Whose Values? Wrong Question.

Churchill Fellow 2025. Four different answers, from four excellent leaders, and what actually predicts who holds up.

Leadership you don't need to recover from starts with a question everyone in this field asks eventually, and almost nobody answers the same way twice.

My central research question throughout my Churchill fellowship was what helps social workers stay aligned to their professional values as they move into and through leadership. I worded it that way deliberately, professional values, and I assumed that framing was basically settled before I'd asked a single question. It wasn't.

At my second field interview Mollie Warren, Director of Family & Children's Services, Boulder County, Colorado, challenged my statement about professional values. She'd been turning the question over all weekend. "I keep thinking about whose values we are actually talking about," she said. So I started asking that question in many of the conversations that followed.

I got nine different answers across fifteen conversations. Personal values. The code of ethics. The organisation's values. The values of the leader above you. Spiritual and cultural values. Societal and political values. Some negotiation between all of them, depending on the conditions you're in.

My job was never to find the right answer among those nine. It was to contest my own idea that there was one.

What I heard, and what it actually pointed to

Mary Kennedy, Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, put one version of the answer as plainly as anyone: social justice, she told me, is not a module in social work education. It's our professional identity. Wherever a social worker goes, their job is to ask whether what's happening is fair, equitable, and just.

Karen Goodenough, PhD, MSW, LGSW, at NASW Minnesota, anchored a different version in the profession's own formal standard: "The code of ethics does not require you to stay and fight. It requires you to do your best with the power you have."

And Áine Morrison, Chief Social Worker for Northern Ireland, named a third, though it takes a little unpacking to see why it's actually different from the first two. Áine gave a six-point framework - value base, communication and relationships, human rights, legal training, anti-oppressive practice, and relationship-based practice, and then named the thread running through all six - our social justice expertise. Not one value among several. The connective tissue the rest is woven from. Her answer wasn't "here is my value," it was something like here is the thing that makes every other part of leadership cohere at all.

And that fourth answer came from Mollie Warren. Her own values are genuinely personal and political, radical family preservation, minimising unnecessary system involvement, an explicit goal of substantially reducing intervention, and she was clear these came from lived conviction rather than professional training.

What made her answer more interesting than a simple fourth category was her own hesitation about it. She caught herself mid-thought, wanting every member of her team to share her value alignment, then immediately pulled back: "I don't think I could just say I want everyone working for me to have the same values I do." She landed instead on a distinction between something like non-negotiable field-level values and more individual conviction, resisting the temptation to simply mandate her own politics as policy. That's a leader actively contesting her own certainty in real time, which is a more honest answer than a clean fourth category would have been.

Four genuinely different answers, from four people I'd call excellent leaders without hesitation. Here's the logic worth considering: if this question had one correct answer, at least three of these four would have to be wrong, since they don't agree with each other. I don't think any of them are. Which means the question itself, asked as if it has a single right answer, is the thing that's broken, not any of their answers to it.

The reframe

Here's where I've landed, and it runs against the grain of most leadership advice on this: it doesn't matter as much as we think which value set a leader centres. What predicts whether someone holds up under real pressure is whether they made a conscious, deliberate choice about it, rather than defaulting to whatever was loudest in the room, and whether they have somewhere to test that choice honestly when the pressure actually arrives.

I saw this play out at an organisational level too, not just an individual one. Juha Kahila told me when he was CEO at the Finnish Youth Housing Association, he stood by his values. They declined tenders they couldn't fulfil with genuine integrity, even under real financial pressure. That's not a values statement on a website. That's a deliberate choice, tested repeatedly against real money on the table, not assumed to hold just because it was written down once.

But an organisation testing its values against a balance sheet is only half the picture. The other half is personal, and it's where I think the room with no boss in it actually earns its place in this argument. I wrote recently about that idea, a confidential, protected space entirely outside line management, and it turned out to be one of the most consistently validated findings across the whole fellowship. I think it's also where the values question actually gets considered best. A value set you've never had to defend out loud, to someone with nothing at stake in your answer, isn't a deliberate choice yet. It's a preference you haven't tested, and this is where you could go to test it.

Mollie Warren confirmed this, later in the same conversation, when I asked her directly where she goes for support. "I have a tremendous community of people involved in this work, but outside my own county," she told me. "It's made a world of difference." A peer community, people doing the same work elsewhere, meeting regularly, with no reporting relationship to her at all.

What it costs, and what it produces

Tiffany Ramos, LCSW, Division Manager for Children, Adult & Family Services in Broomfield County, Colorado, told me directly what the cost of leading this way has actually looked like for her: "Sometimes the cost is you're not always chosen. It's cost me promotion opportunities. It's cost me feeling like my heart's broken, because then I question if I'm doing the right thing."

That's the part leadership content usually skips. A deliberate values choice isn't free just because it's the right one. It can cost you the promotion, and it can cost you the certainty that you made the right call.

It also produced something concrete. Two years before we spoke, Broomfield was losing roughly six of twenty caseworkers a year. Since deliberately realigning practice with staff values, they've had one departure in two years. That's not a soft outcome. That's a retention result, the kind a finance team could actually notice.

What the research adds

This isn't just a fieldwork impression. A 2025 systematic review of leader-follower value congruence makes a distinction worth considering: most of what gets measured, and most of what leaders themselves rely on, is perceived congruence, a self-reported, felt sense that your values line up with the people and systems around you. Actual congruence, a genuine, tested comparison rather than a felt one, is described in the same review as more reliable and considerably underused. That's the academic version of what I heard in the field: most people are running on the felt version of their values, not the tested one, because they've never had anywhere to genuinely test it.

Schwartz's Value Theory, one of the most replicated frameworks in the values literature, backs up why this matters so much: values function as dynamic guiding principles shaping perception and decision-making across contexts, not fixed preferences that just sit there quietly until needed. A value you haven't examined doesn't stay neutral under pressure. It just becomes whatever the pressure shapes it into.

A 2026 Harvard Business Review piece on authentic leadership under pressure found something consistent with both: leaders who explicitly named their trade-offs, anchored openly in specific values, navigated volatile conditions more effectively than leaders who left those trade-offs implicit. Naming it, out loud, to someone, appears to be doing real work.

What this means practically

I think you could stop asking yourself which values are the right ones to lead from and start asking whether you've actually chosen, on purpose, rather than absorbed by default, and whether you have somewhere to say that choice out loud before you're tested on it, not after.

If you don't have that space yet, that's the more urgent gap. Not the values themselves.

Whose values are you leading from, and have you actually tested that answer with anyone, or just felt your way to it?

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