Leadership is Political | Part 2: The Values Gap

And today, I wanna talk about the specific gap that happens in the workplace where the lived reality does not survive contact with what was shared about the organization before people joined or over time as changes happened, and this gap is specific.

It is not just disappointment, though it often includes disappointment.

It is a form of destabilization because when you trusted something that turned out to not be true, you do not simply adjust your expectations and move on.

You start questioning your own judgment.

You wonder whether you missed something obvious, whether you should have known, whether the problem is that you believe too easily, and that self-questioning is a transfer of cost, like it is costly.

The organization advertised something it had not built, and now the person who trusted the advertisement is doing the work of processing the betrayal as though it were a personal error in their own judgment.

I really want to be precise about what is happening here as I see it play out at organizations across the world, because it would be easy to say, "Hey, this is hypocrisy." You know, leaders who say one thing, and they do another.

And while that exists, 'cause we have a lot of leaders who say one thing, and they do another, it is not the structural problem.

I think there's a structural problem where we have most organizations who adopt values the way they adopt branding.

The values were selected for how they positioned the company, what talent they would attract, what reputation they would build, or what clients they would reassure.

It also speaks to maybe what is happening within a political and a geo-geopolitical context as well.

So oftentimes, these were not adopted as operational commitments with consequences attached to them, and no one asks at the point of adoption what these values will actually cost us when they are tested and whether we are prepared to pay for that cost.

In a lot of cases, the question was never on the table because the values were never intended to be tested.

They were intended to describe the organization at its best and then suspended when conditions made them costly or expensive.

I often say, you know, oftentimes workplaces and leaders, they talk about psychological safety, and I often say, "You know, you can slap psychological safety all across your walls, and it won't make people feel safe." What is the action that actually adds up to that sense of psychological safety? So I often ask leaders when they say, "But we want a psychologically safe workplace," or, "We have a psychologically safe workplace," and I ask them, "What does that look like in practice?" And if I asked Person A and Person B, would they be able to tell me the same thing, right? So basically, oftentimes these values are adopted because they sound good, not really understanding what it means for us in the specific context.