From WHY to Values
How Joop van Waas helps leaders and organizations understand what’s really going on.
In organizations, people often talk about strategy, structure, and performance. These are visible and measurable aspects of how an organization functions. Yet coach and organizational consultant Joop van Waas observes that fundamental change usually doesn’t start with what’s visible, but with what lies beneath. Behind behavior lie motivations. Behind collaboration lie values. And behind many tensions in organizations lies a way of viewing the world that people themselves don’t always realize.
“In my coaching, I focus primarily on this: if you’re getting an undesirable result, what do you need to do differently to achieve the desired result?” he says. “That brings you to your commitment, to what you find important, to your purpose. Why are you here? Or, as Richard Strozzi asked him when he was working out his commitment/purpose: Why are you on this earth walk? In other words, what are you here for? Then you move on to your values: how do you view the world? What does that mean for your attitude? And what kind of behavior stems from that?”
That movement—from results back to attitude, values, and meaning—forms the core of his work. In doing so, Joop combines various perspectives: Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, Spiral Dynamics, the ValueMatch assessments, Wouter Hart’s rethinking of purpose, the lived world, and the systemic world, and the body awareness from his “embodied leadership” training at the Strozzi Institute. For him, these approaches are not separate from one another; rather, they reinforce each other.
The Golden Circle as a starting point
An important starting point in Joop’s work is the Golden Circle. At its core, it is a simple model with three questions: why, how, and what. The why concerns the deeper motivation or reason for being. The how concerns the way you do something, and thus also how you collaborate. The what concerns what you actually do: the activities, products, or observable behavior.
Many people are familiar with the Golden Circle primarily from marketing or strategy. Joop uses the model differently. For him, it’s a way to bring people back to their own inner world. “The essence is that you must always reason from the inside out first,” he says. “First, answer the ‘why’ question: WHY am I here? What do I find important? The ‘how’ is about HOW you do it, and that is very often forgotten.”
It is precisely at this point that Joop makes the connection to organizations. An organization may have a clear mission and deliver quite good products, but if the culture isn’t right, things will still go awry. The how is then not just an intermediate layer, but the practical expression of the organization’s operating environment. He therefore calls culture the ‘lubricant of the organization.’ According to him, if you don’t understand that layer, organizations get stuck, even when the strategy on paper is sound.
How Joop links the Golden Circle to Spiral Dynamics
For Joop, the Golden Circle only becomes truly powerful when he connects it to Spiral Dynamics and the ValueMatch assessments. He does this in both individual coaching and with teams and organizations. The Golden Circle helps open the conversation: what drives someone, what is their intention, and why does certain behavior make sense? But to understand more deeply where that comes from, he uses the values profile.
According to Joop, values are at the core of what drives us. They determine not only what we consider important, but also how we perceive things. And it is precisely that way of perceiving things that, in turn, influences our attitude and behavior. “Your motivation, your attitude, determines to a very large extent what you can see, what you can perceive,” he says. “So everyone has a different reality.”
This also clarifies how he connects the Golden Circle and Spiral Dynamics. A person’s why is often linked to their deeper values. The how becomes visible in the attitude with which someone collaborates, leads, or reacts under pressure. And the what is reflected in behavior and results. The ValueMatch values assessment makes the why concrete. It shows which values a person uses most strongly, which values emerge under pressure, and what development is taking shape. As a result, the combination of the Golden Circle and the ValueMatch assessments not only facilitates a conversation about a person’s purpose or essence, but this combination is also a tool for understanding patterns.
Why Spiral Dynamics and ValueMatch in particular
Joop has used various models throughout his career, but he consciously chooses Spiral Dynamics and ValueMatch. Not because other models have nothing to offer, but because, in his own words, this combination gives him the most guidance in conversations with people.
“I choose Spiral Dynamics and ValueMatch because the reports they generate simply provide a great deal of guidance for engaging in conversation with one another,” he says. “When I have the personal values profile, I really go through it thoroughly. Two hours, just the two of us. Then I look at the questions together with the person: what does this actually say, do you recognize it, and how does that manifest itself?”
For him, that’s a fundamental difference from many other models. He notices that people recognize the reports, that they can put them into their own words, and that this leads to a genuine conversation. Not about an abstract label, but about how someone reacts, what resonates with them, and where there’s tension. “The reports from ValueMatch and the way you can use them to guide the conversation really resonate with people. That opens up great opportunities for discussion; with other theories, I often find it feels contrived.”
Moreover, the assessments align with Joop’s coaching style. He doesn’t try to tell people who they are, but rather to make them aware of what is already visible. Often, he believes, someone already knows the answer, but it’s hidden somewhere in their clever subconscious. His job is then to bring that to the surface—in other words, to gain insight into your unconscious and HOW it influences your attitude and behavior, particularly through automatic thoughts. A values profile helps with this, because it puts into words something people often already feel but cannot yet articulate.
Working with three assessments
In his coaching, Joop usually uses not one, but three assessments side by side: the values assessment, the change assessment, and the culture assessment. Together, he believes, they provide a more complete picture of the person and the context in which they operate. “In coaching, I have people complete all three profiles,” he says. “What is the personal profile? Where are you in your development, and what is the cultural profile? And then you look: what is the difference between your personal profile and the culture in the organization where you work? What mismatch exists?”
This often yields immediate insights. Sometimes it turns out that someone is working in a place that doesn’t really align with their deeper motivations. In such cases, Joop doesn’t hesitate to ask the confrontational question whether someone is in a position to make the most of their potential. In some instances, he then helps people take the step toward a different organization or a different role.
The Change Assessment
In addition to the values assessment, the change assessment plays an important role in Joop’s work. While the values assessment reveals what drives someone, the change assessment provides insight into where someone is in their development. “Then you look: where are you now, and what’s in motion?” he explains. He uses it to reveal whether someone is in a phase of stability or, conversely, in a period of tension and change. That helps to better understand behavior: someone under pressure often reacts differently than someone who is in balance. At the same time, the assessment shows which direction is emerging. Change thus becomes not an abstract idea, but something concrete and recognizable. It puts into words what people often already feel but cannot yet articulate well, and makes it possible to work with it more effectively in coaching and leadership.
Joop also links the change assessment to a broader vision of development. He explains to people that development is not linear and that you cannot skip stages. “You have to live through all those values; you can’t skip any,” he says. “You fall back occasionally, and that’s perfectly fine. You can be aware of that.” For him, the change assessment helps make that movement visible: what is emerging, where does someone fall back, and what does this phase of their life or work require?
The culture assessment
Joop uses the culture assessment to map out the work environment. Not with the idea that culture can be changed quickly, but to understand how someone relates to that environment and how you can be effective within it. He explains culture as the company’s operating environment: that which largely determines how people interact with one another, how decisions are made, and what does or does not work in practice.
According to Joop, many organizations underestimate this aspect. They think in terms of systems, structures, and formal agreements, while true effectiveness often lies precisely in the lived environment. That is why he uses the culture assessment not only in organizations when working with teams, but also in individual coaching: to see whether the culture in which someone works aligns with that person’s personal values. The mismatch between the two often reveals why someone experiences friction.
Making values visible in teams
Joop uses the assessments not only individually but also in teams. In doing so, he works, for example, with mats in the different colors of the values systems.
People literally stand in the spot that feels right to them based on the assessment results, and then explain to each other why. This makes the differences between them immediately visible. “That provides a lot of insight into why people might clash with one another,” he says. Because he has gone over the personal profiles individually with people beforehand, they are then much more likely to engage in a genuine conversation with one another.
He also uses the ValueGame—a joint development by Joop’s former consulting firm Perficio and ValueMatch—to facilitate discussions about values within teams. In doing so, he takes the discussion out of the theoretical realm and brings it into everyday practice: how do we view each other, what values do we recognize in the team, where do clashes arise, and what does that require of us? Instead of a personal conflict, tension then becomes something that can be explored together.
One example he cites is a team where family turned out to be the top priority for everyone, even though no one knew that about each other. When that became apparent, a lot of emotion was released. Irritations—such as someone who was often late—suddenly took on a different meaning once the home situation behind it became clear. The team was then able to make different agreements. For Joop, this is a good example of how values and worldview shape collaboration—often much more than people realize—and how transparency about these deeper values leads to improved collaboration.
Body, Emotion, and Language
What makes Joop’s approach unique is that he doesn’t rely solely on thinking and analysis. Drawing from his training at the Strozzi Institute, body awareness plays a prominent role in his coaching. He sums this up in three words: body, emotion, and language. “That’s what we have to create something in our lives,” he says. “They’re interconnected; you can’t leave one of the three behind.”
Body, emotion, and language are interconnected; you can’t leave any one of the three behind
By this, he means that coaching isn’t just about talking. Thoughts, physical signals, and emotions constantly influence one another. People often think they can, for example, simply turn off their emotions and operate purely rationally, but according to Joop, that’s an illusion. Everything works together in how we perceive and act. That is precisely why he also explores people’s preconceived viewpoints with them: what interpretation already lies between what is happening and how you react?
In that work, he uses the idea of centering. For him, the center of the body lies just below the navel—your dantian, the physical center of gravity of your body. The center of language is silence: only when you truly listen can something new emerge. And the center of emotion is acceptance, which he simultaneously calls the hardest place to be. “As soon as you listen, everything is possible; as soon as you speak, it is no longer,” he says. And on emotion: “Accepting what is there and working with it—that is the hardest place to be.”
Accepting what is there and working with it—that is the hardest place to be
For him, that layer is not a separate method alongside the assessments but is inextricably linked to them. For Joop, it’s about the connection between body, emotion, and language: together, they determine how you perceive reality. The assessments reveal those patterns, but the work lies in experiencing them. He guides people to explore what is happening in their bodies, which emotions are associated with it, and which thoughts arise from that—and vice versa. In that process of becoming aware, space is created for different behavior. In this way, coaching becomes not only reflection but also practice.
Doing and being
In his work with leaders, Joop also often distinguishes between doing and being. Especially in high-pressure organizations, he observes that people tend to work harder, do more of the same, and thereby get stuck. He then tries to pull them out of that automatic mode. “In doing, you’re just repeating what you already know, and in being, you can create something new,” he says.
This also aligns with his view on burnout. According to him, burnouts often arise because people keep doing what they were already doing, without this leading to a different result. Becoming aware of deeper motivations, attitudes, and behaviors can help you ultimately choose a different strategy and take different actions that lead to a better result. That awareness arises during the coaching sessions, but the actual change takes place afterwards. Joop says about that change: “And it shouldn’t happen during the coaching session, but between the coaching sessions.” That is where you can practice doing things differently.
Example: Six directors without a CEO
A great example of how all these elements come together is a project Joop is facilitating at a large SME. There, the owners had decided to eliminate the CEO role and move forward with six directors. The question posed to Joop was simple yet exciting: can that work?
Joop found it an interesting question, precisely because it touches on self-organization and ownership. Instead of imposing a blueprint, he began guiding the team on how they could shape their new way of working together themselves. In doing so, he always focuses on the purpose: what must this group as a whole deliver or create, what roles are involved, and how do you shape those roles together now that there is no longer a CEO in the mix?
One of the things he introduced was the distinction between action meetings and role meetings. In action meetings, you make practical arrangements. In role meetings, you look at how you work together, who is responsible for what, and what the team needs. Because the CEO role had disappeared, tasks had to be redistributed. Who takes on what? How does someone get the space to do that? And how do you prevent old reflexes from continuing to dominate?
Joop coaches not only the six directors but also the level below them: team leaders and coordinators. In those sessions, he constantly brings the theme of ownership back to the table.“You are now in charge of yourselves,” he says. “So, you can’t blame the boss anymore.” In doing so, he forces people to view their roles differently: no longer from a place of dependence, but from a place of responsibility.
Sometimes he does this with very simple interventions. In a meeting, for example, he might assign one of the directors the role of ‘Guardian’. That person is not allowed to participate in the discussion of the content but only observes how the meeting proceeds. At the end, that person reports back on what they noticed. According to Joop, this often yields a great deal of insight, precisely because people can no longer focus solely on the content, and the culture and behavior become visible.
What he discovered there, together with them, is a form of leadership he calls CONSCIOUS leadership. For him, this means being aware of your own role, the situation you’re in, and your influence on what happens. In his words, conscious leadership is essentially situational leadership but explicitly linked to self-awareness. You adapt your communication style, your actions, and your approach to leading to what the situation demands, without losing yourself in the process.
A broader question
At its core, Joop’s work is not just about personal development or better collaboration. It’s also about how people and organizations relate to one another in an increasingly complex world. He uses Spiral Dynamics not only to interpret individual patterns but also to show that the same values and tensions are visible at the societal level.
That is why he also says that ultimately only one question really matters: “What are the consequences for the other person?” That question touches on leadership, culture, collaboration, and development. Those who gain insight into their own values, their way of seeing things, and the context in which they operate can also act more consciously.
And that is perhaps what Joop’s work ultimately boils down to: not a model, but AWARENESS. Awareness of what drives you, what your “purpose” is, of how you see things, of what happens in your relationships with others, and of what becomes possible when you not only understand that, but also truly face it.
About Joop
Joop van Waas is an experienced executive coach and leadership advisor who supports senior leaders and professionals in navigating complex organizational and personal challenges. With a background in management and extensive coaching experience, he helps clients gain clarity, strengthen self-awareness, and align their actions with their deeper motivations. His work focuses on sustainable performance, authentic leadership, and meaningful change, enabling individuals and organizations to operate more effectively in an increasingly complex environment. Joop can be contacted here.
