Leadership Through Values

One Dilemma. Four Sets of Values. Four Very Different Businesses.

At our most recent CBSL Onyx members’ day, we ran an exercise I haven’t stopped thinking about since. One business. One genuinely difficult decision. Four teams — each handed a different set of company values and asked to solve it. By the end, one thing was obvious: the values a business chooses don’t just sit on a wall. They decide what the business actually does.

The set-up was deliberately simple. We gave every team the same company and the same problem, and then changed only one thing between them — the values they had to work to.

The company — which I’ll keep anonymous — is the kind most owners would be proud of. A B2B services business, five straight years of growth, healthy margins, strong customer scores, and shareholders expecting another 15% next year. On paper, a success story.

The problem sat right inside that success. One of their star performers — I’ll call him Kevin — personally generates around a quarter of the company’s revenue. Clients love him. He wins the biggest accounts. He mentors the juniors who look up to him. He is also, over the last eighteen months, the reason four people have left the business, the subject of formally documented HR concerns, and the colleague several managers now simply refuse to work with. Belittling people in meetings. Taking the credit for other people’s work.

So here is the dilemma every leader recognises, even the ones who’d never say it out loud: what do you do about the person who is very good for the numbers and very bad for the culture?

Same facts. Four different lenses.

Then we added the twist. Each of the four teams was given a different value set to solve exactly the same problem:

• Extreme Growth — pace, growth, win-win, decisive.
• Employee Democracy — fairness, every voice matters, transparency, community.
• Customer Obsession — customer is king, trust, loyalty, resilience.
• Principle-Centred — discipline, consistency, fairness, trust.

Same person. Same numbers. Same eighteen months of history. Four different ways of looking at it.

And what happened next was the whole point of the exercise. The teams didn’t drift towards the same sensible compromise. They went in genuinely different directions. The growth-led team built a plan to keep Kevin and manage around him — support, flexibility, incentives to bring the juniors through, a review in a few months — all argued neatly back to pace and win-win. A team working to fairness and transparency was far more willing to confront the behaviour head-on, whatever the short-term cost to revenue. The values didn’t decorate the decision. They drove it.

Watching directors defend their decisions — presenting to the rest of the room as if to their own shareholders — you could see the penny drop. We all like to think we make decisions on the facts. We don’t. We make them through our values, whether we’ve ever named them or not. The only real question is whether we’ve chosen those values deliberately, or let them form by accident.

The bit that made the room go quiet

To close, the facilitator showed us something none of us saw coming. An AI-generated forecast of where each of those four businesses would be in twelve months’ time — revenue, profit, staff turnover, engagement, leadership trust — based purely on the value set each team had used to make its decision.

The differences were stark. One route grew the fastest and quietly hollowed out the culture. One protected its people and worried the board. One delighted its customers and burned out its staff. One kept its integrity and paid for it in pace. Four honest businesses. Four very different places to be in a year.

I’m not going to give the numbers away here — they land far harder when you see all four side by side. But if you’d like to see what the forecast actually showed, leave a comment below and I’ll share it.

What members took from the day

I asked a few members afterwards what they’d got from the session. The answers were telling:

• “It made me decide to go straight back and ask whether our values are actually the ones driving our decisions — or just words on the website.”
• “I recognised our own Kevin within about thirty seconds. I left with a much clearer idea of how to handle it.”
• “Seeing the same problem solved four completely different ways was worth the day on its own.”
• “This is the board you can’t afford, doing what it does best.”

That last line is one we use a lot about Onyx. Days like this are exactly why.

Could you have been in that room?

CBSL Onyx is an invitation-only community of company directors who meet to work on precisely these questions — the ones that are hard to take anywhere else. Our sessions are deliberately small, because the conversations are better that way, but we always welcome a few guests who’d like to experience one before deciding whether it’s right for them.

If reading this made you think about your own business — your own values, your own Kevin — I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a message.

And if you want to know what that twelve-month forecast showed… you know what to do. Leave a comment.