The System and Culture of Academic Decision Making 41
personal characteristics and expertise, on context and culture, and on authority
and power, whether formal or otherwise, that they resist easy appropriation for use
in other settings. Yet many features of the leadership relationship lend themselves
to translation into methods of strategic decision making. Aspects of leadership can
be taught and learned if we can find the right conceptual framework with which
to interpret and apply them.
To locate those features of leadership, we need to shift our intellectual gears
toward the conceptual model of human agency, and to values as patterns and
norms of self-enactment. The word “values” itself is slippery and is used to refer to
many things, including opinions on controversial moral questions or, at another
pole of usage, personal preferences. I intend a different yet common meaning.
As persons, as agents of our own lives, we make choices in the name of centered
values, in spite of the continuous change and conflict in the values that we hold.
Even though we are not always conscious of our values as the standards of our
choices, we can easily find them by asking a basic question that comes in many
forms. To locate our values, we must ask ourselves: what matters decisively to us as
we give shape to our lives and form to our experience? We can block this question
from our thoughts, but not our lives.
Values provide the standards of choice that guide individuals, organizations,
and communities toward satisfaction, fulfillment, and meaning (Morrill 1980). As
a consequence, they have critical importance for both understanding and practic-
ing relational leadership. Although values may seem to be abstractions because
we often use abstract terms to name them, they are inescapably immersed in the
choices we make and the lives we lead, more gerunds than nouns. Whether august
values such as liberty and equality, or more earthy pursuits like ambition and sta-
tus, they orient and shape our thinking, feeling, and acting. Our values are both
expressed in and influenced by what we believe, feel, and do. We find them in the
ways that we push ourselves this way and that, in bestirring ourselves to have more
of whatever attracts us, whether love, justice, knowledge, pleasure, wealth, or
reputation. We know them as claims on us, as sources of authority over us, as well
as forms of desire and aspiration. Each type of value, whether moral, intellectual,
aesthetic, personal, or professional, has its own weight and texture, but as a value
it both attracts and judges us. No matter how we touch the life of a person or of
an organization, we find values as demands and goals. In real life they do not fall
easily into neat hierarchies, as much as we wish they would, for we both wisely
and unwisely shift our values in different situations.
Respect as a Value
A quick example may help to illustrate these points. Consider a value such as
respect for others, a pattern of comportment that many would see as central to
leadership. As a value, respect is the activity of respecting, so it is a form of agency.
It is a specific pattern of valuing another person as an end in him- or herself.
Respect as a value involves a pattern of choice and action that determines how