Every leader wants more than one thing at the same time.
We want growth and efficiency. We want speed and quality. We want innovation and predictability. We want employees to have autonomy and we want accountability. We want people to take risks and we want those risks managed.
That tension is the work.
In marketing, for example, they can tell their team that “We want more leads”. Great. There is a fairly straightforward way to get more leads: spend more money.
Except I also want the cost per lead to go down.
So now “get more leads” is not actually the assignment. The assignment is to generate more demand while becoming more efficient at generating it.
Safety works the same way. Of course everyone wants a safer workplace. But safety measures can slow things down. More checks take more time. More precautions can reduce speed. Suddenly two results we care about are competing with each other.
This happens everywhere in business because almost every result requires some kind of sacrifice.
The question is: what are you willing to sacrifice?
That’s where values enter the conversation.
Most companies have some version of integrity, accountability, people first, customer obsession, excellence, or innovation written down somewhere. And I believe most leaders genuinely mean those things when they write them down.
But saying you value integrity when honesty is convenient tells me very little about your culture.
Integrity gets interesting when telling the truth might cost you the deal.
Accountability gets interesting when owning the mistake could hurt your career.
Until there is tension, there isn’t much of a test.
I think this is where a lot of conversations about company values go wrong. We spend enormous amounts of time defining them, wordsmithing them, putting them on websites, introducing them at all hands meetings, and asking employees to remember them.
But your employees are not learning what you value from the words you chose.
They’re learning what you value by watching what happens when two things you say matter cannot both win.
This is why culture becomes clearest under pressure. Pressure forces choices.
And choices create experiences that tell people what the organization really believes.
Those decisions become stories. People repeat them. They shape beliefs about what gets rewarded, what gets punished, and what matters when things get difficult.
That’s culture.
So maybe the goal is to ask where your results are creating tension.
Where does growth conflict with efficiency? Where does speed conflict with safety? Where does customer experience conflict with margin? Where does accountability conflict with someone’s personal advantage?
Then look at what happens in those moments.
Elsewhere In Culture
Labor Protections with John Frehse
John Frehse joined me to talk about labor protections, below market wages, and what happens when decisions get made too far away from the people living with the consequences. We got into the tension between regulation and local judgment, and why leaders have to ask whether control from the top is actually helping or just making them feel safer. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000785461809 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PIBRZcRwNkilP1Dayk3oL?si=07c1778e03494cdd
The LLM Apocalypse
AI can create more information than we could ever possibly use. That means the work is shifting from producing to filtering. I looked at a Linux maintainer who deleted 138,000 lines of old code and asked the question every leader should probably be asking right now: what is the organizational equivalent of old code that we are still carrying around for no good reason? Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000785740351 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7D9q44aOtVcERyGkQgGNqX?si=c23f1255640242c4
Change Management vs. Change Activation
Change management can give people the map, the training, and the destination, but that does not mean the ship ever leaves the dock. I break down the difference between preparing people for change and actually getting them to take ownership of the result. Because responsibility can be assigned. Accountability has to be chosen. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ceo-daily-brief-with-dr-jessica-kriegel/id1725350421?i=1000786000042 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7tFs95hMxjVGTbo1u2Wh9P?si=db3b55dffba74d61
And coming later this week:
From “This Is How We’ve Always Done It” to Change Agents with Sabrina Hansford Henry
Sabrina Hansford Henry from the Georgia Department of Corrections joined me to share what culture change actually looked like inside one of the largest corrections systems in the country. Their success coaching program helped move academy graduation rates from 77.8% to 92.4%, and it started with a willingness to stop accepting “this is how we’ve always done it” as an answer.
How Change Actually Becomes Culture with Sabrina Hansford Henry
Culture becomes real when people start reinforcing it without waiting for leadership to tell them to. Sabrina and I talked about Culture Champions, Focused Recognition, Above the Line® behavior, and what changes when those ideas become part of everyday conversations instead of another initiative employees are expected to remember.