#581 Values Are Not an Elevator Poster: Why Leadership Only Proves Itself Under Pressure | Article by Niels Brabandt

Values Are Not an Elevator Poster: Why Leadership Only Proves Itself Under Pressure

Ask any executive whether values matter in leadership, and the answer is almost always an immediate yes. Walk the same building thirty minutes later, once something becomes economically uncomfortable, and those same values often quietly evaporate. That gap between stated values and lived behaviour is worth examining properly, and last week's largest HR decision-maker expo in Europe provided an unusually clear example of exactly why it matters.

A Two-Minute Aside After the Keynote

Niels Brabandt was once again the opening keynote speaker across all three days at Zukunft Personal in Cologne, addressing the HR Roundtable, the largest network of decision-makers for decision-makers across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. After the professional content of his keynote, he added something he rarely does: a two-minute personal statement. He had been in Berlin during Pride, the day a terrorist attack took place there, and he told the audience that HR work carries real responsibility for democratic attitude and for free, equal and human rights, since the workplace is the second most influential place, after private life, where people absorb democratic values. The public response was overwhelmingly positive. What followed afterwards, however, was more revealing: several people wrote privately to object, all of them aligning themselves, entirely unprompted, with a specific far-right party that Germany's own domestic intelligence and constitutional protection services classify as confirmed right-wing extremist. Nobody had been named. The objection named itself.

The Elevator Poster Problem

Most organisations have one somewhere: a poster listing company values, teamwork, respect, integrity, often installed in a lift, which is precisely why the industry nickname for it is the elevator poster. Employees walk past it, roll their eyes, and quietly wonder whether they joined the wrong company. The poster is not the problem. The problem is a leadership team that believes hanging it up counts as having values, right up until those values become inconvenient.

Management Is Not Leadership

It is worth separating two terms that get used interchangeably and should not be. Management means turning resources into value, a factory, a workforce, a finished product sold on the market. That is a legitimate and necessary function, and it has nothing to do with leadership on its own. Leadership begins where someone motivates people, keeps sickness rates down, keeps people wanting to come to work, and finds solutions that hold up over time. When orders suddenly spike, the difference becomes visible immediately. A manager issues an order: longer hours, shorter breaks, more pressure, a solution that often produces sick leave, injuries and resignations as a side effect. A leader sits down with the people doing the work and asks what could be organised differently, arriving at a solution people actually helped build.

The Good Weather Captain

Germany's rail network offers an uncomfortable illustration of what happens when management is mistaken for leadership. A former Deutsche Bahn chief executive was given a single political mandate: balance the books, achieve what is known in Germany as the Black Zero. He delivered it, on paper, by starving infrastructure and maintenance investment for years. Maintenance cycles kept slipping further back until a wheel failed inside Cologne station. No one was killed only because it happened at low speed inside a terminal rather than at full speed on the open line. He had technically achieved his target. He had also created a problem that will take a decade or more to repair. That is the essential test of leadership: anyone can captain a ship in calm water. What a leader is actually made of only becomes visible once the weather turns genuinely bad, which is exactly when most so-called leaders quietly turn back into managers, cutting jobs, cutting pay, and applying the least creative pressure available to them.

The Excuse Industry

The phrase that should worry any employee is the one many leaders use to justify staying silent on basic rights: it might cost us clients. Translated honestly, that sentence means the values were always for sale, and the price was simply never tested. The public speaking industry, in which Niels Brabandt also works, offers one of the clearer examples: associations in both Germany and the United States have explicitly advised speakers to avoid political statements on social media because it might put off paying clients, which, translated, means the money is welcome regardless of where it comes from. That is not neutrality. It is a value system with only one value, and it is not one worth admiring.

What Leaders Should Do Now

Taking a stand on free, equal and human rights has to be an explicit expectation set from the top and lived by the entire senior leadership team, not left to individual conviction, so that the standard carries through the whole organisation. Leaders who hold that line, particularly when times are hard, consistently see employees go the extra mile without being asked, stay loyal without demanding immediate compensation, and choose to work through difficulty together. Leaders who abandon their values the moment the economy dips see the opposite: rising sick leave, quiet disengagement, people doing the bare minimum and leaving the moment their contracted hours end. That outcome is never the employees' fault. It is a direct, predictable consequence of leadership that only ever performed values when performing them was free.

Niels Brabandt

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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify

For the videocast's and podcast's transcript, read below this article.

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Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nielsbrabandt

Website: www.NB-Networks.biz

Podcast and Videocast Transcript

Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc

Values and leadership, and taking a stand. And you're probably now thinking, yeah, I know these moments when leaders say, "Oh, it's all about values," and 30 minutes later they forgot about all of that. And of course, that's not how it should be, but there is a specific reason why we opened this topic this week. We had the largest decision-maker expo in Europe just last week. The future of people development happened in Cologne, called Succurs Personal, which translates to "future HR," but it's about everything regarding organizational and people development. This expo always sets the direction for what's happening this year, and of course next year.

What happened there was, I'm very grateful for being booked again as the opening keynote speaker on all of the three days. I was there at the HR roundtable, which is Germany's largest network — Germany, Austria, Switzerland — largest network of decision-makers, for decision-makers, by decision-makers in that space. And after I gave my opening keynote, I decided to do one thing, which I usually do not do: I made a personal statement. I usually don't do that during my keynotes, but at this expo, and at this point in time, especially in Germany, it felt necessary. And turns out it was.

What I talked about in about 2 minutes was that I was in Berlin during the Pride, where we had the terrorist attack. You might have heard of that. And the only thing I said there is that HR work is crucially important regarding showing people democratic attitude and the right attitude towards free, equal, and human rights. That's what I said. After our private lives, work is the second most decisive moment where people learn about the importance of democracy.

And it was quite interesting to see, after I made this very personal statement, I received a lot of support, especially publicly all over there. But of course, and no worries, I'm not surprised about that, after the expo, a couple of people wrote me emails specifically. They all supported the same party, which was the AFD. I didn't mention the AFD in the slightest in my whole statement. It's the equivalent to Reform or to the Rassemblement National in France. So extreme far-right winged, however, the German version of their party also is confirmed by the Secret Service and by the Constitution Protection Service to be extreme, extremist far-right wing. So far, far worse than the other versions you have in other countries.

And still, some people said, "Why do you criticize that? I have the right to my opinion. Why do you say something like that in public?" It's quite interesting. I never mentioned your party, but immediately, when I talk about the people who do terrorist attacks and are far-right wingers, you seem to identify with that kind of group and align your party in that phrase in the same instant, in the same moment. Quite interesting, isn't it? And it's interesting how you see how certain leaders react to these moments and how other leaders react in that moment. So we have to talk about how important it is to take a stand in leadership.

And very important here, this post — sorry, this podcast — is not about politics. There will be no political statement in here. So why is it so important? First, of course, we have to talk about in which situation we actually are. The situation is quite tense at the moment, because at the moment we often see people who say, "Well, we have values in our company," and, you know, we have these posters on the wall where they say, "Oh, our values are teamwork and appreciation and respect." And in Europe, we usually call these posters "elevator posters," because what happens often is that people get to work, suddenly there's a poster in the elevator, and they say, "Oh, look, have you seen this? This value thing where they say respect and teamwork? Did I go to the wrong company?" Because that's not us, is it? And that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Many people mix up two different terms. They say, "Oh, I'm a leader because I'm a team lead at the local call center. I'm a leader because I'm leading the sales department. I'm a leader because I'm leading the finance department." Here are the news. You're not automatically a leader because the title tells you that you are. We distinguish two very specific terms: management on the one side and leadership on the other side. And when I often ask people, "What's the difference between management and leadership?" they cannot name the difference. Which, by the way, also tells me that they never, in their whole life, had a single leadership training.

Because leadership is not management, and management is not leadership. Both, of course. You hardly can be a great leader when you are a bad manager, and you hardly ever can be a great manager when you are a bad leader. So they go hand in hand. But you need to know what the difference of the two is. Management means nothing else than turning resource into values. And I give you a very simple example. Let's say you have a factory building, you have a ton of resources, you have a group of workers, and you need to produce a certain product which will be sold on the market that brings in the money. Doing that, making people assemble something, and then you sell on the market, is not leadership. It's called management. Because what you do is you turn resources into values. Nothing else.

So, of course, you could now say, "Well, I don't need anything more. We just need management. We don't need leadership, do you?" Let's just say you have the following situation. Suddenly someone says, "Oh, we have more orders than we actually can handle, but we need to deliver on time, and I don't think we have enough. I don't think we have enough products ready on Friday." And then you very quickly see who is a manager and who is a leader.

The manager will very quickly say, "Oh, okay, so I hereby give the order. Everyone stays two hours longer, and our breaks are cut today and tomorrow, and basically for the whole week, because you know work's happening." That's a typical management reaction. You exit to the first thing you do, working with orders immediately, not listening to anyone. You probably solve the situation for now with a certain side effect: people calling in sick afterwards or during the day, a higher level of injuries, probably legal complication with that, people quitting their jobs so you have no workers at all left. All of that happens when you're only a manager.

A leader would now say, "Hey, let's talk with the people. What can we do?" And maybe they say, "Hey, I think we do a couple of things very inefficiently. Let's do it that way. And probably I can do a bit more here. These people can work a bit longer on Monday. Someone else can come in earlier on Tuesday. A couple of people can stay longer on Wednesday. Others can't."

So we organize it in a way that we get the amount of pieces together, together in communication. That's very simple and probably a bit oversimplified, but that's an example of leadership. Leadership means you find a solution which sustainably works. Because managers only have one answer, and these answers are not very creative. More working hours, less breaks, more pressure. That's a typical management decision. It has nothing to do with leadership. Because what you have here is someone turned resources into values, and they achieved a certain goal, in this case, producing the pieces they want.

I have another example. If you ever went by train in Germany, you probably think, "Why is everything so delayed?" I give you an example. Because back in the days, when Mr. Gruber was the CEO of Deutsche Bahn, he got one job, and the job was, and that is something that politics forced him to do. Politics said, "You need to balance the books. We need to have what we call in Germany the Black Zero." So basically, balance books. So after a couple of years, he managed that Deutsche Bahn went to a Black Zero. So the books were balanced.

Oh, by the way, there was no investment in infrastructure. There was hardly any investment in maintenance. All the maintenance circles became longer and longer, pushed back further, further, further. That up to the point until a wheel of a train broke, fortunately, inside the Cologne train station, so no one was injured or died. If that had happened at 300 kilometers an hour, probably anyone in that train had been dead immediately. And then the CEO was fired and relieved from their job. And of course, you can say, "Well, he achieved his goal."

Well, when you sit there and you know that you achieved the goal with non-sustainable measures, anyone knows when you do not invest into maintenance or infrastructure, it will catch up with you in 5, 10, 15 years. And here are the news. It did. The German train system is in a horrible condition, and it'll take probably a decade to get it up to where it is, if not longer, because German public administration is not in the shape you need it to be for these kind of complex projects. So here we go. Management and leadership need to be distinguished.

The problem now is that often people say, "Yeah, I know. I talk with the people. We live by our values." Okay, do you? Perfect. Then you are a really good leader. However, what happens when the economy dips? Because then you see who is really a leader. When the economy dips, you will see who actually is a leader and who is a manager. Because most people say, "As soon as the economy dips, I am going full pressure." Cutting jobs, cutting pay, more hours, more pressure. The least creative solutions you can ever take, because they might work in the short run, but never in the long run.

When people see, "Oh, all our values of teamwork and working together and whatnot else get thrown under the bus as soon as the economy dips," well, here are the news. They find solutions for themselves as workers as well. More people call in sick. More people will quit. You have higher costs for recruiting. Your reputation on the market is horrible. No one shows up to work for you anymore. People will, of course, find shortcuts to create the bare minimum quality to get by. They show up the latest, they leave the earliest. And when you ask for the extra mile, they say, "Sorry, my working hours are completed. Wish you all the best from here. Good luck."

So as soon as the economy dips, you see who is just all talk, no trousers, and who are the people who actually live by their actions. People who live by their actions are the ones you need here. Because as soon as the economy dips, you see who is really a leader and who is nothing else than a good weather leader, as we call them. Good weather means when you're a captain on a ship and the weather is good, you don't need to be a great captain. The great leader, the great captain shows when the weather becomes really bad. So we need to be aware that actions speak louder than words. And that's where most leaders fail.

And here is my main point. When you suddenly say, and I heard people saying that, when leaders say, "Oh, we are not political, we do not make political statements because it could actually cost us clients." Oh, so these are your values? Your values are worth the base of clients you have. And as soon as one client says, "I don't like it," you throw free, equal, and human rights under the bus. Wow. And by the way, the speaking industry in which I also work is one of the most horrible of all of them. The amount of times people told me, and especially from speaking associations based in Germany and the US, they were by far the worst. They immediately said, "Oh, you shouldn't be political on social media because it can put off clients."

I'm going to translate that for you. The translation is, "Oh, well, when my feet come from a fascist regime, you know, I'll take it. I'll take it. I work with anyone." Fascists, Nazis, far-right wing nutters, far-left wing extremists and terrorists. I work with anyone as long as they pay my fee. I'm not going to make a political statement. So first, of course, the vast majority of so-called speakers, especially the ones who claim to do speaking only, which is usually often a lie, these people don't make political statements because, and I put it into very polite words here, their level of education and intellect isn't able to grasp the concept of politics. They don't know what's going on. So if they make a statement, it would sound incredibly uneducated. So that's why they shy away from it.

Other people simply say, "I really take money from absolutely anywhere." And these people are one of the reasons why I left these kind of associations, because the value system in these associations is anyone who pays me is my friend, anyone who doesn't is irrelevant. And that is not a sustainable concept. And by the way, in these associations now, certain changes happen. So there is hope that things change for the better in certain places. However, I do not have high hopes. People who claim the only thing I can do is talking 45 minutes unquestioned, uninterrupted on the stage, and that's my only service. I'm very sorry. That's not expertise. That's ego. But that's a different story here.

Getting back to what we need now. When the economy dips, what you need to do is you need to show proactive communication. As soon as you say, "Look, the books are dire. We're a bit dry on actually purchases from our clients, so it gets pretty complicated. What can we do?" People will sit together with you because anyone is interested in keeping their job, and they will work with you. They will say, "Hey, maybe we can have flexible hours. Maybe we don't get a pay rise next year. Maybe we can have better purchasing conditions. Maybe we can get efficiency from here or there. Or we have a couple of people who go to retirement next year, and we're not going to hire new people, so we get a bit of relief on the payroll here." They will find solutions with you. And as soon as that happens, it tells you that people are actually interested in working with you. However, proactive communications is something in which many leaders are not very good.

The question now is, how do you implement that in your organization? The implementation is pretty straightforward because it often, in many organizations, already fails on the first step. The first step is the awareness that you expect people to take a stand. You expect people to speak up publicly for equal and human rights, no matter if it's in the production facility or online social media, LinkedIn, wherever else. You expect them to make a point. When someone says something racist, it is punished. It is followed up with. When someone openly says, "I'm voting for the new Nazi party," you say, "You have no career here anymore in the future." And by the way, that is legally totally feasible because there are certain parties when they are secured on the non-democratic spectrum, in a non-democratic space, you do not have to keep these people on staff because they threaten anyone else and their rights as well.

And of course, this awareness cannot be done by only one person. For example, the CEO, the business owner, or the chief executive, or whoever else. CEO, CFO, CMO. It needs to be done by the whole senior leadership team. You need to tell your senior leadership. You expect them to take a stand. It is part of their job. Because if they don't, and especially if this phrase of, "Oh, we're not making political statements because we do not want to put off our clients," if that comes along, I can tell you there are damages and benefits to everything. The damage to not taking a stand is people know I'm not safe here, so they will move on. When you ask for loyalty, they will not say yes and do the opposite because you force them to do so. Leadership fault, not people fault here, not employees fault. And the damage is massive. Your reputation will be you do not stand up for values. You do not stand up for equal and human rights. Do I want to buy that? Absolutely not.

So you harm your own business, not only in the mid and long run, but also short term. And by the way, if ever any of these far extremists, no matter if far-left wing extremists or far-right wing extremists, regimes get into place, we all know it's always temporary. And when they fall, people will look back who has done what in history, and then the bill will come to your table very quickly, and it's not served on a silver platter. So the damage and benefit simply means the damage is done when you do not take a stand for equal and human rights. The benefit, if you do, is on all ends, from senior leadership to board to the people who work with you. And when you do everything, as we just discussed it in a positive way, your company will be way better off. And I wish you all the best implementing this in your organization.

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