Values-driven leadership: leading when values collide
Values-driven leadership starts where values collide. What a Dutch town hall case teaches about workplace polarisation and the story behind a viewpoint.
In the Dutch municipality of Brummen, the council, executive and civil servants spent 2024 and 2025 preparing a reception centre for 350 asylum seekers, and for a long time a broad majority seemed to support the plan. When the national mood shifted and unrest in the village grew, the division walked straight into the town hall: indignation arose within the civil service itself. The same employee who spent the day drafting the policy advice was confronted about his employer's decisions by a neighbour that evening.
Values-driven leadership is the ability to lead in such a situation by addressing what is actually at play: not the positions people take, but the values and experiences those positions grow from. A leader who can do that does not need to smooth over disagreement. She makes sure colleagues keep seeing each other as people with a story, rather than as supporters or opponents.
Why is this a leadership question right now?
The Brummen case was described this month by the University of Twente on Binnenlands Bestuur, and its core reaches well beyond asylum policy or the public sector. Sooner or later every organisation imports a topic society is divided about: a reorganisation, a merger, the use of AI, a client not everyone wants to work for. The authors describe what happens when the opposition hardens. Colleagues become more hesitant to speak up, seek confirmation among the like-minded or withdraw from conversations altogether, and in the worst case the cooperation between the workforce, management and the board comes under strain.
For a leader that is a double loss. The atmosphere suffers, but so does the quality of the work: it is precisely on sensitive issues that an organisation needs its different perspectives to reach a sound judgement. People who go quiet to protect themselves take their knowledge and their doubts into that silence. The advice that lands on the table afterwards is poorer than it could have been.
What actually collides when values collide?
The phrase values conflict suggests two people facing each other with irreconcilable convictions. The values research of social psychologist Shalom Schwartz shows something more precise. Values such as security, tradition, self-direction and care for others are present in almost everyone; people differ mainly in how they rank them, and the values sit in predictable tension with one another. Someone who gives priority to security and preservation will experience friction with someone who gives priority to change and openness, and the other way around (Schwartz, 2012).
That insight changes how a heated conversation looks. The colleague worried about the reception centre is not necessarily hard-hearted; he may be giving priority to safety and to the liveability of his street. The colleague arguing for reception is not naive; she is giving priority to care for people in need. Both draw on values the other knows as well, just in a different order. A position is the outside. The value beneath it is where conversation becomes possible.
Why a code of conduct does not replace the conversation
The reflex of many organisations under tension is an agreement on paper: a code of conduct, a guideline on political expression, a protocol for sensitive files. Such frameworks have their value, because they mark the line between personal opinion and professional role. A civil servant can privately disagree with a decision and still contribute to it professionally; the University of Twente researchers explicitly name that role distinction as something to hold on to.
But a framework does not answer the question that really matters between colleagues: do you understand why this weighs on me? That question is only answered in a conversation in which someone can tell their story. If you hear that your colleague's worries go back to what happened in his own neighbourhood, you do not have to agree with him to keep trusting him. Acknowledging the story is not the same as endorsing the position, and exactly that distinction keeps a team workable.
How does a leader hear what lies beneath a position?
This is where values-driven leadership becomes concrete work, and it starts close to home: with the leader herself. If you do not know your own values and your own sensitivities, a heated meeting mostly sounds like a threat to your position. That is why we wrote earlier that leadership development begins with your own story: only those who know where their own judgement comes from can set it aside for a moment to understand someone else.
After that, it calls for a different kind of question in the team meeting. Not "what do you think of it", because that question produces positions, and positions harden. Rather: "what have you experienced that gives this topic its weight for you?" An employee who tells about the evening he was confronted at his sports club about his work gives his colleagues something a statement never gives: an experience to step into. In the practice of values sessions we see the same thing happen time and again. Once experiences are on the table, the tension drops, because people discover that opposing positions often rest on shared values: nearly everyone turns out to worry about the same community.
A leader who makes that shared layer visible can then build on it. A team that knows which values it shares can carry out a decision not everyone agrees with, because a connecting story carries more weight than a compromise. That story does not appear by itself; it needs a leader who organises the conversation before the camps have formed.
What can you do this week?
Watch for the signals the researchers name: conversations turning personal, fixed camps taking shape, colleagues starting to avoid topics or each other. These are not matters of atmosphere but early signs that the undercurrent of your team is shifting.
And organise the conversation while it is still possible. Do not pick the charged topic as your first exercise; start with the values themselves. In your next meeting, try asking not for opinions but for the experience behind someone's commitment to this work. The leader who knows the stories of her people before things get tense has built something no code of conduct can match.
Which value of your most critical colleague do you not yet know? That conversation is a good place to start.
Frequently asked questions
Values-driven leadership means leading from insight into the values that lie beneath behaviour and positions, in yourself and in your people. Instead of steering on opinions or rules of conduct, a values-driven leader makes visible which motives carry a position, so colleagues can keep understanding each other even when they disagree.
Start before the camps form. Do not ask for positions but for the experience that gives a topic its weight for someone, and name the values behind opposing positions. Acknowledging someone's story is not the same as endorsing their position; that distinction keeps the cooperation workable.
No. The goal of a values conversation is not consensus but understanding. Research on workplace polarisation shows that different perspectives actually improve the quality of decisions, as long as substantive differences do not degenerate into personal opposition and distrust.
Values are abstract until someone tells you where they come from. A story about a concrete experience makes tangible why a value weighs heavily for someone, and gives colleagues something to step into. That is why NarraTyx uses the personal story as the starting point of every values conversation.
Sources
- Universiteit Twente | Deeltijdonderwijs (2026). Als de discussie over een azc het gemeentehuis binnenkomt [When the debate about an asylum centre enters the town hall]. Binnenlands Bestuur, 17 August 2026. https://www.binnenlandsbestuur.nl/carriere/universiteit-twente-or-deeltijdonderwijs/als-de-discussie-over-een-azc-het-gemeentehuis-binnenkomt
- Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116
