I spent years making decisions quickly, confidently, and from somewhere I couldn't name. The results were there. The performance was there. But if someone had asked me what I actually stood for, separate from the company's values poster and the leadership playbook I'd internalized, I wouldn't have had a clean answer.
I would have said something about integrity. Something about people. The words would have sounded right. They would have also been borrowed.
There's a difference between knowing your values and performing them. I was performing. The operating system I was running on had been assembled from every boss I'd admired, every culture I'd absorbed, every expectation I'd met without questioning whether it was mine. It worked. Until it didn't.
The crack showed up in discomfort. Not the obvious kind, not a blowup or a firing or a crisis. The quieter kind. A decision I made that technically checked every box but left me feeling hollowed out. A conversation where I said the right thing and felt like a stranger saying it. A hire I knew was wrong but couldn't articulate why, because on paper nothing was wrong.
That's how values announce themselves when they've been ignored. They don't show up as clarity. They show up as friction.
I started paying attention to the friction. Not the strategic kind, not the operational kind. The kind that lives in the body. The tight jaw after a meeting where I compromised something I didn't have language for yet. The low-grade dread before a conversation I should have been fine with. Something was being violated, and I didn't know what it was because I'd never named it.
So I did something I'd never done in fifteen years of leadership. I sat down and tried to figure out what I actually believed. Not what I'd been taught. Not what the culture rewarded. What was mine.
It was harder than any strategic plan I'd ever built. Strategy has frameworks. Values, real ones, resist frameworks. They live in the space between what happened and how it felt. The moments that lit me up and the moments that made me want to leave the room. Both were data. I'd only been reading half of it.
What I found surprised me. Some of the values I thought were central turned out to be inherited. Loyalty, for instance. I'd have said loyalty was a core value without hesitation. But when I looked at how I'd actually behaved in moments of conflict, what I valued was honesty, even when it cost loyalty. I'd been telling myself one story and living another.
The discomfort was the more honest teacher. Every time I'd felt that nameless friction, there was a value underneath it asking to be recognized. Not a moral. Not an ethic. Something more personal than that. A principle I'd been operating from without ever making it conscious.
Once I named them, everything shifted. Not the results, at first. The decisions. They got slower, which scared me. They also got cleaner. I stopped optimizing for outcomes I didn't actually care about. I started saying no to things that would have been easy yeses a year earlier. The team noticed before I did.
A leader who doesn't know what they stand for will stand for whatever the room requires. I did that for years. I was good at it. And it was slowly making me someone I didn't recognize.
The values weren't hiding. I just hadn't thought to look.