Values in research: privilege or necessity?

​The world is full of people who achieved high levels of ‘success’ in business, sport, wealth and other domains only to find this did not bring the happiness and satisfaction they sought.
 
Success in research is no different. My own experience on being awarded tenure, for example, was an immediate sense of relief after years of career insecurity, and of gratitude for the hard work of my team, followed by an unnerving feeling of ‘what now?’, when faced with the opposite extreme.

​However ironic this sounds, this is a remarkably common experience that needs its own solutions. The way I rationalise it today is that my craving for security and success had unconsciously taken over from the intrinsic motivations that brought me into research in the first place. So once I had all the security I could want, there was just emptiness.  Reconnecting with these underlying motivations, and the values they relate to, takes a while but that process is crucial.

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​Organisational psychologist Adam Grant writes: “Success is most rewarding when it serves the people and principles that matter to you”. Your values, in other words. Success when it comes feels hollow unless or until it is aligned with our deepest values.
 
But is a focus on values just a privilege of those lucky enough to have security? And what are values? How can we get crystal clear on ours, and, crucially, how can that help us in other career stages?

​Values are ours, and ours alone
Many of us, including me before seeing the work of Professor Steve Peters and his colleagues, would struggle to define what values are, and perhaps to name those that matter us most.
 
Peters defines a value as an ideal, or a moral guide to how we live. But that’s probably all everyone can agree on!
 
This is because everyone has different values, even if only slightly, and only we can define them. No-one else can tell us what they are. Many values have roots in early life – our family, our school days and our culture. Others are driven by major life experiences that help us identify our most intense likes or dislikes. They are deeply held beliefs about which behaviours we feel most comfortable or uncomfortable with. This explains why only we can define them – no-one else can tell us what makes us feel uncomfortable. Examples of values would include integrity, respect, honesty or fairness. Others could be reliability, hard work, compassion, generosity, loyalty, kindness or others. Only you can know which ones mean most to you and which specific events in your life have shaped this.

A workplace may, however, have a set of core values its leaders would like to see there. This makes sense because most teams work best when time and energy wasted on friction is minimal. Working with colleagues, and especially leaders, who have similar values to our own is much less stressful because it frees us up to be ourselves, leaving us more energy for moving towards our potential.

​How can we identify our values?
If no-one can tell us what our strongest values are, how can we know? How do we turn this abstract notion into identifying what really moves us?
 
The two definitions I like best are:

• Something that makes your toes curl when you see it being violated
• Something you would go out of your way to uphold, even if that goes against your own interests

 
If you squirm at seeing someone telling a lie, or treating a colleague unfairly, for example, or anything else that you simply cannot get out of your mind, maybe it’s time to check your toes! It could be a sign that they are violating one of your strongest values.

​An example of the second definition would be if you have ever resigned from a job because there is something you felt was deeply wrong there. Putting aside security for belief suggests a strong value underlying that decision somewhere.
 
In both cases, it is very worthwhile to define our values as clearly as possible because similar situations are certain to recur on other occasions and matter just as much to us.

​Trade-offs
The trade-off between security and success on the one hand, and values on the other, is everywhere. It could be a PI at a conference deciding between the mentoring lunch or joining a prestigious contact at a nearby restaurant, a postdoc choosing between training a student or pushing on with their own paper, or a student weighing up working in a lab that has published more ‘big’ papers or the one that has a better culture. Generic ‘right or wrong’ answers to these would be simplistic – all are very context dependent – but they do all need clarity on our values in order to decide.
 
Values can also conflict with one another. Loyalty and fairness is one very good example: it is impossible to be both loyal to our most immediate and trusted colleagues and fair to everyone when resources are finite. We have to decide which makes our toes curl more when someone goes against it. Hiring decisions are an obvious area where this gets particularly complicated.  

​What happens if we don’t live by them?
Having this kind of clarity about our values can be game changing in lowering stress. Do we instinctively opt for the ‘security and success’ option in a challenging situation, or are we prepared to sacrifice these for something we truly believe in so we can look in the mirror and smile?

You may find yourself trying to fit in with the culture around you, unconsciously replicating behaviour patterns you dislike in others. This usually leads to stress that will show up somewhere in our life, perhaps in comfort eating or late-night Netflix binging instead of switching off for the day, knowing we have lived it in a way we truly believe in.  
 
An occasion when I went against my own values was when I tried to finish a grant application on a family vacation. Quality time with my family, and in particular the mental wellbeing of everyone in it, matters hugely to me. However, the grant deadline was looming and, despite my best efforts to finish it earlier, the application wasn’t ready. I had a big decision to make – hold it back for the next round or plough ahead? The stress this action led to gave me a shock I really needed. I have never worked on holiday since and, where once I saw it as a sign of commitment in others, albeit with no expectation on my part, I now actively advise against it. If we don't feel we can leave our work behind for a week or two, something else is wrong.
 
And by the way, I didn’t even get the grant!

​Our values can change
The above example also illustrates how our values can change with life stage and new experiences. My thoughts about young people in the workplace, for example, have been deeply influenced by the experience of having young adult children myself, seeing close-up the challenges they face and how much they are still learning. Reading Sarah-Jane Blakemore's excellent explanation of how extensive human brain development continues into our late 20's has also influenced my values around this age group, especially around providing opportunities for personal and professional development. If I’m ever in doubt, I only have to think how I would like a line manager to treat my own children. 

​Other values can strengthen when we observe the consequences of them being violated. Most of us can probably think of some. And meeting people we admire, or dislike, as we go through life can also lead us to revise our values accordingly. It is useful to stop and review from time to time whether any of our values have shifted.

​Privilege or necessity?
So is choosing to live in line with our values in research a privilege of security or a necessity for us all?
 
There’s no doubt, as a tenured professor, that I can divert more attention from security to values than earlier in my career. Many life experiences have also helped clarify them for me. But even in those less secure days, if I had defined myself more by my values, and less by my achievements, I think it would have helped a lot. As every recipient of a grant or paper review knows, achievements are not entirely under our control, but being crystal clear on our values, and living by them, is.
 
No-one can pay their rent or feed their children on ‘good feeling’. But remembering our values does help stabilise our emotions and this saves energy that we can put to better use. Staying connected with our values does not have to be in conflict with achieving security and success. It can be a central part of it.