Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters
Almost every organisation claims to have values. Leaders display them on walls, print them in corporate literature and repeat them during induction programmes as though putting a collection of respectable words on a poster somehow makes them true. Integrity, respect, excellence, accountability, collaboration and courage usually appear somewhere in the mix. There is nothing particularly wrong with any of those words, but writing them down tells me almost nothing about the organisation or the people who lead it.
If you really want to understand an organisation’s values, ignore the posters and watch what its leaders do when somebody behaves contrary to them. Watch who they promote, who they protect, who they blame when something goes wrong, what they do when someone challenges a senior manager and how they deal with a high performer who treats people badly. Most importantly, watch whether they apply the same standards to themselves that they expect from everyone below them. That is where you find the real values of an organisation.
Leadership values work in exactly the same way. Leaders do not demonstrate their values through presentations, LinkedIn posts or annual employee engagement exercises. They demonstrate them through their behaviour, decisions and the consequences they create. More importantly, leaders reveal their values through what they choose to tolerate.
I have always believed that standards are remarkably simple. If you repeatedly accept something, regardless of what you say about it, you have effectively decided that it is acceptable. That principle matters in leadership because people pay far more attention to what leaders do than to what leaders say.
You can talk about integrity until everyone in the organisation can recite the definition from memory, but if senior managers manipulate information when the truth becomes inconvenient, they have shown everyone that integrity does not really matter. Some claim that respect sits at the heart of your organisation, but if you allow a manager to bully employees because they deliver good numbers, you have shown that respect comes with conditions. You can put accountability on every wall in the building, but if leaders push accountability downwards whenever something goes wrong and pull credit upwards whenever something goes well, people will quickly understand how accountability really works.
This is where much of the corporate discussion about values becomes meaningless. Values are easy when they cost nothing. Leadership starts becoming interesting when maintaining those values becomes inconvenient.
Leadership Values Are What You Do, Not What You Say
There is no shortage of advice about the values leaders supposedly need. Search online and you will find endless variations of the same ideas. Good leaders need integrity, courage, empathy, honesty, humility, resilience, accountability and respect. Fine. I doubt many people would seriously argue that leaders should instead aspire to dishonesty, cowardice, arrogance and irresponsibility.
The problem does not lie in identifying desirable characteristics. The problem lies in demonstrating them when circumstances make doing so difficult. That is the difference between a value and a slogan.
A leader who talks about honesty when everything is going well has proved very little. What matters is what that leader does when a project starts failing, and the customer asks for an update. A leader who claims to welcome challenge has proved very little when everybody agrees with them. What matters is what happens when a relatively junior employee says they think the leader is wrong. A manager who talks about accountability when the team performs well has proved very little. What matters is what that manager does when something fails badly enough for senior management to start asking questions.
Those moments tell you what somebody actually values. People working within organisations become very good at spotting the difference between what management says and what management means. They have to because understanding that difference helps them survive.
Employees learn very quickly which rules matter and which do not. They learn which managers they can challenge, which mistakes they can admit, which problems they should raise and which they should keep quiet. They learn who senior management will protect and whether competence matters more than politics. None of this normally appears in an employee handbook, and it does not need to. People learn it by watching. That is why leadership behaviour carries so much influence. Every decision teaches something.
What Leaders Tolerate Becomes the Real Standard
One of the simplest lessons I carried from military life into civilian leadership is that a standard you refuse to maintain is not much of a standard. That does not mean leaders should spend their lives looking for opportunities to punish people. People make mistakes, get things wrong, have bad days and need space to learn, develop and occasionally fail. There is a considerable difference, however, between allowing someone to make a genuine mistake and repeatedly tolerating behaviour that undermines the standards you claim to uphold.
Suppose an organisation claims that respect is one of its core values. Its leaders deliver the usual corporate messaging about treating colleagues professionally and creating a respectful workplace. One manager, however, regularly humiliates people during meetings. They interrupt employees, belittle ideas, lose their temper and leave people reluctant to speak. Everyone knows about it. Senior management knows about it. Perhaps HR knows about it. Yet nobody does anything meaningful because the manager delivers results.
At that point, the organisation has made a decision about its values. Its leaders have decided that respect matters until respecting people interferes with performance. The poster might still say respect, but leadership behaviour says something entirely different.
The same thing happens with competence. An organisation can claim that competence, professional development and continuous improvement matter, but if its leaders continually promote people because they are politically useful, personally popular or good at managing upwards, employees will eventually stop believing that competence matters. Why wouldn’t they? Their leaders have shown them otherwise.
This is one of the reasons I place so much emphasis on what leaders tolerate. Tolerance creates permission. Once people see leaders repeatedly accept a particular behaviour, they begin to understand that the behaviour falls within the organisation’s real boundaries. It might technically breach policy, contradict the values statement or attract public condemnation from senior management, but if leaders repeatedly allow it to continue, the practical message becomes clear. It is allowed.
Values Only Matter When There Is a Cost
Most organisations find it very easy to have values when those values cost nothing. Integrity is easy when telling the truth carries no consequences. Courage is easy when everyone agrees. Accountability is easy when the outcome succeeds. Respect is easy when you like the person standing in front of you. Fairness is easy when you have enough to go around.
The real test comes when maintaining the value becomes uncomfortable.
Imagine a project that has fallen badly behind schedule. Senior management knows it and the project team knows it. Then the customer asks whether delivery remains on track. Now integrity has a price. Telling the truth might damage the relationship with the customer, expose poor management decisions or affect someone’s bonus or reputation. Suddenly integrity becomes more than a word because someone has to make a decision.
The same principle applies to courage. Organisations often talk about courageous leadership as though it involves making bold decisions and delivering motivational speeches. However, courage looks much less glamorous. Sometimes it means sitting in a meeting and telling someone considerably more senior than you that you think they are wrong. It means stopping a project after the organisation has already spent enormous amounts of money because continuing would waste even more. Sometimes it means defending an unpopular employee who happens to be right, and sometimes it means saying, “I made the wrong decision.”
Those situations matter because something is at stake. Without consequence, values remain theoretical.
Integrity Is About Consistency
I consider integrity probably the most important leadership value because without it almost everything else starts to fall apart. I do not mean integrity simply in the sense of not lying. Leadership integrity means creating consistency between what you say, what you expect and what you actually do.
If you tell people safety comes first and then pressure them to take shortcuts because production has fallen behind schedule, you show them that safety does not come first. When you tell employees that you want them to speak openly but become defensive whenever somebody disagrees with you, you show them that openness has limits. If you tell people that wellbeing matters while celebrating employees who routinely work ridiculous hours, you show them which behaviour the organisation really rewards.
People notice inconsistencies like these. They might not challenge them openly, particularly if leadership has already taught them that challenge attracts consequences, but they notice. Once leaders create enough inconsistencies, people stop taking leadership communication at face value and start interpreting it. That creates a dangerous environment because when employees start asking what management “really means”, leaders have already damaged their credibility.
People trust official communication less, informal conversations gain importance, rumour fills the gaps and employees become more cautious about what they say and who they say it to. Leaders rarely destroy trust through one enormous event. More often, they erode it through dozens of smaller contradictions. A promise someone quietly forgot, a standard a manager applied to one person but ignored for another, a difficult truth a leader conveniently avoided or a senior manager excused for behaviour that would have triggered disciplinary action for somebody else can all remove a little credibility. Eventually there is not much left.
Accountability Cannot Only Travel Down the Organisation
Accountability is another favourite corporate value. I am very much in favour of accountability, provided we mean the real thing rather than the version where senior leaders find somebody lower down the organisation to blame.
Holding other people accountable is easy. Taking responsibility for your own decisions is considerably harder. This is where weak leadership often exposes itself. Something goes wrong, and somebody immediately asks who is responsible. Sometimes that is an entirely legitimate question, but competent leaders should also ask whether they made the expectations clear, whether the person had the competence required to complete the task, whether they had the resources and time they needed, whether they had the authority to make the decisions necessary to achieve the outcome, whether somebody raised warning signs that management ignored and whether competing priorities made success unlikely.
Those questions matter because responsibility without authority is not accountability. It is simply a convenient way of allocating blame.
You cannot remove someone’s ability to make decisions and then hold them entirely responsible for the consequences of decisions you prevented them from making. Yet organisations do it all the time. Good news travels upwards, and bad news travels downwards. When a project succeeds, leadership receives recognition for creating the conditions for success. When it fails, somebody starts looking for the individual who failed to deliver.
That is not accountability.
Competent leaders understand that their responsibility includes the system in which their people operate. Sometimes an employee performs badly and needs to take responsibility. Sometimes leaders create a system that makes failure almost inevitable. Knowing the difference requires judgement.
Respect Does Not Mean Avoiding Difficult Conversations
Respect is another value that sounds good until you ask what it actually means. Some leaders confuse respect with being nice, but they are not the same thing.
Respect sometimes requires conversations that neither person particularly wants to have. If an employee underperforms and their manager avoids addressing it for six months because the conversation might feel uncomfortable, I do not consider that particularly respectful. The manager has taken away six months in which that employee could have understood the problem and improved.
Respect means treating adults like adults. It means explaining expectations clearly, giving honest feedback, listening to people even when you disagree with them and recognising expertise wherever it exists instead of assuming organisational status determines who knows best.
That last point matters. One of the quickest ways leaders expose their own lack of competence is by assuming that authority and knowledge mean the same thing. They do not. A senior manager may hold greater authority than the engineer, technician, operator or specialist standing in front of them, but that does not mean the manager understands the technical problem better. Competent leaders know when to make a decision and when to listen to someone who knows more than they do. That requires confidence, not weakness.
Good Leaders Need People Who Will Tell Them They Are Wrong
The more senior somebody becomes, the harder they may find it to receive honest feedback. That is one of the dangers of authority because people behave differently around power. They soften criticism, phrase disagreement carefully, avoid raising problems that might reflect badly on them and learn which opinions attract a positive response.
If a leader is not careful, they can gradually surround themselves with agreement. The dangerous part is that they may mistake that agreement for evidence that they are right.
This is why I think leaders need people around them who are prepared to say, “I think you’re wrong.” Not rudely, not for the sake of being difficult and not because every decision requires a committee debate, but when it matters.
Leadership teams where nobody challenges anybody are not necessarily aligned. Sometimes people simply feel frightened, politically cautious or conditioned to agree. A leader who claims to welcome challenge but reacts badly when somebody challenges them will very quickly stop receiving challenge.
They may not even notice. Meetings will become easier, people will nod more, and disagreement will disappear. The leader may conclude that communication has improved. In reality, people have simply learned to keep quiet.
That is not leadership success. It is organisational blindness.
Humility Is Not Weakness
I have never understood why some leaders find admitting that they do not know something so difficult. Nobody knows everything. Pretending otherwise does not make you look competent. Usually it does the opposite.
Humility in leadership does not mean walking around apologising for your position or pretending you lack confidence. It means understanding the limits of your own knowledge.
A competent leader can say they do not know. They can ask someone else for advice, change their mind when better evidence becomes available and recognise that the person several levels below them in the hierarchy may understand a particular problem far better than they do. Most importantly, they can say, “I was wrong.”
Some leaders seem to think those words destroy authority. I think the opposite is often true. People already know leaders make mistakes. Trying to pretend otherwise simply insults everyone’s intelligence.
Authority does not require perfection. It requires credibility.
Values Without Competence Are Not Enough
This is where I part company with some of the more simplistic discussions about leadership values. Having good values does not automatically make somebody a good leader.
You can be honest, decent, compassionate and courageous and still be completely incompetent. Good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes.
Leadership requires competence. A leader needs knowledge, skills, judgement and the ability to apply them appropriately in context. Someone may genuinely value fairness but lack the judgement to apply it consistently. They may genuinely value communication but communicate badly. May believe strongly in developing people but lack the ability to coach, mentor or manage performance. They may value accountability but design roles where responsibility and authority remain hopelessly misaligned.
Character matters and competence matters as well. You cannot substitute one for the other.
This is one reason organisations get leadership selection so badly wrong. They promote somebody because that person performs brilliantly in a technical role and assume they will automatically know how to lead. Or they choose someone because they appear charismatic, articulate and confident and assume those characteristics demonstrate leadership capability.
Neither assumption makes much sense.
People need to demonstrate leadership competence. Values influence how a leader uses that competence, while competence determines whether they can turn those values into effective action. You need both.
If You Want to Know What an Organisation Values, Look at Who It Promotes
Forget the values statement for a moment and look at the promotion decisions. They will tell you far more.
If an organisation claims to value teamwork but consistently promotes aggressive individual performers, teamwork is not really the priority. When it claims to value developing people but promotes managers who deliver numbers while burning through their teams, development clearly sits further down the list. If it claims to value competence but promotes people who manage upwards, avoid difficult decisions and tell senior management what it wants to hear, employees will understand the system.
People are not stupid. They respond to incentives, and promotion provides one of the strongest incentives an organisation can create.
Every promotion tells the rest of the workforce something about the behaviour the organisation considers successful. It tells people that this person succeeded here and that this is what success looks like.
That makes leadership selection a cultural decision, not simply an HR process. Promote the wrong behaviours often enough and you should not feel surprised when those behaviours spread. If political skill produces promotion, people learn politics. When competence produces promotion, people invest in competence. If hiding problems protects careers, people hide problems. If raising problems damages careers, people stop raising them.
An organisation gets more of whatever behaviour its leaders reward.
Leaders Create Culture Whether They Mean To or Not
Organisations often discuss culture as though some mysterious force floats around the workplace waiting for leaders to transform it. I see it much more simply.
Culture develops from the behaviour a group learns to regard as normal, successful or acceptable. Leadership heavily influences that process because leaders control or influence many of the consequences attached to behaviour. They decide who gets promoted, what receives recognition, what deserves attention, what they will challenge and which exceptions they will allow.
Over time, those decisions create patterns. Patterns create expectations, expectations influence behaviour, and behaviour reinforces culture.
This is why changing a few words on the company website does not change organisational culture. If the same people continue behaving in the same way, making the same decisions and rewarding the same behaviours, they will continue creating the same culture.
You cannot PowerPoint your way out of that. You cannot launch a new values programme and expect employees to forget everything the organisation has already taught them.
If leaders genuinely want culture to change, they need to change their own behaviour as well. Usually first.
The Problem With Corporate Values
I do not think organisational values are pointless. Used properly, they can provide useful principles for decision-making and establish expectations about behaviour. The problem is that too many organisations use them as branding.
Integrity sounds good. Respect sounds good. Excellence sounds good. Innovation sounds good. The words are so universally acceptable that choosing them requires almost no commitment at all.
The important question is not whether an organisation has selected the right words. The important question is whether those words change anything.
Does the value influence decisions? Can employees explain what it looks like in practice? Can they identify behaviour that contradicts it? Do leaders act when somebody repeatedly violates it? Do leaders still apply the standard when the person violating it is senior, successful or commercially valuable?
That last question exposes many corporate values because leaders find it easy to enforce standards against somebody with little power. The real test comes when maintaining the value costs the organisation something.
Perhaps the person involved generates significant revenue, possesses specialist knowledge, would prove difficult to replace or enjoys the support of senior management. Now leaders have to decide whether the value really is a value.
People will watch that decision far more closely than leadership probably realises.
Leaders Give Permission Through Their Own Behaviour
Leadership behaviour does not only establish expectations. It gives permission.
A manager who regularly arrives late but criticises employees for poor timekeeping creates two standards. A senior leader who expects people to admit mistakes but never acknowledges their own teaches everyone that admitting mistakes is something subordinates do. A manager who complains about gossip and then discusses confidential matters with selected employees gives permission for gossip to continue.
The reverse is also true. A leader who admits uncertainty gives others permission to admit that they do not know. Leaders who ask for help show that seeking assistance is acceptable. A leader who changes their mind after hearing better evidence demonstrates that disagreement can prove useful. A leader who gives credit to the people who actually did the work demonstrates that recognition does not need to be hoarded.
These things sound small, but they are not. Culture grows from thousands of small interactions like these. Leaders shape it whether they realise it or not.
Pressure Shows You What a Leader Really Values
If you want to understand somebody’s leadership values, watch them when things start going wrong.
Pressure strips away a lot of the corporate polish. Deadlines move closer, resources disappear, customers become unhappy, senior management starts asking questions and performance drops. Suddenly the leader who talked constantly about empowerment begins micromanaging every decision. The manager who promoted openness starts controlling information. The organisation that said people were its greatest asset starts expecting exhausted employees to absorb an impossible workload. The business that claimed safety was non-negotiable starts accepting shortcuts because delivery has fallen behind schedule.
This is when leaders reveal their values.
It is also when people remember leadership most clearly. Employees may forget dozens of ordinary meetings, but they rarely forget the manager who threw them under the bus when something went wrong. They remember the leader who stood in front of senior management and took responsibility. They remember who remained calm, who listened, who disappeared and who immediately started looking for somebody to blame.
Leaders often build their reputations during the worst days, not the best ones.
The Standard You Walk Past Becomes the Standard You Accept
There is a simple principle behind all of this. If you knowingly and repeatedly walk past something, eventually you have accepted it.
That does not mean leaders should react dramatically to every minor mistake or spend their lives looking for faults. Leadership requires judgement. Context matters, intent matters and proportionality matters, but persistent avoidance also matters.
If a leader repeatedly ignores poor behaviour, declining standards, incompetence, bullying, dishonesty or lack of accountability, they cannot continue claiming that those things are unacceptable. Their behaviour says otherwise.
Silence communicates, inaction communicates, and selective enforcement communicates. People notice all three.
Sometimes addressing a problem feels uncomfortable. It may mean challenging somebody you like, having a difficult conversation, confronting someone more senior, losing a high performer or admitting that a decision you previously supported was wrong.
That is precisely why leadership matters.
If every decision felt comfortable, obvious and consequence-free, organisations would not need much leadership.
Leadership Values Are Revealed by What You Are Prepared to Defend
I am not particularly interested in asking leaders to list their values. I am much more interested in watching what they do.
Do they tell the truth when the truth becomes inconvenient? Accept responsibility when something goes wrong? Do they treat people with respect when those people disagree with them? Do they allow others to challenge them? Can they admit that someone else knows more? Can they say they were wrong? Do they maintain standards when maintaining them carries a cost? And do they possess the competence and judgement required to turn all of that into effective leadership?
Those questions tell me considerably more than a corporate values statement ever will.
Leadership values are not the words leaders write on a wall, the words organisations place in annual reports or what executives say during leadership conferences, employee engagement events or carefully prepared presentations. They are what people experience.
Every decision teaches something. Promotion teaches something. Every exception teaches something. Every behaviour that leaders allow to continue teaches something. Eventually those lessons become expectations, expectations become normal behaviour, and normal behaviour becomes culture.
That is why I believe what leaders tolerate matters every bit as much as what they actively do.
You can claim to value respect, but people will remember the bully you protected. Claim to value competence, but people will remember the incompetent manager you promoted. You can claim to value integrity, but people will remember the truth you avoided when telling it became inconvenient. You can claim to value accountability, but people will remember who carried the blame when the decision went wrong.
Leadership is not defined by the values you claim when nothing is at stake. The values you defend when something is at stake define your leadership.
So perhaps we need to stop asking leaders what their values are. There is a much better question.
What are you prepared to tolerate?
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