You say leadership matters to you, but you're not sure if that's actually true or if you're repeating something you've heard in job interviews and business podcasts. Or you've pursued leadership roles and felt hollow in them, wondering if you were chasing someone else's script.
Who This Is For (and Who It Is Not)
This is for someone who has held leadership positions, been offered them, or aspires to them, but feels uncertain whether it's a genuine pull or an assumption. You might be in a role where you manage people and the responsibility exhausts you in ways you can't quite name. Or you're considering a promotion and something inside is resisting, even though the career logic is clear. This page is for you if you're willing to question whether leadership belongs on your actual values list.
This is not for someone who is certain they love leading. If you energize other people, make their work matter, feel alive in that responsibility, and would actively choose it even if the title and money disappeared, you already know. You don't need this.
This is also not for someone who simply doesn't care about the question. If leadership has never interested you and you're not facing pressure about it, your time is better spent elsewhere.
What You Will Discover
Shalom Schwartz's research across 80+ countries identified ten universal value types that show up in human motivation everywhere. The framework is structured circularly, which matters: values adjacent to each other are compatible and reinforce each other, while values opposite to each other are in genuine tension. Leadership, in Schwartz's model, clusters with power and achievement, which sit opposite values like benevolence and universalism. Once you see this structure, you stop asking "should I value leadership?" and start asking "what am I actually trading when I choose leadership over what opposes it?"
You will likely find that what you thought was ambivalence about leadership is actually clarity about a different value that matters more. You might discover that you want influence or impact, which live in different neighborhoods of the values circle than leadership does. Or you might realize that leadership is real for you, but only in specific contexts, with specific kinds of people, at specific points in your life. That distinction changes everything about how you make decisions.
Common Reasons People Wait
The first hesitation: you worry that admitting leadership is not a core value will limit your career or make you look less ambitious. This is reasonable. Career advancement often demands it, and you're right that the world rewards people who pursue leadership visibly. What changes when you know the truth is that you can make conscious trade-offs instead of unconscious ones. You can choose a leadership path if you want the outcomes it provides, fully aware of what you're prioritizing over. Or you can stop performing ambition and build a career around what actually energizes you, which often leads to better work anyway.
The second hesitation: you're not sure leadership counts as a value at all, or you think it should come naturally to you by now. Leadership is not abstract or fuzzy. It's a concrete orientation toward influence, power, and directing others, and it's not equally important to everyone. Schwartz's research shows this variation is normal, not a personal failure. Some people lead naturally. Some don't. The question is which category you actually fall into, not which category you think you should be in.
The third hesitation: you think this assessment will reveal something uncomfortable about yourself, and you're not ready to act on it. This is worth sitting with honestly. If you discover that leadership is not your core value but you're currently in a leadership role, that creates real complexity. But you're already experiencing that complexity. The assessment just names it. Naming it is the only path to choosing what you actually want instead of what you defaulted into.
The My Values career assessment surfaces your actual values, ranks them, and shows you exactly where your current life aligns with them and where it doesn't.
Is it bad if leadership is not one of my core values?
No. Schwartz's research shows that people vary in what matters to them across every value type. Not valuing leadership is not a limitation, it's information. The problem only exists if you're in a leadership role despite it not being core to you and you haven't acknowledged that trade-off.
What if I want influence but not a formal leadership title?
That distinction is crucial. Influence, impact, and power are not the same as leadership. You might value shaping outcomes without managing people, which lives in a different part of the values circle. The assessment helps you identify what you actually care about instead of conflating leadership with all forms of impact.
Can my values change, or am I stuck with what this shows?
Values can shift with life stage and major experience, but Schwartz's research shows they're more stable than preferences or moods. What matters more is understanding what your values are right now, in this phase of your life, and making decisions aligned with that truth rather than assuming you'll change.
How is this different from just thinking about it on my own?
Thinking on your own is useful but incomplete. You have built-in blind spots about what you actually value versus what you think you should value. The assessment puts your values in front of you ranked and contrasted, which makes the real tensions visible in a way private reflection often misses.