The Same Person at Church, at Work, and at Home
I've made a promise to everyone I work with. If you meet me at church, at work, or at home, you meet the same Anna. Not a different version depending on the room. If you ever catch a gap between what I say and what I actually do, I want you to name it. I'm not offering that as a slogan for the wall. I'm offering it as an invitation to hold me accountable, because I've watched too many leaders let their public self and their private self drift apart, quietly, until nobody, including them, could tell which one was real anymore. Values-based leadership in business isn't a phrase I keep in a strategy deck. It's a promise, and I expect people to test it.
Why I Say It Out Loud
A private commitment is easy to break. Nobody's watching, so nobody notices when it slips. A promise you say out loud is different. It puts other people in the room with you, and it gives them permission to ask, gently or not so gently, whether you're still keeping it.
That's the long story of why I don't just try to be consistent privately and hope it shows. I say it, on purpose, to the people I lead, because I want them checking my work. I want the person who reports to me to feel just as free to notice a disconnect as the person who sits next to me at church. Integrity at work doesn't survive on good intentions. It survives on people close enough to you, people you trust enough, to say something when the words and the actions stop matching.
I'll say plainly, this isn't about religion, and I'm not interested in anyone feeling like they need to share my faith to sit at this table. Faith is where my own promise comes from. What I'm asking for is simpler and available to anyone: be the same person no matter which room you're standing in.
When It Would Be Easier to Slip
The big moments rarely tempt me to slip. Usually it's the small, tired ones nobody's grading you on.
A deadline tempts you to soften a hard truth into something easier to deliver. A personnel decision means doing right by one person costs you an uncomfortable conversation with another, and it would be so much simpler to just avoid it another week. There's the version of you that shows up gracious and patient with a client, then short and distracted with the person who's been on your team long enough that you've stopped trying to impress them.
I've been tested on all three. One season, I let a hard conversation with someone on my team sit for weeks. I told myself I was being kind by waiting. I wasn't. I was avoiding the version of leadership that costs something. When I finally had the conversation, it went better than I'd let myself imagine, and it reminded me that it doesn't close on its own. Somebody has to walk into the harder room on purpose.
Values-driven business decisions rarely announce themselves as values decisions in the moment. Most of the time they show up as a five-minute exchange nobody else will remember, where you either say the true thing or the easier one.
What Values-Based Leadership in Business Buys You
Here's what I've come to believe after years of watching this play out both ways. People don't just admire consistency. They build on it.
Research on ethical and authentic leadership backs this up. When a leader's actions and words stay aligned, employees show measurably higher engagement and stronger trust in their leadership. It isn't about being likeable. It's about being predictable, in the way that lets people relax into the work instead of watching you. Other research on integrity in leadership points to the same pattern. Honest, consistent leaders build teams that give feedback more freely and hold themselves more accountable, because the leader modeled that it was safe to do so.
I've felt this in my own team. When people trust that the version of me in a hard meeting is the same version they'll get in an easy one, they stop spending energy managing me. They spend it on the actual work. That's what ethical decision making actually buys a business. It isn't a shinier reputation. It's a team that stops bracing and starts building.
One thing you can do this week: Pick one place in your week where the private you and the public you might not fully match, a conversation you've been softening, a standard you hold your team to but quietly let yourself skip. Close that distance, on purpose, before the week ends. Don't wait for a bigger moment to prove it. The small ones are the actual proof.
The Test Never Really Ends
I don't say all this because I've mastered it. I say it because I haven't, and because naming the promise out loud is the only way I know to keep myself honest about it. Some weeks I close the distance well. Some weeks I catch it late. Either way, the people around me know what they're allowed to hold me to, and that matters more to me than looking like I've already arrived.
If this is on your mind, you might also enjoy The Trust You Build Before You Need It, where I write more about what actually earns a team's confidence long before you need it. And if you're wondering where any of this comes from, Meet Anna has more of the story.