Somebody on your leadership team has spent the last three months irritated by things that should not matter very much: a report that arrives a day late, a process that changed without warning, a colleague who keeps raising the same point. Yet the irritation keeps returning, attached to something different each time, and the decision that ought to have settled the matter keeps reappearing on your agenda under a slightly different name.
What you are looking at is very often a values conflict, and the most uncomfortable thing about values conflicts is that the person carrying one usually describes it as somebody else’s problem. I have just spent several weeks doing exactly that myself.
I Thought It Was About My Horses
This autumn I received notice to leave the home I was renting, and with the home went the large field where my horses could run whenever they chose. They now live at a yard with very little grazing, so every morning somebody has to turn them out and every evening somebody has to bring them in. That routine does not always fit my commitments, which means I now rely on other people to help me keep it.
I told everybody who asked that this was a conflict about my horses, because I value them living as naturally as possible. Then I watched them walking towards the gate on a cold, wet evening because they actually wanted to come in, and I had to admit that they were coping considerably better than I was. The conflict I had been describing as theirs was mine, and it sat between giving them space to move and protecting my own freedom.
Two Values Can Travel Together For Years Without Ever Being Aligned
What took me longest to see was why I had never noticed the conflict before. The field had been satisfying both values at once, giving the horses their freedom to move and giving me the freedom to check on them whenever it suited me. One arrangement quietly served two values, so I assumed they were the same thing.
Leadership teams live inside this pattern constantly. Very often the thing holding two values together is a condition rather than a decision. While revenue climbs quickly, a business can value generosity with headcount and discipline on margin without anybody having to choose between them. When growth slows or the founder steps back, the team discovers that those values were never aligned at all, because they had only ever been subsidised. In the episode I describe watching the most extreme version of this from inside Arthur Andersen, and what happened to one particular values statement when its subsidy disappeared.
Right Versus Right Is Far Harder Than Right Versus Wrong
Rushworth Kidder drew a distinction in How Good People Make Tough Choices that every executive ought to carry with them. A choice between right and wrong is a temptation, and most capable leaders handle temptations well because they know which side they are meant to be on. A choice between right and right is a dilemma, and dilemmas are considerably harder, because whichever way you go you give up something you genuinely believe in.
Four Signs You Are Already Carrying One
- A decision keeps coming back. You believe something is settled, and a fortnight later it returns under a new name because the tension underneath it was postponed rather than resolved.
- Your reaction is out of proportion to the event. That surplus emotion is usually information about a value being squeezed somewhere else.
- You find yourself building a case. Leon Festinger’s work on cognitive dissonance in 1957 showed that when our actions and beliefs disagree, we usually adjust the belief rather than the action, so a very good argument for why everything is fine deserves suspicion.
- You describe your conflict as somebody else’s problem. The version I hear most often is a chief executive telling me the team is not ready for more responsibility, when the team is perfectly ready and the leader has not yet decided between holding control and being free of the detail.
The Horse Reads Your State Rather Than Your Story
A horse does not respond to the reason you give yourself for being at the gate. It responds to the state you bring with you, so if you arrive resenting the routine while telling yourself you are doing it for the horse’s sake, the horse reads the resentment and ignores the story. Your team does precisely the same thing, only more slowly and more politely, and the commercial cost shows up as capable people who quietly stop bringing you the decisions you say you want them to take.
Two Places To Start
The first is to name the conflict accurately, including whose it is. Say aloud which two values are pulling against each other and which one is winning this season, because a choice that has been spoken can be reviewed, while a choice that stays unspoken simply hardens into habit.
The second is to separate the value from the arrangement you have welded it to. Steven Hayes, who developed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, describes values as directions rather than destinations, which means there is almost always more than one way of honouring them. In the episode I add two further approaches, one borrowed from Barry Johnson’s work on polarities and one from Roger Martin’s on integrative thinking, along with a harder question about freedom that I had to put to myself.
So here is the question worth carrying into your week. Which condition in your business is currently holding two of your values together, and what will your leadership team discover about itself on the day that condition disappears?
Listen to the full episode of Impactful Teamwork to hear the rest of the story and the four ways I am working through my own conflict. Then take the Entrenched Leadership Dynamics Diagnostic and find out which patterns are already shaping decisions in your business.
Or join us at our next executive forum, where we work through exactly this question with leaders of scaling businesses and pressure-test what human leadership needs to look like alongside the technology. Register your place here
Show Notes
00:50 Horse Move Story
03:50 Values Conflict Defined
06:38 Moral Distress vs Dilemma
08:42 When Conditions Change
2:23 Spotting Values Conflicts
15:50 Values vs Goals Clarity
17:42 Herd Lessons on Freedom
18:56 Four Ways to Resolve
22:26 Weekly Leadership Challenge
23:32 Wrap Up and Resources
