This blog is an exploration, not a manifesto. It marks an initial step in my ongoing inquiry into the role of values within the broader idea of a leadership field. It's not my intention to add yet another normative leadership model to the growing pile, but rather to explore what happens when we stop treating values as individual beliefs and begin to see them as something that takes shape and comes alive in relationship, in the field in which leadership emerges.

In an earlier blog [LINK TO BLOG], where I reflect on why I am drawn to the concept of a leadership field and to creating this website, I refer several times to values-driven leadership. That is a somewhat risky move. These days there are well over a hundred leadership labels built around a qualifying adjective: servant leadership, authentic leadership, transformational leadership, and the list goes on. Still, I use the term deliberately, because part of my inquiry concerns the rather superficial way in which we tend to work with the notion of values. It's not that we have wrong intentions, but we don’t seem to really know how to work with values, let alone the role paying attention to values actually plays in leadership.

In an earlier blog, where I reflect on why I am drawn to the concept of a leadership field and to creating this website, I refer several times to values-driven leadership. That is a somewhat risky move. By now, there are well over a hundred leadership labels built around a qualifying adjective: servant leadership, authentic leadership, transformational leadership and so on. Still, I use the term deliberately, because part of my inquiry concerns the rather superficial way in which we tend to work with the notion of values. Not out of bad intent, but because we don’t seem to know very well how to work with values. Let alone what role attention to values actually plays in leadership.

Almost every list of organizational values I have encountered over the years consists of words that are nearly impossible to disagree with. And that is precisely the problem. Values lose their meaning when they function only as consensus language, as words on a wall or slides in a presentation, rather than as living reference points for behavior and decision-making.

I understand why this happens. Working with values is not easy. Values are slow, deeply rooted, and difficult to “train”, especially in adults. The development of values is primarily a reflective process, not a performative one. Values come alive only when they are lived, not when they are taught. They call for a systemic approach rather than an individual development trajectory.

Most organizations lack both the structures and the patience required for the deeper work needed to not only activate values once, but to keep them alive and relevant over time. Perhaps even more importantly, values can be confronting. They can be used to question existing power relations, cultural patterns, or strategic choices and that makes them uncomfortable territory.

And yet, Gary Yukl (2012) identifies values as the fifth function of leadership. As I understand his description of this function, it operates above and through and under the four first four functions.  My working hypothesis is that a re-orientation toward leadership, by paying closer attention to the field in which leadership can thrive, makes it possible to position values in a more fundamental and integrated manner.

A leadership field points toward a collective process, in which values can become more than well-intended words in a vision statement, model, or chart. Values come to life between people, not within individuals. That makes them harder to transmit, but far more powerful when that process truly takes hold and is sustained.

Values as Field Forces: Reframing Yukl’s Fifth Leadership Function

In traditional leadership theory, the value-based function is often understood as the leader’s ability to articulate a vision, model ethical behavior, and inspire commitment to shared ideals. Gary Yukl describes this as the leader’s role in providing moral direction and expressing and upholding the values that guide collective action. Yet when leadership is approached as something that unfolds in a field, a wider and more systemic interpretation becomes possible. Values are no longer merely personal principles or organizational slogans; they become structural forces within the social field that shape the conditions for leadership to arise.

Values as Attractors in the Leadership Field

A field perspective shifts the focus from individual leaders to the relational space between people, the patterns of interaction, meaning-making, and possibilities that are continuously emerging. In such a field, values function as attractors: they orient attention, stabilize expectations, and invite certain forms of behavior while discouraging others. A value such as “care,” “transparency,” or “stewardship” is not simply a belief held by a leader but a pattern of coherence that can be felt across the system.

Seen this way, Yukl’s value-based function is not just a matter of ethical leadership; it speaks to the internal grammar of how a leadership field organizes itself. Values provide the directional pull that allows leadership to emerge as a distributed, relational phenomenon rather than a personal act of influence.

Stabilizing the Field Through Shared Purpose

Strong leadership fields are characterized by a sense of groundedness: individuals understand why they are here, what matters, and what the work is ultimately serving. Values play a stabilizing role by offering a shared foundation for decision-making and cooperation. In Bourdieu’s terms, they become part of the habitus of the field. An embodied, taken-for-granted sense of “how things are done around here.”

This stability is not static. It is dynamic and responsive, allowing the field to maintain coherence in the face of complexity. Wheatley’s work on self-organizing systems suggests that coherence always arises around simple, generative principles; in leadership fields, values provide precisely that role. They help the system stay oriented even when no single individual is directing the action.

How the Field Amplifies or Obscures Values

Every leadership field transmits values, whether intentionally or not. Some fields amplify fear, competition, or status; others amplify curiosity, kindness, or learning. These values are carried not only by explicit statements but through micro-interactions, narratives, rituals, power relations, and emotional climate. A field marked by distrust will reinforce behaviors that protect individual interests. A field marked by openness will invite contributions that serve the whole.

From this perspective, the value-based leadership function is always active. The real question is whether it operates consciously. Leaders cannot avoid shaping the value-dynamics of the field; they can only choose whether to do so intentionally. Their responsibility becomes one of field modulation: tuning the relational space so that the values most aligned with the system’s deeper purpose can emerge and take root.

Values as the Mechanism for Coordinated Action

One of the limitations of traditional leadership theory is its difficulty explaining how values translate into collective behavior. A field view provides a clearer mechanism. Values create attractor states that guide sensemaking; shared sensemaking guides coordinated action; coordinated action becomes culture. Bateson would describe this as the emergence of “patterns that connect", recurring forms of interaction that reveal the deeper logic of the system. In this way, values act as the connective tissue of the leadership field, enabling individuals to move together without relying solely on hierarchy or control.

The Leader’s Role: Cultivating the Quality of the Field

Integrating Yukl’s fifth function with a field perspective reframes what leaders actually do. Rather than being visionaries who motivate followers through charisma or moral exhortation, leaders become stewards of the field’s integrity. Their task is to cultivate the ethical, aesthetic, and relational qualities that support the emergence of healthy, adaptive, and meaningful forms of leadership.

This involves curating spaces where shared purpose can become felt, modeling values in ways that resonate across the field (“walking the talk”), holding tensions and polarities without collapse, creating conditions that invite collective wisdom and acting with awareness of how every gesture affects the field.

In Scharmer’s language, this is the practice of “holding the social field.” In Torbert’s terms, it reflects later-stage action logics that combine self-awareness with systemic sensitivity. It is leadership as ecological participation rather than positional authority.

Conclusion: Values as the Ground of an Emergent Leadership Ecology

When leadership is understood as unfolding in a field, values become the field’s organizing forces, the invisible architecture through which leadership emerges as a relational and systemic phenomenon. Yukl’s value-based function, seen through this lens, is not just one category among others but a foundational dynamic that shapes the entire leadership ecology.

Values are what give the field coherence, integrity, and direction. They are the ethical and energetic infrastructure of collective action. To work with the leadership field, then, is necessarily to work with values, not as abstract ideals but as living, generative forces within the relational fabric of an organization.

In the blogs that follow, I hope to continue to explore how values behave within leadership fields: when they are amplified, when they flatten out, and which conditions allow them to remain alive. Not from the assumption that values are fully controllable or designable, but from the question of how attention to the field in which leadership unfolds can create space for values to become genuinely operative.