Leadership is Political | Part 2: The Values Gap
Most organisations have values, but pressure reveals whether they are commitments or simply branding. In this episode, Chisom explores why the gap between stated and lived values is a feature of organisational design, not just hypocrisy, and what leaders, managers, and employees can do when the values they were promised no longer hold.
With Chisom Udeze, Solo
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Show Notes
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.