Leadership is Political | Part 2: The Values Gap

 Most organisations have values. Most of those values do not survive contact with pressure. When budgets tighten, when the market shifts, when someone powerful is challenged, the stated commitments to inclusion, openness, and psychological safety tend to collapse quietly, and the people who trusted them are left holding the cost of having believed something that was never operational. In this episode, Chisom examines why the gap between stated and lived values is not hypocrisy in the simple sense, it is a design that treats values as positioning rather than commitment, and pressure is what reveals which one your organisation actually built. Chisom looks at how the same pattern operates in governments and founding documents, and she ask what each person inside these systems, leaders, the people in the middle, and the people with the least formal power, can actually do when the values they were promised stop being true. 

Transcript

0:03

You were told something when you joined. Maybe it was on the website, in the job listing, in the interview, on the wall in the reception area. Inclusion, diversity, openness, psychological safety, a commitment to people, a value driven culture. And you believed it. Not because you were naive, but because you were responding to rationale to what was being advertised. organizations spend considerable time and money telling you who they are. You took them at their word. And that is not a character flaw. It's just how trust is supposed to work. Somebody tells you something, you trust them by their word, and it is their responsibility to hold up to their part. But that doesn't always work out. like that and especially in workplaces. And then at some point the stated value stops surviving contact with the lived reality. Maybe it happened quickly in the first month where you watched someone get punished for raising a concern that a value statement said was welcome. Maybe it happened slowly over years through a pattern of small signals that never quite rose to the level of a confrontation, but it accumulated into something you could no longer explain away. Maybe it happened in the meeting where the diversity or equity commitment was deprioritized because the budget was under pressure or there was a political pendulum. Maybe it was in the restructuring where the people let go were disproportionately the ones who had been vocal. in what needed to improve or change within the organization. It could also be the psychological safety that turned out to mean the leader's comfort was protected and not yours. My name is Chisomu Daise, and this is Overnight's Wisdom. And today I want to 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 judgments. 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 advertise 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 judgments. 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, because 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 joke geopolitical context as well. So oftentimes this we're 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. And some, to be honest, are not even about describing the organization at its best. You know, oftentimes what we see is that there is a version of decorative values that does not require pressure to reveal itself because there was never really anything underneath the language to begin with. And this shows up as the leader or the company that claims a passion for diversity, for equity, for inclusion, and never really invests in it. So the language is present, the budget is not. The commitment in the keynote speeches, but not in the hiring data. And also not in the promotion patterns, not in who is in the room when decisions are made. I wanna be clear here that this is not a value that failed under pressure. It is a value that was never funded in the first place, which means that it was never a commitment. It was a type of performance and the audience was not the people it claimed to serve, but the market that it was designed to impress. now for the values that did receive some investment, pressure is a test that reveals what kind of commitment was built. The distinction is not intention per se, because many companies intend that it values to be real at the moment of adoption. The distinction is whether the commitment was designed to bear the weight when weights actually arrived. A value that survives the pressure that was costly to protect was operational. A value that does not survive was decorative. You can only know which kind you have after the pressure arrives, which is precisely why organizations never ask the questions in advance. and pressure comes in predictable forms. Financial pressure, for example. So you see, Meta disbanded its DEI team and cancelled equity-focused programs as part of workplace reduction in 2023 and 2024. After years of positioning itself as a leader in fostering diversity, The value survived when it was free or actually when it was fashionable and when the political pendulum swung that direction. But the value did not survive the budget cut. Another type of pressure is political pressure. So Target ended his DEI goals in early 2025, citing an evolving external landscape and increased legal threats. So again, the value survived when it was popular. It did not survive the shift in the political climate. and these companies are far from alone. by mid-2023, DEI related job postings in the United States had declined 44%, I believe, from the year before. Across both the United States and Europe, dozens of companies followed the same patterns. scaling back commitments that had been stated publicly and prominently from Lego, the Danish company stripping all its diversity language from its sustainability reports to PWC, so Pricewater House Coopers, dropping its minority procurement pledge. The political pendulum swung and the values swung with it, which tells you everything about what kind of values they wear in the first place. Leadership pressure is another type of pressure. So a senior hire arrives who does not share the same values, and the organization adapts to the new leader rather than say holding the new leader to existing commitments. In every case that I've pointed out, be it financial pressure, political pressure, or leadership pressure. The pattern is essentially the same. The value was real enough to state and not real enough to protect when protecting it actually costs something. What makes all of this particularly damaging is that the organization rarely announces the withdrawal. There is no memo that says we have decided to stop valuing what we told you we valued. The shifts happen in practice in what is funded and what is not, in who is promoted and who is managed out, in what is celebrated and what is tolerated. The values remain, even when they do remain, say on the website. They remain in some capacity on the onboarding deck. And the person who notices the gap between the stated and the leaved value is placed in the position of either naming the discrepancy no one else will confirm, or accepting the reality that contradicts what they were told. Listen, this is not a comfortable position to be in for anyone. And it is a politically constructed position, to be fair, because the organization's silence about its own withdrawal is what forces the individual to choose between their perception and the official account. And most people understandably choose the official account for as long as they can bear it. And frankly, this pattern does not belong only in the workplace. And recognizing where else it operates is not a digression. It's really also just part of the larger argument. If we look at what happens at a governmental level, right?

Governments adopt these two: 10:36

constitutions, founding documents, charters, mission statements, all of them articulate commitments that the state then suspends under pressure. sometimes partially, sometimes selectively. And sometimes in ways that are contested and reversed through courts and civic action, and sometimes honestly in ways that go unchallenged for generations. These are things like equality, due process, the dignity of the person, the freedom of expression, the rights to assembly. These are stated values and in many countries, some of the time, they are operational. But in most places and in most countries, when they are tested, they become quite expensive. When honoring them would require the state to constrain its own power or to observe a cost it does not want to observe. And they fail in the same way that decorative values fail anywhere else. The fact that in some democracies the suspension is challenged or litigated and sometimes reversed. Does not disprove the pattern. It confirms it. It tells you that those values were closer to operational, close enough to be defended, which is precisely the distinction this episode is making. the further a value sits from operational, the less anyone fights for it when it is withdrawn. It simply just disappears and the disappearance is just observed as normal. Think about what happens in a country that states its values equality and then under economic pressure withdraws public services that made equality even partially possible. The schools that we are defunded, the healthcare that is rationed, the infrastructure that deteriorates in the communities that were already on the served. The value of equality remains in the constitution. It remains in political speeches. And the population that depended on it is placed in exactly the same position as the employee who trusted the value statement. They are left processing the gap between what they were told and what they actually received. And that processing is done privately and individually, as though the gap is a personal hardship rather than a political choice. The mechanism is identical. A company says it values inclusion and then restructures the diversity team when the budget contracts. A government says it values equality and then withdraws protection from the population that needs them the most when the political environment shifts. In both cases, the values were real enough to be stated, real enough to attract belief, and not real enough to survive the moments when honoring them required something. So the gap is not really between intention and execution. The gap is between positioning and commitment and pressure is what reveals which one was built. So, if the gap is structural, if values as positioning is the norm rather than the exception, Then the question is what that means for the people inside the systems. and then again, the answer also depends on where you sit. But first, I want to name, say, three of the forms the gap takes because they are often confused with each other. So values that were never funded in the first place, values that were funded and then withdrawn when it became expensive or politically inconvenient, And values that when the gap is named are restated through activity, task forces, consultants, updated language without anything operational actually changing. All three are forms of decoration, each produces the same results, more or less. The people who trusted the value carry the cost of its failure. If you lead, the first thing I want to say that is worth saying is that you may not even know that this gap exists. And that is not an excuse. It is a diagnostic. The first episode, which was last week, of this series argued that the system shields leaders from seeing the cost of their own power and the value gap is one of the most effective shields available. So you stated the values and you may genuinely believe in them. And the system around you is designed to confirm that belief because the people who see the gap most clearly are least likely to tell you about it. They learned from watching what happened to the other person who spoke about it before them that naming the gap is more expensive than actually absorbing it. So your value feels real to you. They do not always feel real to the people three levels down. And the only way to close that distance is to stop measuring your culture by what you intended and actually start measuring it by what people experience. Not by the engagement survey, which asks whether people can tolerate the conditions, By the questions you're probably not asking. So what are people carrying here that they should not have to? And how much of it traces back to a value I stated but did not operationalize? There's also something worth naming here. The culture of professional leadership rewards the performance of strength, the suppression of discomfort, the treatment of vulnerability as a liability. I know we talk about being vulnerable, but what that means in actions, a lot of companies and leaders are not willing to face. So that reward structure does not stay private. Unprocessed pain in any leader does not stay with the leader, it becomes culture. A leader that does not have emotional literacy will unload whatever it is they need to process but haven't processed onto the people they lead. Unexamined belief systems, you know, in leadership do not remain individual. They shape what is tolerated, what is rewarded, and what gets to be called professional or professionalism. he shows up in the leader who was humiliated earlier in their career and now calls that humiliation regal when they inflict it on others. The leader who grew up in scarcity and now hoards information because sharing it feels like losing control. you see it in the leader who was never given emotional support and now treats the request as though it is a weakness. And thus they build systems and cultures where no one admits to struggling until they break. Each of this is a lack of emotional literacy, each of this is unprocessed pain and unprocessed systems of beliefs that are converted into a management style. And the value gap sits directly on top of it. Because the leader who cannot sit with your own discomfort will build a culture that punishes discomfort in others. The leader who cannot receive a challenge or be disagreed with will build a culture that produces silence. The leader who has not examined their own assumptions about who belongs will build a culture where the value of inclusion as stated and the practice of exclusion is tolerated because the leader does not have the internal capacity to see the contradiction. This is not an attack on leaders. It is a description of how the gap gets built from the inside one unexamined reaction at a time. If you sit in the middle, you often know this gap most intimately because you are the one translating the stated values into daily practice and watching them break in your hands, essentially. You sit in meetings where the values are affirmed and then you walk into rooms where you have to implement decisions that contradict them. and you are expected to do both without acknowledging the contradiction. And that expectation comes from multiple directions at once. The leader above you needs you to maintain the front. The team below you needs you to make sense of what is happening. And your own professional conditioning tells you that managing that contradiction is simply what your role requires. All three reinforce the same silence. You are the bridge between what the organization says and what the organization does, and the structural dishonesty of that position is rarely named. You did not create the gap, but you administer it. And the cost of administering it is the cognitive dissonance of presenting a values aligned front while knowing the reality behind it I mean, that is a specific form that neither the leader track or the person with less power track fully captures. It is specific to your position. And the boats of eats is very real. you have a bit more power to close the gaps in small daily ways than the person who's below you In how you say interpret a directive. In what you choose to enforce and in what you choose to let pass, in whether you protect the person who raises the concern or whether you manage them into silence. And at the same time, you have less power to close it structurally than the person above you because the gap exists at a level of decision-making you do not control. And holding both truths at once without using one to avoid the other is the actual work of your position. And it's not an easy job. If you are the person without formal authority, I want to say this directly as well, you were not wrong to necessarily believe what you were told. The instinct to trust an organization that stated its value clearly and publicly is not naivety, right? It is a reasonable response to a reasonable claim, because it is a reasonable claim. And then the destabilization you feel now, the questioning of your own judgment, And the sense that you should have seen it coming. That is the cost of the gap landing on you instead of on the institution that created it. It is not yours to carry. But I do also want to leave you with something more concrete because naming the cost without like naming what you can do about it is saying a diagnosis without a clear direction. What you can do though is stop performing alignments you do not feel. Now you cannot do this recklessly because maybe you need that job, you have to pay your bills, and people depend on you. So don't do it recklessly in a way that costs you your livelihood, but do it with precision. Name to yourself very clearly what is real here and what is a performative decoration. Decide what you are willing to carry and what you are not. Be very clear about it. Find the people who see what you see, because one person naming a gap can be dismissed. But a pattern of people naming the same gap becomes evidence the organization cannot easily reclassify as attitude. I also want to be frank about the risks here because giving this advice without naming what it costs would be also a type of disservice. Organizing informally inside a workplace, even at the level of shared observation rather than formal complaints carries real consequences. People who find each other and name the pattern together can be labeled as a clique, managed out as a group or treated as a cultural threat rather than a diagnostic resource. So the risk is real and whether it is worth taking depends on your specific situation, your financial security, your options, your read of the specific terrain. but the risk does not change the structural fact that a collective voice is harder to dismiss than an individual voice. And the decision on whether or not to use it is your choice to make with full information, not with the risks hidden. So you want the risk in full view and then decide how you move. and listen, if the gap is unfixable from where you stand, if the values were never built to bear any kind of weight, and the institution has no interest in rebuilding them, then the clarity is not that you have failed. The clarity is that you are now seen accurately, and seeing accurately is the precondition for every decision that comes next, including the decision to leave when you are able to. And it also informs how you can start strategically planning that exit. So the grace I can offer here is accuracy. The leader who genuinely believed their own values statement and has never been told it does not match the lived experience is not the same leader who knows the gap existed and maintains it deliberately. Both produce the same harm, but they require different things. The first needs information they are currently shielded from, and the second needs accountability, they are currently protected from. Collapsing the two does not serve the arguments per se. The person in the middle performing a coherence they know is not real deserves a recognition that their position is structurally dishonest and that that dishonesty was built into the role before they even arrived and started. The person without power deserves a recognition that the destabilization that they experience or they feel is not their fault and it's also not their imagination. and that seeing the gap clearly is not the same as being able to close it. Everyone here in some capacity is implicated, but the weight of course is not distributed equally, and the people who created the gap and the people who are carrying the cost of it are not answerable in the same way, of course. When we show grace and understanding in conversations like this, that grace does not erase the difference. It actually insists on seeing the differences clearly and where responsibility lies. And then there is one more version of the gap that I must name because oftentimes it's the hardest to see. Some organizations, when the gap is named, they do not respond with silence or retaliation. They actually respond with activity. A task force is assembled, a consultant is hired, a review is commissioned. New language is often drafted, new frameworks are introduced. A town hall is held where leaders acknowledge that we actually have work to do. And then nothing operational changes. The values are restated in updated language. The programs are refreshed, and the gap remains exactly where it was. But that is often harder to name because the organization has performed the appearance of a response. And the person who says nothing has changed is now arguing against visible effort rather than visible neglect. As I like to call it, this is the second order decoration or the decoration of the second order, right? where activity is built on top of the original decorative values, and it is diversion that traps people most effectively because it takes the energy of the critique and redirects it into participation in a process that was never designed to produce the change that it promised. So this week I want to leave you with something concrete and one for each position. If you lead, take one value that your organization states publicly and trace it to the last practical application and expression of it. Not to the policy documents and not to the training program. But to the most recent decision where that value was tested when honoring it would have cost something. And ask, did it survive? If it did not, you know the kind of value it is. And then the next question is whether you are willing to rebuild it as a commitment or whether you will continue to maintain it as a positioning. This is not a comfortable question, but it is a necessary question. If you sit in the middle, name to yourself one place where you are currently bridging the gap between what the organization says and what it does. You do not have to resolve it this week or next month, but naming it accurately without the organizational language that softens it is the first step towards deciding what you are actually willing to keep carrying and what you are not. If you're the person without formal power, name one thing that you are carrying that is not yours, one cost that landed on you because a stated value turned out to not be operational. You do not actually have to do anything with it, but having an accurate name for it, knowing it is the institution's failure and not your own misjudgments. changes the ground you are standing on and clearer ground is where better decisions come from. I'm big on language and naming something accurately allows us to move clearer. in the last episode I introduced the three clarities. So identity, context, and power. and everything I've said again today is the three clarities at work. And I want to show you where, because the pattern of the gap becomes sharper once you are able to see it within each clarity. And then you're able to see where that clarity is failing and for whom. I am going to name the primary clarity failure for each position, not because each position only has one, they do not. There are multiple failures and context at play. but I'm naming the primary one because naming the primary one gives you the sharpest point of entry for your own diagnosis. the leader who does not know that your values are decorative has a context clarity problem. They are reading the terrain from their own vantage points and mistaking it for the whole picture. The value feels real from the top because the top is where the values are most consistently performed. The leader sees the all-hands meeting where the values are affirmed. They do not see the Monday morning where these values are. directly, sometimes firmly set aside because a client is more valuable than the principal. Or in a context where a high performing team member is toxic, but because they are high performing, they are allowed to continue to be toxic. Context clarity will ask, what is actually true here? Not from where I sit, but from where the people with the least power sit. and if your answer is different from their answer, the version from below is the more accurate one. Because values are not tested by the people they are designed to comfort. They are tested by the people they are supposed to protect. The person in the middle who administers the gap without naming it has an identity clarity problem. Not because they are failing as a person, but because the role has replaced the person. The contradiction between stated values and lived values has absorbed into the job description until it feels just like how things work. And the question, who am I inside the system, has been answered by the system rather than by the person in the middle. Identity clarity would therefore ask what am I compromising in order to hold this position? And is the compromise something I choose or something I observed without noticing? And that is not an easy question to process when your livelihood depends on a role. But the question is not asking you to leave or to burn the house down. It is just asking you to see clearly what staying is costing you and what is costing others. And then you can see if there is a way for you to bridge that gap or plan your exits. The person without formal power who is questioning their own judgment has a power clarity problem because the cost landed on them. They were given no vocabulary to name it as institutional rather than personal. So they turned the diagnosis inward, as many of us tend to do in a lot of these situations.

So power clarity here would ask: 31:42

what is genuinely mine to move here? And what was never mine to carry? The destabilization you feel is not evidence that you read the situation wrong. It is evidence that the situation was built to be misread and you are now seeing it accurately. That accuracy doesn't necessarily mean you become comfortable, but it is the ground on which every honest decision can be made about staying, about speaking up, about leaving, about building something differently. All of that becomes possible when you see the thing, Clara. Now again, as I said, whether you were a senior leader, a middle manager, or someone who has little formal power, context, and power clarity applies to you. But we've just touched on one each. What is the most prominent in the space in which you are holding? And I also want to name that oftentimes values don't fail because people were bad. I don't genuinely think a lot of people walk around trying to cause harm. But we're human and life happens, and we're stressed, and we're upset and we're overwhelmed and we cause harm. So oftentimes values failed because they were never built to bear weight. And sometimes it's something as simple as apologizing when you've done something wrong, taking responsibility and accountability. And having a process within the workplace and the culture to hold that type of behavior upright. And when things happen and there is no meaningful repair, it shows how values actually interact, at least how stated values interact with lived reality. And ultimately, no matter how it shakes out, the pressure reveals what was always true about said value within a workplace. and with that, this is where I'll leave this one. If this is the kind of thinking that you like or appreciate, I also run a weekly newsletter where I share insights on clarity in a workplace setting, societal setting, and also personal life. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate your time. And I'll see you next week.