Hey Changemakers,
Years ago, I committed to riding my bike within a two-mile radius of home and office. It’s a deeply rooted practice and a small way I can reduce my carbon footprint. Having my bike in working order demands regular attention: the chain, the brakes, and the occasional trip to the shop to true a wheel that’s gone wobbly. There is no set-it-and-forget-it.
So it was interesting when I recently met a nonprofit with a values problem. You wouldn’t know it from the outside. A few years back, the team workshopped a beautiful set of organizational values: powerful, specific, the kind of thing you want to cross-stitch in pretty colors and hang in the lobby. They rolled them out with fanfare. And here’s the part that matters: When they wrote them, they were true.
Then we started digging into everyday processes. Who got promoted last year, and why? How did the senior team handle the big conflict last quarter? When the ED is under pressure, what gets cut first?
The answers looked nothing like the wall.
Nobody Lied. The Wheel Warped.
Here’s what I want you to hear: Nobody at this organization was a hypocrite. The values didn’t fail. They drifted.
Values drift the way a bicycle wheel goes out of true. The wheel still turns. You still get where you’re going. But it doesn’t roll quite straight anymore, and you’ve been compensating for so long you don’t notice the wobble. No single spoke broke. A hundred small decisions each bent things a millimeter, and every one of them felt reasonable at the time.
And drift shows up first in the most sensitive places. The organization that values “collaboration” promotes its lone-wolf rainmaker because the revenue is just too good to argue with. Everyone updates their understanding of the real rules within a week. Or the one that values “investing in our people,” then cuts professional development first, every single time. Nobody even debates it anymore. And that’s exactly when cynicism starts to breed.
You won’t find your real values in a document. You’ll find them in behavior and decisions, in who got the benefit of the doubt after a mistake, and in what survived the last budget crunch. Those patterns are the organization telling you what it actually values right now. Your job is to listen, even when the answer stings.
If you’re wincing a little as you read this, welcome. This is the newsletter where we wince together and then do something about it.
Recalibration Is a Leadership Habit
Because drift is subtle, the antidote has to be, too. Not a dramatic re-visioning retreat. A habit: regularly checking the gap between your stated values and your operational reality, the way a good mechanic trues a wheel before the ride, not after the crash.
In practice, that looks like a decision flagged before it sets a precedent (“We said community input was a priority. If we skip that step now, we won’t do it later”). It looks like guardrails built in anticipation of drift, like promotion criteria that weigh alignment with values, not just performance metrics.
And it should almost always be a leadership conversation because operational reality largely reflects what leaders tolerate, reward, and model. (A favorite book, The Primes, makes this abundantly and uncomfortably clear).
Yes, “actions speak louder than words” is a cliché. It became one by being relentlessly true. Your team is watching what you do, not what the poster says. Truing the wheel means committing to one or two specific behavioral changes, making them visible, and staying the course.
I keep coming back to something I heard from a leader years ago: His senior team was evaluated by staff on how well they were living the values. Staff grading leadership. Imagine. You can start a gentler version of that conversation with one question for your team: What behaviors are we tolerating that we shouldn’t be?
The answers will tell you nearly everything.
Until next time,
Kimberley
