No one sets out to abandon their values.
I want to say that first, because everything else I'm about to say will sound like an accusation otherwise. The leaders I'm describing in this essay – and I've worked with and for enough of them – did not sit down one day and just decide to stop caring. When the values were declared, they probably meant it.
But here's what I've learned, first from the inside and now as a consultant, where I get to see the patterns even more clearly: Every organization, and leader, has values when it’s easy because sincerity is cheap when nothing's actually on the line. A mission statement costs nothing on the day you write it – and it can continue costing nothing for years. Sometimes long enough that everyone, leadership included, mistakes the absence of a challenge for the existence of conviction.
But then one day the test will inevitably arrive. You’re faced with a decision no one wants to make – a situation that could frankly really use those values as guidance. But somehow you end up just doing the thing you’ve always done, values be damned.
And this, my friends, is the whole ballgame. Values don’t get consciously abandoned. Rather, people convince themselves that they’re just “temporarily” shelving them, because they think the situation calls for it.
Really, what good is a value if it costs you nothing to keep it? Not much – and that's the problem.
A value you never have to pay for isn't really a value yet. It's just something you like about yourself.
And for a lot of leaders, that works out fine, because declaring values is easy when times are good. It brings good people through the door. People tell you they chose your company because of what you stand for. You get to feel – genuinely feel – like one of the good ones. And none of that is fake. It feels exactly like conviction, because as far as you know, that's what it is.
But feeling like one of the good ones and being one are two different things.
The test arrives unscheduled
The most common test, in my experience, is layoffs.
Nothing puts your values under the lights faster than cutting people. Not "do we have values" – the answer to that is probably sitting on a wall somewhere, or on your website. The question layoffs bring up is more like: What do those values mean when they actually cost you something?
I've seen this question get answered a lot of different ways, some of them genuinely humane.
Here's what I learned to look at first: the list. When a layoff is done well, the list is painful but explainable – the math is the math, and the process treats people like people. But when it goes badly, the list says something the leadership team never would. Like when the values on the wall say equity and diversity matter, but the list says otherwise. Time after time, the people most routinely impacted by layoffs are the ones who look least like the people making the decisions.
And that's when you find out what was underneath all along.
I’m not here to say that the people making decisions like that are straight up frauds. They probably did believe they held those values, right up until the moment it stopped being free and easy. But caring that only exists when it’s easy was never really caring. It was probably what seemed like a sound investment in the organization’s brand and perception, and it likely worked at first.
Because values are easy to declare, and hard to earn. They’re hardest to keep when difficult decisions are on the line – but if values aren’t actually shaping behaviors and decisions, they’re just words.
Employees can usually see through it all. They weren’t in the meeting where the list was made, but they don’t need to be to form an opinion. Because when a decision contradicts a declared value, employees don't experience a dilemma – they experience a lie.
The people who leave first
What tends to happen after a breach like this: people start to leave.
And those who leave first are the ones who believed the hardest. They took the values seriously – seriously enough to organize parts of their careers around them. When they experience the lie, they probably don't make a scene. They conclude they were naive, update their resume, and take their excellence somewhere that means it.
The people who stay do something else: they recalibrate. No announcements or confrontations, but every value statement after that gets read differently.
And the thing we usually forget: From the top, none of this shows. A resignation looks like regular turnover. Cynicism looks like culture. Nothing is on fire, so nothing must be wrong. Meanwhile, the gap between what the organization says and what it does keeps getting wider – and that kind of gap compounds over time.
What passing looks like
But here's the hopeful part, because there is one: The same test that exposes empty values is the one that proves real ones. I've watched leaders pass it, and the thing that strikes me every time is that passing never looks like winning. The value gets kept and something else gets lost – profit, comfort, the ease of the decision everyone wanted you to make.
What separates passing from failing isn't the outcome – sometimes the layoff happens either way. It's what gets questioned first. Leaders who pass the test ask: what can we lose before we ask the people with the least power to lose it? Our own pay? The thing we were going to buy? The plan as we wrote it? Sometimes the honest answer is "nothing is enough," and the layoff happens anyway. But everyone in the organization can tell the difference between a leader who asked and one who never did.
Because how you do the hard thing is where the values actually live. That's the entire lesson.
Years ago, a consultant named Katie Augsburger shared her open-source Guide for Ethical Layoffs with me, and I learned as much from it as from anything I've read on the subject. The subtitle tells you what passing looks like: how to center dignity and humanity in times of crisis. People wrote this down. There's a playbook. The leaders who fail the test aren't missing information – they're missing the willingness to use it.
Every set of values is at first just an aspiration. But the difference between aspiration as performance and aspiration as direction is whether your aspiration survives a decision that no one wants to make. One is just decoration, but the other is a direction you can actually steer by.
You can’t see it from the top
A direction, though, only helps if you can see where you're starting from.
The challenge with this kind of gap: you can't see it clearly from the top. Every year looks roughly like the last one, right up until it doesn't. By the time the gap is visible from the top – in exits, in cynicism, in the slow hollowing-out of the people who cared the most – it's been visible from the bottom for a long time.
That's why I do this work. Not because leaders are bad, but because the view from up there is structurally misleading, and someone has to show you the view from everywhere else. When I run an assessment for an organization, what we're really doing is taking a picture of what the organization says it values, scored against what it actually does. Not to catch anyone – to locate them. Because the difference between an organization that's drifting and one that's compounding its way toward real trouble is time – and time is the one thing you can't get back once you've spent it.
One thing we can all be sure of: Your values will be tested, and you don’t always get to choose the day it happens. The only thing you get to choose is whether they’ll stand up when they actually cost you something.
If this resonated, I write one essay a month on purpose, strategy, and the work of building organizations that match their ambition. Get it in your inbox.