Five Insights From Mental Health to Inspire Organizational Values
By Philip Silva
Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash
Look, I get it.
Writing values statements for non-profit organizations can feel like one more exhausting hoop to jump through while writing a grant application or strategic plan. Does anyone even read these things? Do values even matter?
William F. Meehan III and Kim Starkey Jonker, writing in Engine of Impact: Essentials of Strategic Leadership in the Nonprofit Sector (2018), capture these doubts in three short sentences: “…these days, the values of many organizations are similar, if not the same. We’re all in favor of values like excellence, collaboration, diversity, and leadership. So why make a special point of it?” (p. 44).
In my experience, values statements have a lot to offer and it is worth making a special point of them, but there’s no denying that naming an organization’s values have become a routine chore to get through rather than a source of lasting insight and inspiration. To make values valuable again, here are five insights from mental health practice, a realm where values are often an essential therapeutic tool for thriving through life’s challenges.
First, values are not goals to be achieved or tasks to be crossed off your organization’s to-do list. Instead, Dr. Steven Hayes, one of the originators of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, urges us to think of values as adverbs: words that add a particular quality or spirit to our activities. An organization may feed people experiencing hunger, but does it do that work equitably, generously, or maybe even selectively? An organization may train electricians to install solar panels, but does it do so rigorously, accessibly, or, in some cases, rapidly? Although delivering hot meals or leading a workforce learning program are actions that come to an end eventually, the values that inform how organizations go about these tasks go on forever.
Second, values should inspire and inform our work under any circumstances. They tell us how we will show up in good times and bad. They keep us heading in the direction that matters most to us even when the road has twists and turns and unplanned detours. As Dr. Russ Harris writes in his classic self-help book, The Happiness Trap, “Values are your heart’s deepest desires for how you want to treat yourself and others and the world around you; personal qualities you want to bring into play in the things you say and do.” The same is true for organizations.
When I’ve led groups through a values-choosing exercise, I’ve asked participants to consider what it would look like to live out their values if: 1) Their budget was slashed to zero and the group was on the verge of insolvency; OR 2) If a sudden financial windfall made it possible for the group to expand its reach tenfold. The values that surface in either extreme are usually the ones that are most widely shared by all the participants and, as a result, they are the values that will be most useful for guiding an organization through almost any challenge it may face.
Third, true values should be freely chosen. They aren’t virtues, morals, or even statutory obligations, such as “good governance” or “fiscal transparency,” that set guardrails for how an organization must or should behave (essential though these may be). Instead, values should come from deep within the core of an organization’s collective self-identity. Dig through all the layers of explanations an organization may give for choosing this value or that value and ultimately you’ll come to a point where there are no rational reasons left. An organization chooses the values it chooses because those are the values that simply resonate the most with the spirit of the group.
This third insight can be particularly difficult to grasp in a society that values rational explanation above other ways of knowing and experiencing the world. It can feel like an overwhelming responsibility to freely choose a set of values instead of relying on a laundry list of “reasons why” to validate and justify our selection of values. Leaders may also feel anxiety about freely choosing values in a participatory process that includes a quorum of staff members if they believe values are meant to be etched in stone as soon as they’re selected. This leads to a fourth insight: values can–and probably should–change over time.
Organizations evolve. Staff members come and go. Funding prerogatives change from year to year. The world turns. Though values are, in and of themselves, timeless, their resonance with an organization will inevitably change as time goes by. Just as any individual should periodically step back and reconsider the values guiding their actions, organizations need to periodically revisit their list of core values and ask themselves, “Is this still true for us today?” If the answer is “no,” then it’s probably time to work on selecting new values to meet the moment.
Finally, values can contradict each other. Individuals can easily select a handful of values that may seem to cancel each other out (for example, I’ve repeatedly come back to both “freedom” and “security” as values that inform how I move through the world). According to the Internal Family Systems model of therapy, we are each made up of a mix of different “selves” with a complex mix of motivations and priorities. That’s ok. As Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I contain multitudes.”
The same is inevitably true of organizations, with their dynamic mix of leaders, external and internal stakeholders, staff members, and constituents. Pull all those people together into a single group and you’re bound to find values going off in divergent directions. And just like competing values held by individuals, that’s ok. Negotiating between contradictory values and finding ways to honor them all simultaneously can actually lead to a great deal of creativity, innovation, and new ways of working.
© 2025 Philip Silva