Managing a Values-Actions Gap
Imagine looking across the street and witnessing a helpless person being battered by someone much bigger and stronger. But instead of intervening, all you do is toss that person a pair of boxing gloves and declare, “Well he’s certainly no longer welcome in my restaurant.”
That’s how I’ve felt the last week watching the war on Ukraine and the response of Western powers to it.
I certainly get the intellectual arguments for their strategy of sanctions and aid over direct military intervention—indeed, avoiding WWIII is a worthy objective, and the Ukranians may ultimately wear down their opponents without direct intervention, even if it comes after a lengthy and brutal fight. But even if that’s intellectually right—which is impossible to know in real time—the current response is definitely emotionally dissatisfying.
It also makes me respect leaders less when they describe the situation with high-minded moral indignation—War crimes! Atrocities!—and in the next breath, say that they won’t do anything about it. I’d respect it more if they said, “It’s not good, but I don’t believe in trying to fix everything that’s bad.”
When one boldly declares a value like “Never again!” but then subsequently avoids acting on that value when given the opportunity, it destroys credibility. It creates a values-action gap.
[On the Now & Then podcast, history professors Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman discussed how President Zelensky’s main contribution to his country’s war effort was making it a values challenge for Western powers. Ezra Klein’s podcast this past week made a similar point.]
Coincidentally, the latest issue of Harvard Business Review contains a series of articles about the role of purpose and values in companies, and how those companies can seek to balance their values with their financial interests.
In the article “The Messy but Essential Pursuit of Purpose,” Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati draws a distinction between deep purpose companies and others. He writes, “Deep purpose companies thoroughly embed their purpose in their strategy, processes, communications, human resources practices, operational decision-making, and even culture. Sadly, such enterprises are quite limited in number. The vast majority of companies practice what I call convenient purpose: They talk about purpose but act on it only in superficial ways.”
I’ve personally experienced several companies where values were overridden by near-term considerations because they were never “embedded,” as with deep purpose companies. The values were merely aspirations, which led to values-actions gaps that I experienced as real disappointment when they happened.
In contrast, I’ve seen values acted upon when the aspirations were converted to rules, controls, and business practices. The “if-then” was clear. For example, If it’s not a good use of the client’s money, tell them, and end the project. Ironically, witnessing a values-consistent business decision was emotionally fulfilling, even though it was, ironically, the easy decision to make, given that one only had to follow the rules.
Of course, it’s easy to sit on the sidelines and imagine values-consistent business decisions to be obvious and easy for companies to make. The Washington Post reported how Google and Apple were faced last fall with decisions of whether to allow access for Russian customers to an opposition party voting app. On one level, it’s a “values versus money” decision since those companies wanted to retain access to the market—except that in reality, it was a “values versus values” decision, since the Russian government was also intimidating their in-country employees and not allowing them to leave.
From the Post article: “Google executives disclosed the removal of the app in an internal email whose contrite tone suggests that the decision was not popular with some employees. ‘We resisted this position for as long as possible,’ the message said, ‘but nothing is more important to Google than the safety and well-being of our employees.’”
Surely, there are no easy answers in that situation.
Ranjay Gulati says that deep purpose companies take these challenges head on. He writes, “Deep purpose companies and their leaders resist the urge to dodge tough decisions. Instead they are willing to linger in a space of discomfort, ambiguity, and contradiction.”
And instead of speaking in platitudes about the values, these leaders are forthright about what is possible, what’s not, and where they hope to be in the future. Gulati writes, “When making trade-offs, it’s critical to explain the logic behind your decisions so that stakeholders understand how they connect to and support purpose.”
For me, this is the key for leaders to maintain credibility with their teams when it’s difficult to fully close the values-actions gap. It’s not a matter of abandoning values because they’re hard to live up to. Rather, it’s a push to engage people in why it’s hard, which might just deepen their commitment to solve the challenge.