Personal Values and Strengths: Know What Drives You
When people understand what drives them, their values and their natural strengths, the impact on engagement, performance, and leadership is profound. Self-awareness is where sustainable change begins.
Self-Awareness at the Centre of Everything
Successful organisations invest in identifying the pre-existing talents and strengths of their employees, teams, and leaders. True leadership stems from a genuine understanding of personal values and strengths, both your own and those of the people around you.
Recognising and aligning with these core tenets enables leaders to navigate complex challenges with authenticity, inspire trust, and drive sustainable results. Our coaching approach places self-awareness at the centre. When people do what they do best and care most about, engagement, productivity, and initiative follow.
Understanding what drives you, and what drives others, is not a soft skill. It is one of the most practical and commercially significant capabilities a leader can develop.
What Self-Awareness Enables
- Authentic decision-making. When you understand your values you understand why you make the choices you do and can make them with greater confidence and consistency.
- Stronger relationships. Knowing what others value provides a stronger platform for understanding, influencing, and building trust at every level.
- Sustainable performance. People operating from their natural strengths are more engaged, more productive, and more likely to stay.
- Better leadership. Leaders who know themselves lead others more effectively. Self-awareness is the foundation of every other leadership capability.
- Cultural alignment. When values are understood at both individual and team level, they create a shared language for decision-making, feedback, and accountability.
When people do what they do best and care most about, everything changes. Engagement rises. Initiative increases. Conversations become more honest. The work feels more meaningful. This is not idealism. It is what the evidence consistently shows when values and strengths are understood and applied.
Personal Values
Values are deeply held beliefs that guide our choices, attitudes, and behaviours. They act as a compass, helping us navigate life's complexities and determine what is most meaningful and important to us. They are the core principles that provide direction and influence our sense of right and wrong.
Identifying your personal values is a powerful tool. Increased self-awareness of what matters most to you helps you understand how you act, why you make certain choices, and what motivations drive you. It also explains why you react more strongly to particular events and situations than others might.
Knowing what others value provides a stronger platform for understanding and influencing. It is critical in building effective relationships and in leadership at every level.
Real Deal Values Assessment
Based on research with more than 250,000 working professionals, the Real Deal process quickly and simply pinpoints what really makes you tick. It identifies the values, stressors, motivations, and priorities that shape how you think and act.
The CoachStation team have used this process with hundreds of employees, leaders, and clients since 2009. The 80-card facilitated activity creates genuine self-awareness and drives meaningful coaching conversations.
Why Values Matter in Organisations
Leaders and companies use values frameworks to transform the way their people relate, engage, and shape their culture. When values are understood at both an individual and team level, they create a shared language for decision-making, feedback, and accountability.
The Real Deal process includes several stages and a facilitated coaching discussion. The process itself is as important as the outcome. Insight without conversation rarely leads to lasting change.
How Values Can Be Your Secret Weapon at Work
From creativity to collaboration, to growth and generosity, we can easily name our values. But can we apply them in our day-to-day work? Listen to hear how to more effectively identify and apply values, and why it matters so much in the workplace.
Strengths
Understanding your inherent strengths is not just about self-awareness. It is about optimising performance, both personally and professionally. CliftonStrengths provides a scientifically-backed framework that illuminates the unique capabilities and talents each individual possesses.
As Tom Rath observes in StrengthsFinder 2.0, the aim of almost any learning program is to help us become who we are not. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to our shortcomings than to our strengths. A strengths-based approach challenges this directly and takes the path of least resistance instead.
When individuals leverage their innate strengths, they are more engaged, more productive, and more likely to contribute meaningfully to their teams. A strengths-based culture creates sustainable benefits for individuals and organisations alike.
13 Organisational Benefits of a Strengths-Based Approach
Improved Productivity
Working in areas of natural excellence drives higher output and more consistent results.
Increased Engagement
People using their strengths daily are more satisfied, more committed, and more loyal.
Enhanced Team Dynamics
Understanding strengths enables better collaboration and natural complementarity across teams.
Focused Development
Targeted growth aligned to what each person does best rather than fixing weaknesses.
Increased Morale
Recognised strengths build confidence and contribute to a more positive team environment.
Better Conflict Resolution
Strength awareness reveals root causes and opens complementary pathways to resolution.
Higher Retention
People stay where their unique talents are acknowledged, developed, and put to use.
Optimised Decision-Making
Aligning tasks and projects with team strengths produces consistently better outcomes.
Authentic Leadership
Strength-aware leaders build genuine trust and credibility with the people they lead.
Efficient Resource Allocation
Reduce unnecessary training by aligning roles to inherent strengths from the outset.
Increased Innovation
Diverse strength profiles foster varied approaches to problem-solving and creative thinking.
Enhanced Customer Service
Employees operating from their strengths provide better, more genuine client interactions.
Long-Term Growth
Strengths-based cultures build a sustainable growth trajectory that compounds over time.
The CliftonStrengths Domains
The four domains are a shortcut for making the most of the 34 CliftonStrengths themes. They answer the question: how do I make sense of where I am most powerful at a greater scale than my individual themes? Each domain illuminates a distinct way of contributing and leading.
Relationship Building
Adaptability · Connectedness · Developer · Empathy · Harmony · Includer · Individualization · Positivity · RelatorHow a person builds connections and forms deeply meaningful relationships. These themes are the essential glue that holds a team together. When teams need to be greater than the sum of their parts, they turn to Relationship Builders.
Executing
Achiever · Arranger · Belief · Consistency · Deliberative · Discipline · Focus · Responsibility · RestorativeWhat pushes an individual toward results. Motivational strengths that generate and focus energy to achieve and accomplish. When teams need to implement a solution, they look to people with Executing themes who turn ideas into action.
Strategic Thinking
Analytical · Context · Futuristic · Ideation · Input · Intellection · Learner · StrategicHow a person analyses the world. Strengths of perception, organisation, and information processing that help teams make better decisions, stretching thinking toward what could be possible in the future.
Influencing
Activator · Command · Communication · Competition · Maximizer · Self-Assurance · Significance · WooHow a person takes charge, speaks up, and makes things happen. People strong in Influencing themes help teams reach broader audiences, sell ideas, and drive others toward action and positive outcomes.
Most people have strengths across more than one domain. Understanding your dominant domain tells you not just what you are good at, but how you are wired to contribute, which is the insight that makes strengths-based coaching genuinely transformative rather than merely interesting.
Where Values and Strengths Connect
Emotional Intelligence
Values and emotional intelligence are deeply connected. When you understand what matters most to you and why you react the way you do, the ability to manage your responses and relate to others with empathy improves significantly. EI is how values show up in behaviour under pressure.
Explore Emotional Intelligence Accountability and ExpectationsREOWM Accountability Model
Values without accountability are intentions. The REOWM model gives leaders a practical framework for translating values-based leadership into clear expectations, observable behaviours, and consistent outcomes. Together they form the foundation of a high-trust team culture.
Explore REOWM
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about personal values, strengths-based development, and how CoachStation uses both to build more self-aware and effective leaders.
Values are deeply held beliefs that guide choices, attitudes, and behaviours. They act as a compass in decision-making and determine what is most meaningful and important to a person. For leaders, understanding their own values provides greater clarity about why they react strongly to certain situations, what drives their decisions, and where misalignment with their environment is creating friction or disengagement. Knowing what others value provides an equally important platform for understanding, influencing, and building the kind of relationships that make leadership effective rather than transactional.
The Real Deal Values process is a facilitated card-sorting activity based on research conducted using more than 250,000 working professionals. It uses 80 cards, each carrying a value-based word or phrase, and takes participants through a structured process of sorting and eliminating cards across multiple rounds until their primary and core values are identified. CoachStation has used this assessment with hundreds of employees, leaders, and clients since 2009. The process is as much about the coaching conversation it generates as it is about the outcome, creating genuine self-awareness rather than a label to put on a profile.
A talent is a naturally recurring pattern of thought, feeling, or behaviour. A strength is what that talent becomes when it is identified, developed, and applied deliberately. The CliftonStrengths framework, developed by Gallup and explored in StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath, is built on the principle that people develop most rapidly and perform most effectively when they build on what comes naturally rather than spending the majority of their effort correcting weaknesses. CoachStation's strengths programs help leaders identify their top themes and translate them into practical leadership behaviours.
The four domains are Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. Executing themes drive results and getting things done. Influencing themes enable leaders to take charge, speak up, and move others to action. Relationship Building themes create the connections and trust that hold teams together. Strategic Thinking themes help leaders absorb information, see patterns, and make better decisions about the future. Most people have a natural orientation toward one or two domains, and understanding where your strengths cluster helps you contribute more intentionally and collaborate more effectively.
Most development programs are built on the premise of identifying what someone cannot do and trying to close that gap. This is the path of most resistance. When people are working in areas where they have natural talent, they are more engaged, more productive, more confident, and more likely to take initiative. The strengths-based approach does not ignore weaknesses, but it recognises that the greatest return on development investment comes from building on what is already there rather than trying to fundamentally change what is not. Organisations that embed a strengths-based culture consistently see higher engagement, lower turnover, and stronger team performance.
The REOWM Accountability Model works best when the expectations being set are grounded in a clear understanding of personal values. Knowing what a team member values most shapes how expectations are framed, how feedback is given, and how accountability conversations land. A conversation about performance that connects to someone's own values is fundamentally different from one that imposes external standards alone. Values and accountability are not separate conversations. They are the same conversation at different depths.
Values and strengths work is embedded across CoachStation's individual coaching, team development, and leadership programs rather than treated as a standalone exercise. The Real Deal Values assessment and CliftonStrengths are used as starting points for deeper coaching conversations about self-awareness, motivation, and leadership identity. With 16 years of coaching experience and 30 years of leadership experience, CoachStation has conducted this work with hundreds of leaders and teams across many industries. Book a discovery call to explore how values and strengths work could support your development.
Ready to Explore Your Values and Strengths?
Whether you are working individually or with your team, CoachStation can guide you through the process. A values and strengths-based approach makes a measurable difference to how people lead, engage, and perform.
