Questions for Leaders: A Self-Examination

Thinking creatively about the choices open to us, and our responsibility to stand up for our values.

Mary C. Gentile is the creator and director of Giving Voice To Values, and author of Giving Voice To Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right (Yale University Press). Giving Voice to Values (GVV) is based at University of Virginia-Darden School of Business. It was first launched by Aspen Institute as Incubator & Founding Partner with Yale School of Management, then supported at Babson College 2009-16.

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I have spent my professional career advising on how to voice and enact our values in our organizational lives – and in our wider lives as well. As the (albeit incomplete and imperfect) principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights have increasingly come under threat, I have found myself reflecting on what my work might offer to those trying to preserve the best of what has been and correct the inconsistencies and errors that helped to bring us to this point.

In particular, I have been discouraged by the choices made by leaders of so many institutional pillars of our society, from powerful law firms to educational institutions to media to the military, as well as judicial and elected officials of our government. Although some of these individuals may not agree that they are participating in the dismantling of fundamental principles of our country’s functioning – things like free speech, due process, separation of powers, government transparency, the social safety net, election integrity, and so on – I believe that many others simply do not feel they can resist the pressures or risk the potential backlash if they do not comply with the demands of the Trump administration. They may hope that they can fly under the radar or, more self-interestedly, think they can reap benefits through compliance.

Given my professional focus creating an innovative pedagogical approach to values-driven leadership development called “Giving Voice To Values” (GVV), it feels somewhat hypocritical to claim that I cannot find a way to act — and to help others to act — in the service of my values, as our nation and our world face so many crises. Of course, the focus of my work, originally, was restricted to business ethics and business education. But this seems a thin and insufficient excuse for refraining from today’s challenges. And so I keep trying.

As I’ve written about before for The Renovator, GVV is about creating opportunities to pre-script, plan, rehearse and coach effective approaches to ethical challenges — to build a “moral muscle memory” — to increase the likelihood that we will act confidently, more comfortably and competently when faced with values conflicts. In this way, we can build a default to informed voice and action that counters the often automatic, even unconscious tendency to take the path of least resistance, later rationalizing why it was the “right thing” to do – or perhaps the only thing we could do.

Given years of work on this approach, I also recently wrote a post to share strategies and tactics that can enable us all to be more effective when we try to voice our values across the ideological differences we see all around us.

Now, in the past, sometimes people would question the usefulness of GVV by saying this work is focused on individuals when so many of the challenges we face are organizational realities (or societal realities or systemic realities) that cannot be overcome by the choices of any one individual. I would respond that of course, systemic issues must be approached systemically, and that means the process of change may be more long-term, more incremental, more complex. But it’s still individuals who operationalize this process, so we always come back to individuals at some point.

Yet the individual challenge for organizational leaders may feel different. Those of us not in leadership positions may wonder why such individuals don’t act more confidently, boldly, courageously, competently and morally when faced with values conflicts. I often hear from those not in formal leadership positions that it is too risky for them to voice and enact their values because they don’t have the authority, the positional power, or the networks to do so. But on the other hand, leaders sometimes say that they have so many different constituencies who rely on them and who are pressuring them that it would be easier for someone with less responsibility to act on their values.

And so the story goes. It seems that no one believes that they have the degrees of freedom to speak and act. Nevertheless, I do find individuals at every level in an organization who have found ways to act on their values, and I always want to learn from them.

Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash

While my previous essay was about conversational tactics for individuals communicating across differences, those in leadership positions may need something else. I think the same communication strategies I write about for individuals are useful here but perhaps a bigger problem is actually moving oneself, as a decision-maker, to cross that line — to use those strategies to stand up to pressures and inappropriate demands.

So rather than simply trying to share reasons for why these organizational leaders should stand up to inappropriate pressures — and avoid the “anticipatory obedience” that seems to only buy time, at best, and more often seems to invite further demands — I thought it might be useful to generate a list of questions that encourage decision-makers to think about their choices differently.

So what self-examination questions invite organizational leaders and decision-makers to think about their choices in new, useful and important ways?

• Is a sense of threat, of powerlessness, of “not having a choice,” actually something that we – paradoxically – do choose? In September, Timothy Snyder described how the Trump administration seemed prepared to use military forces on U.S. soil to enforce its agenda, but he asked an important question (emphasis mine):

“The terror, though, is largely up to us. Do we choose to be terrorized? There are those, such as undocumented workers, who have good reason to fear. And then there are those, many of the rest of us, who have an occasion to think and react creatively.”

• Are we falling prey to false dichotomies? For example, non-compliance with such demands, while potentially costly, is not necessarily an existential threat.

• Are we “victims” of unsought pressures and threats – or are we actors in our own story?

• Is there anything you would not do to try to protect the status quo in your organization?

• Is there anything you would not do to advance your organization’s survival?

• Is there anything you would not do to advance your organization’s profitability?

• What would happen if you decided to resist pressures from the administration? Who would you feel pressure from inside the organization? Outside the organization? How might you respond to their pressures? (That is, instead of only focusing on the potential costs of non-compliance, consider the “Giving Voice To Values Thought Experiment”: what if I were to act on my values? How could I be effective?)

• If you do not resist and the worst happens, what would that be? What would be left?

• If you do resist and the worst happens, what would that be? What would be left?

• Which of the two outcomes above would be better?

• Do you believe your organization can escape the worst? (If you do not resist? If you do resist?)

• What would make you believe the stakes were so high that you have to resist?

• If you resist, who are you afraid of facing/defying (now or later)?

• If you do not resist, who are you afraid of facing/defying (now or later)?

• Are there conversations you can have before declaring a decision that would both inform you of other viewpoints and also help your colleagues better understand your thinking?

• Are there people whom you think would support your decision to resist? Can you line up their support in advance?

• Who will oppose your decision to resist? How can you prepare for their push back?

• If the worst happens, how would you, the organization, and others survive that?

• Will you be comfortable talking about your decision? With whom? With whom would you not be comfortable talking about your decision? Why? How will you describe your decisions?

• If not you, who is responsible for upholding democratic principles, free speech, human rights, anti-corruption, etc.?

• If you comply with pressures to abandon your values, what does that do to you – emotionally, physically, psychologically, spiritually?

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I imagine that different leaders – different ones of you – will have different answers to these questions. But my thought is that you likely don’t need help with skills, confidence or communication strategies. You have those gifts or have colleagues and team members who do.

But you may need to step outside of your habitual set of advisors to really reflect on what is important to you; to your family; to your organization; your community; your nation; and our world.

And you might need to step away from all the voices warning you of the dangers and the threats, in order to ask: “what if” I were to act on what is important to me and my family and my organization and my nation and our world? You may need to give yourself the space and encouragement to consider how to act on your values, rather than simply asking whether you could.

And you might want to consider the counsel of Karl Weick, organizational psychologist and theorist, who wrote:

“We justify what we do, not by belief in its efficacy but by an acceptance of its necessity [emphasis mine]. … To view optimism as a duty rather than as something tied to unsteady expectations of success is to position oneself in a sufficient variety of places with sufficient confidence that events may be set in motion that provide substance for that hope.” (“Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems”, American Psychologist, January 1984).

By imagining how to be effective at voicing and enacting your values, you take the first step toward being effective at doing so. Don’t sell yourself short when it comes to the role you can – and truly, must – play in preserving the deepest values that our nation – and what you aspire to.