the five core values and ask someone to look at their job or career through each one.
For each value, ask:
How much does my work allow me to live this value?
You can use a simple one-to-five scale:
- One: My work feels very far from this value or regularly pushes me to compromise it.
- Three: There is some room to live this value, alongside meaningful tension or inconsistency.
- Five: My work is well aligned with this value and gives me room to express it.
Write down why you chose each score. The “Why” is often the most important part of any self-reflection exercise, so I often intentionally include it.
What does values misalignment look like in an actual job?
Imagine family is one of your core values.
Your job regularly requires you to work extra hours in the evenings and on the weekends. You miss dinner with your family, your children’s sports games, and concerts you wanted to attend. Work keeps claiming the time you intended to spend with the people who matter to you.
That is a concrete conflict between your work and your value.
It’s not just that you’re working more hours and you’re overworked and getting exhausted… It’s that those extra hours are displacing something central to your life. In my experience, that is part of why the situation can feel so miserable.
If you are also dealing with a toxic workplace, the two can compound each other. You experience the difficult environment during the day, and then its demands take away the family time that matters to you outside it.
It’s also why we can see the same situation at work have wildly different impacts on two different people. One person is thrown for a complete loop because a value was stepped on or compromised, while another person looks on and says “it wasn’t that big of a deal…”
Now imagine a different version of that situation. The workplace still has difficult people and unhealthy dynamics, but you can be home for dinner. You can care for a sick family member and attend your child’s concerts in the evening.
The workplace problems still exist, but an important part of your life remains available to you.
That is the kind of space I mean when I talk about a protective barrier. Staying connected to something that matters can help you remain grounded in yourself while navigating difficult circumstances. And being able to protect your values builds tolerance for the unhealthy workplace.
I recognize that these combinations can be hard to find. Some unhealthy workplaces create much of their harm through the demands that force people to give those things up. Values work can help you name that conflict and see it more clearly, even when changing it requires support or a larger decision.
How can you move closer to a value this week?
After looking at the scores, choose one value and ask:
What is one small thing I can do in my job this week that brings me closer to this value?
You don’t have to fix the whole job today (in fact you likely won’t change the job at all). You don’t have to bring all five values into perfect alignment. Just start with one intentional step.
Let’s say learning is a core value, and you have a difficult week coming up.
Could you learn a process you haven’t understood before? Try a new piece of technology as part of something you already need to do? Look at your current project and explore a different way of approaching it?
The idea is to find or create a little room for learning inside the work… because that’s aligned to your core values of Learning.
That might mean taking an activity that already exists and changing how you engage with it. You could ask someone to explain their approach, investigate a question you’ve been working around, or test another way of completing a task.
The step can be small. What matters is that you chose it because it connects with something important to you.
Afterward, reflect on what happened. Did you get to express the value in the way you intended? Did anything about your experience of the work feel different? Is there something worth keeping or adjusting next week?
What can change when you keep doing this?
I don’t want to present this as a guarantee. But I have seen people’s relationship with themselves and their careers begin to change through this kind of ongoing, intentional work.
Sometimes the workload hasn’t changed. The manager hasn’t changed. The environment is still difficult. The demands are still high.
Yet the person has a little more space. I’ve seen people gain confidence, find more room to consider their choices, and become more grounded around bosses whose behavior had previously made them feel small.
I’ve seen people walk into a room and own the ground they stand on because they finally know what that ground is.
That doesn’t mean they control the people around them. It means they have a clearer sense of themselves within the situation, and a clearer understanding of what they want to protect, pursue, or change.
This is at the heart of what I teach inside Innervates. Turning your career into a craft, advancing your career, and changing jobs all build on the same foundation: knowing who you are.
A values card sort gives you a place to begin. What you learn from it can help you recognize where work is asking you to abandon yourself, where you still have room to express yourself, and which small decisions can give you back some ownership and agency over your career.
