(February 3, 2025 Newsletter)
One of the more agonizing experiences my clients face is when they feel pulled between organizational expectations and their own personal principles. Here are some examples:
You’re asked to relay instructions or bad news with which you disagree.
You’re disciplined for something you don’t think you did wrong.
You’re asked to enforce a policy you think is counterproductive or misguided.
What do you do? How do you reconcile the gap between your personal and organizational values?
Why it matters
For all the talk of democratizing power in organizations, there remain substantial aspects of our work life that are dictated from above.
As a middle manager, I imagine this experience is familiar. Even in an organization where you feel mission aligned, a fundamental reason that your role exists is to bridge between senior leadership and individual contributors (and laterally too).
Even if you are on senior management, the CEO will still sometimes dismiss your recommendation or you’ll be outvoted by the rest of the exec team.
Even as CEO, it still sometimes happens that the board or an influential individual asks you to take a direction that seems wrong to you.
Knowing how to identify what exactly is bothering you about the situation enables you to choose your next steps from a place of grounded leadership, instead of reactivity.
With a clear mind, it’s easier to decide what to do than when you’re tense or angry.
How to reconcile the dissonance
Identify the experience. The first step is to notice how you’re feeling and the narrative running through your mind. Are you feeling annoyed? Betrayed? Pulled in many directions? Squeezed? Pressured? Sometimes the clash is stark and emotions run high, and other times the gap isn’t that wide and emotions are tamer.
Make space around it. Getting specific with Step 1 can begin to ease the tension because it forces you to pause and see yourself from outside the situation. The thought “This is going to be such a disaster” becomes “I’m feeling nervous about relaying this bad news.” Already, without doing anything else, the strong conviction that this conversation will lead to a disaster is replaced.
Name the values. The main question here is this: Which values are in conflict? In the above example, it might be that your care for this individual is coming into conflict with your sense of responsibility to the organization, or alternatively that your sense of justice is clashing with the organization’s focus on efficiency.
What are you curious about? Following up on my recent newsletter on my core value of learning, it’s helpful to go to a place of curiosity to lower the temperature. If you finish the question “How can I…?” you’ll begin moving toward action that reconciles the gap in one of a few directions.
Take the long view. Some other questions you can consider are: When you look back on this moment in 10, 20, 30 years, what will this moment have helped you clarify about your leadership approach? Or what will make you proud to report to your grandchildren about how you handled yourself?
Choose your next steps accordingly. Consider short- and long-term options. In the short term, you might want to try and elicit an explanation from the decision maker before relaying the bad news; or attempt one last time to push back before the final call is made; or do what you’ve been asked in a way that still holds “justice” or “care” close. Depending on the outcome, in the long-term, there might be a voice inside telling you to find a place where your values are more aligned.
Final thought: Instead of shooting from the hip in a way that you might regret (or procrastinating endlessly out of a sense of paralysis), I hope that the above guidance can help you lower the heat and gain some perspective.
Understanding the values that are in conflict sets you up to seek alignment, to be proactive and decisive, even when the choices laid out before you seem bad at first.
The Coaching Corner
When an answer is insufficient
There are times when your Spidey Sense tells you that an answer you just got from a team member isn’t enough. They might not have given enough detail to make you confident in their response, or they put a sunny spin on something you don’t think is going well.
You can – and should – dig deeper to get more information. Here are some ways to do so:
We’re all aiming for the best results here, so could you tell me more?
It sounds like we’re making progress. What’s your level of confidence?
As a reminder, the end result we’re aiming for is _______, so how close are we?
Note that none of these questions are closed (generate yes/no answers). They all require more detail to fill in the picture for you.
Recommendations
Thank you, Alena, for responding to my request last week for a Mel Robbins episode to start listening to her podcast. Here’s “How to make the next year your best year: ask yourself these 7 questions.” (Also, I’ve never watched a podcast before! What a new experience.)
“Leaders shouldn’t try to do it all” – a new HBR article that got me thinking about identifying and leaning into your competitive advantage. Even without being the former CEO of Lego or P&G, we can learn from this principle.
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