Recently, I've been asked what's the single word that describes my leadership style. I paused, wondering how I could encapsulate everything in just one word. But then I knew: Empowerment.

I believe in empowering people. In giving them the authority to shape their own path, transforming them from passive recipients into active agents who proactively drive their work, their life, and their career.

Empowerment is my value. It isn't my only value, but it's probably my most important one. It drives my decisions, guides my actions, and shapes how I work with my teams. It even shapes me, because I also want to be empowered.

This conversation made me wonder. What are other values that I hold? And how important are values for leaders?

Why do leaders need values?

Throughout my career, I've navigated countless changes. In consulting, every month brought something unexpected - refactoring legacy banking systems one week, running on-site technical training in India the next. Later, switching to product companies meant learning entirely new domains, surviving organisational pivots, weathering layoffs, celebrating promotions, and managing career shifts. I've faced chaos and uncertainty many times.

While my values naturally evolved, they became my compass through all this turbulence. They helped me decide not just what to do, but how to do things right. How to stay true to myself.

Over the years, we all make thousands of big and small decisions. Since the right choice is rarely obvious, values serve as our guide to decisions that align with our beliefs.

Your Values Build Trust and Shape Your Teams

The most important and valuable feedback I received throughout my career was that my teams trust me.

Why did they trust me? Because they knew I respected them and was honest with them. They knew I would openly celebrate our wins, but I'd be just as transparent about our failures. I will eagerly give credit where credit is due, and with the same eagerness and candour, I will point out issues and discuss what needs to be improved.

When we faced tough situations, whether as a team or as an organisation, I would not leave them in the dark or feed them empty corporate speak. I would openly discuss what is happening and give them as much context as I can. By consistently staying true to transparent communication and treating people with respect regardless of their role or background, through both good times and difficult ones, I was able to earn their trust.

People need to know what their leaders stand for and that they can count on their consistent behaviour. Without clear values, leaders come across as unpredictable or opportunistic. This is not the type of person that you want to trust.

Your values shape who you hire and who actually thrives on your team. When I interview candidates, I'm not just looking at skills. I'm trying to understand what they value and whether we're compatible.

For example, if empowerment is central to how I manage, but I hire someone who prefers being told exactly what to do, we're going to clash. If I value transparency but bring on a manager who likes to "massage the message" when reporting up to leadership, that's a recipe for disaster. I've made these mistakes before, and the results were always regrettable.

Surrounding yourself with people who share similar values makes work not just more efficient, but honestly, more enjoyable.

This means that not everyone will be a perfect match, and that's okay.

Your Values Define Your Organisation

Values guide individuals, but more importantly, values shape entire organisations and their cultures.

Consider Jeff Bezos and the foundational value he built Amazon upon:

There are many ways to centre a business. You can be competitor-focused, product-focused, technology-focused, or business model-focused. In my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

Customer obsession, Amazon's most important value, is engraved in the very core of the company. It's not only a crucial part of their hiring process, but it also defines how they work on all levels of the organisation. Like the famous Working Backwards product development method, where every new product or feature must start from customer needs. Product Managers define features by writing Press Releases and FAQs for future users, rather than traditional Product Requirements Definitions. User is in the centre from the very first step.

This customer obsession created a unique culture in Amazon, dramatically different from, for example, Google, which traditionally put technology and engineers on a pedestal. Two different core values resulted in two entirely different companies.

Your Values Help You Scale

In my post on Teams' Autonomy, I've mentioned the importance of keeping teams aligned through a shared goal - a North Star. Leading through alignment and shared goals is an important aspect of making your teams autonomous and is absolutely critical when you scale your organisation.

When you're a startup with 10 people, everyone can be in the same room for important decisions. Leadership's vision and values are communicated directly. But what happens when you have 100 employees? 200? 1000?

You can't be in every room. You can't approve every decision. You can't personally guide every person. This is where most organisations break down. They either become bureaucratic bottlenecks with endless approval chains or they lose coherence and descend into chaos.

That's where values come in. As Amazon puts it, their leadership principles "help foster autonomous decision making as the company scales, and help leaders lead beyond their immediate line of sight".

In simple terms, a shared set of values allows leaders to make aligned decisions independently. When they understand and internalise the same set of principles, they will naturally align their thinking and their decisions with the organisation's values.

You cannot be in every meeting. But the values you set - and deliberately hire for - can be.