WHEN VALUES BECOME SLOGANS🌫️

WHY REPEATING VALUES IS NOT THE SAME AS LIVING THEM

Nov 28, 2025

There is a German expression that speaks volumes: “Nach außen hui, nach innen pfui”, which would translate to: “ Shiny on the outside, shabby on the inside.”
It captures something I keep noticing in companies, in leadership, and in life: how easily we polish what’s visible and neglect what actually matters.

Everywhere, values are declared — on websites, in boardrooms, in personal mission statements, and even in affirmations. Words like integrity, authenticity, and empathy are the social currency of our time. We use them to signal belonging, to suggest depth, to reassure others that we are, in fact, “one of the good ones.” And yet, the more we repeat them, the less they seem to mean.

I am the last person to be cynical about values themselves. I believe in them deeply — maybe too deeply at times. What unsettles me is how they are spoken about: as decoration rather than direction, as branding rather than behaviour. I’ve been in conversations where entire teams could recite their company’s values verbatim, and yet the atmosphere in the room told a very different story — cautious, guarded, performative. It’s the same feeling you get in any relationship where words say one thing and tone says another. There is a reason why I judge people by their actions and not their words.

When values become slogans, they lose their moral weight. They stop asking anything of us. They become statements of identity instead of tools for self-examination. It’s a quiet kind of hypocrisy that seeps in, often unintentional — the kind that happens when speaking the right words feels like the same as living them, even when you don’t. The declaration becomes enough.

What troubles me most is the fatigue that follows. The gap between word and action doesn’t just damage trust; it drains vitality. You can feel it in organisations, in teams, even in yourself — that dull exhaustion that comes from pretending coherence when you know it is simply not there.

Maybe that’s the real work of leadership now: not inventing new values, but breathing life back into the ones you once held true.

When Values Drift

That drift rarely starts with bad intentions or a scandal. It begins with small mismatches—between what is promised and what is permitted, between what is celebrated in public and what is rewarded in private.

In the beginning, the words are true — they name what we genuinely believe. But then the daily noise begins: the targets, the deadlines, the fear of missing expectations. Slowly, the words that once guided us turn into armour. They serve to protect our image instead of our integrity. Little by little, the inside stops keeping pace with the outside. The difference feels harmless at first: an exception here, a convenient shortcut there. But culture learns by imitation, not instruction. When people see that talk matters more than truth, the lesson spreads quietly and usually very quickly. And it doesn’t start with one person or one policy; it’s contagious. The erosion of values doesn’t arrive with a crash; it hums in the background.

I have observed companies where values were displayed on every wall, yet meetings felt heavy, cautious, and even performative. People smiled at the right moments but said less and less of what they really thought. Over time, trust thinned. People learned that the safest thing was to stay agreeable.
When words lose credibility, energy follows. Curiosity fades. Initiative shrinks. What was once collaboration becomes compliance.

There is an English saying that actions speak louder than words, and, in this context, it could not be truer. You can repeat a slogan as often as you like—it will never make it true. Repetition only amplifies the emptiness when behaviour doesn’t match. A value that isn’t visible in action becomes background noise; people stop hearing it.

In German we say, Der Fisch fängt immer vom Kopf an zu stinken—the fish starts rotting from the head. It’s blunt, but accurate. Culture follows leadership.
If a leader doesn’t embody the values they preach, why should anyone else? The tone, the ethics, the courage, or the caution of an organisation all begin there. You cannot outsource integrity. You have to lead your own ship.

Real leadership isn’t about having the perfect set of principles and values written down somewhere; it’s about alignment—between the word spoken, the action taken, and the example set. When that alignment slips, the entire system drifts with it.

Restoring Lived Values

Once trust begins to erode, no statement can repair it. Words can name an intention, but only behaviour rebuilds belief. The work of restoring coherence — between what is said and what is done — is slow, unglamorous, and deeply personal. It begins long before a strategy or a workshop; it begins with the willingness to look honestly at the gap.

Values recover their strength when they are tested.
When a leader chooses to speak plainly instead of spinning.
When a team admits that the inside no longer matches the outside — and stops pretending it does.
When decisions begin to reflect what is right, not just what is defensible.

The path back to living values and integrity is not dramatic; it is repetitive. It happens in quiet corrections — in the small, consistent moments when people decide that congruence matters more than convenience. Over time, those small adjustments change the atmosphere. The tone softens. Conversations become real again. Energy, once lost to pretence, returns to purpose.

Values are not about perfection; it is continuity. It’s the discipline of returning — again and again — to what you claim to stand for. It’s also humility, the courage to acknowledge that drift happens to everyone, and the maturity to notice it before it turns into rot.

When alignment returns, you can always feel it. Trust stops being managed and becomes natural and real again. People start to speak with ease, because they no longer have to translate between language and reality. That is what gives an organisation, a team, or a person their real strength — coherence — and a return to lived values.

In the end, values are not what we write down; they are the quiet commitments that remain when the slogans fade, the pattern that holds when no one is watching.

Perhaps that is the essence of leadership — not inventing new values or virtues, but remembering the ones that made you worthy of trust in the first place.

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Maybe the point isn’t to get it right all the time, but to notice faster when we don’t.
Every person, every team, every company drifts — that’s simply human. What matters is whether we are willing to stop, look, and realign before the words lose their meaning.
Because the real test of values is not how well we talk about them, but how quickly we return to them when we drift.

🎶My Song for you

I chose Man In The Mirror by Michael Jackson simply because it is an amazing song and it does always start with us…

For more good music, go to this Spotify playlist where you can find all the songs from the Change & Evolve Letters!

📚My Poem for you

Is by Langston Hughes (1901—1967)

Dream Deferred

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore–
And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?