The Word on the Wall - Love, Leadership, and Living Your Values

The Word on the Wall

A university I work with has "love" written into its core values.

Not "respect." Not "compassion" or "care for the whole person" or any of the softer synonyms that appear more often in institutional documents. Love. The actual word, sitting there in the official language of a secular, statewide university, asking to be taken seriously.

The first time I saw it, I felt disquieting excitement; an enthusiasm that comes when an organization decides to stop being cautious and say the bold thing. But the relief lasted about thirty seconds. Because the question that followed it was the harder one:

What does love look like mid-semester?

Not in the mission statement. Not in the welcome address. About six weeks into the new year, in a financial aid office, when a student's family is in crisis. In a faculty meeting, when a colleague's work is being evaluated. In a residence hall, at 11pm, when someone is having a hard night. Love is in the values document. But is it in the decision?

That is the unknown most organizations never resolve. And it is the gap that determines whether a culture is real or wall decoration.

The Problem with Words on the Wall

Every organization has values. Or think it does.

What most organizations have is a list. Often the product of a retreat, a consultant, a working group that spent three days – or three years - finding language everyone could agree on. The list gets framed. It goes on the website. It appears in the new employee orientation. It is: Displayed.

But display is not culture. Culture is what happens when no one is watching the display. It is the decision a middle manager makes at 4:45pm on a Friday when the right thing and the easy thing are not the same. It is the conversation a supervisor has, or doesn't have, when a team member is struggling. It is whether the people in your organization, when they encounter an ambiguous situation, reach for the values the way they'd reach for a compass, or whether those values simply don't occur to them.

The Harvard Business Review's research on what they call "companionate love” -- genuine care, expressed in the commonality of daily work -- found that organizations where employees feel truly valued report higher satisfaction, stronger teamwork, and measurably better outcomes for the people they serve. The Wall Street Journal and Drucker Institute's most recent Management Top 250 found the same pattern at the organizational level: the best-managed companies in America are not the fastest or the most disruptive. They are the most balanced; investing in people, purpose, and performance simultaneously, rather than trading one against another.

What the data is describing, in the careful language of research, is an organization that has learned to close the gap. Where the values in the document and on the wall are the same values shaping decision. Where love, or integrity, or excellence, or whatever the true word is, is not aspirational. It is behavioral.

Making known the unknown is the actual work of leadership. And it is harder than writing the values down.

What My Father Heard at the Gibson Concerts

My father introduced our family to jazz with the conviction that this was something worth paying attention to.

We went to the Gibson Jazz Concerts together. Nights full of musicians who had rarely, if ever, played together before, and that was exactly the point. My dad loved Gerry Mulligan. He loved Stan Getz. Miles Davis lived on the vinyl shelf at home. But what my father loved more than any particular musician was the musicians themselves; their character, their style, the specific and unrepeatable way each one inhabited the music.

He helped run the family pawn shop the same way. He was the encyclopedia of that place, knowing every item and object that came through the door, and knowing every person who came through as well, genuinely curious about what made each one themselves. After he died, I found a record he had recently purchased. A remake. Jazz at the Pawnshop. Of course he had.

What he understood, and what he tried to teach me, was this: the most extraordinary things happen when original people find a shared vision worth playing toward. Not identical people. Not interchangeable people. Original ones. Each bringing something no one else can bring; aligned around something larger than any single voice.

That is what I have spent my career trying to better understand.

Here is the part that surprises people: structure is not the enemy of that originality. It is the condition that makes it possible.

A jazz musician is not free because there is no score. He is free because he knows the score so completely that the white space between the notes becomes his to fill. The written piece - the chord changes, the rhythm, the agreed-upon direction of the tune - is what makes genuine improvisation possible. Take away the structure and you don't get more creativity. You get noise. Or you get musicians playing very carefully, very safely, because without a shared frame, no one knows where home is.

The same is true in organizations.

When a faculty member knows that love is not just a word on a wall but a value their institution has operationalized; when they have heard it explained in their onboarding, heard it reinforced in their quarterly conversation with their supervisor, watched their department head make a decision that demonstrated it, they know the tune. And knowing the tune, they are free to play it in their own register. Their riff in a classroom at 9am, when a student is drowning in material he doesn't understand yet, will not look like the financial aid officer's riff when a student is three weeks from having to withdraw. It will not look like the residence director's riff at 11pm. But all three are recognizable as the same music. None of them contradict the score. All of them amplify it.

That is what a living value looks like. It’s not uniform behavior. It’s coherent behavior. Every player in a different key, all of them playing the same song.

The Operating System That Makes Music Possible

I implement EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) across nonprofit and for-profit organizations. The question I am asked most often, in various forms, is some version of: how do we make the values real?

The tools themselves become the score.

The Vision/Traction Organizer (V/TO) is where the organization writes down what it believes, where it is going, and how it’s getting there. Core values live there. So does the long-term target, the three-year picture, the one-year plan. When it is done well, every employee can hold it and know the tune.

The quarterly priorities (Rocks) are the three to seven priorities that matter most this quarter. This is the notation. They tell each person and each team: here is the phrase we are working on right now. Ninety days at a time.

The Level 10 Meeting is the ritual and rehearsal. Same time, same agenda, every week. Not because ritual is comforting (though I believe it is), but because consistent practice is how a group of individuals becomes an ensemble. You cannot improvise together if you only see each other occasionally.

The People Analyzer is how the organization asks, honestly, whether the people in the seats are actually playing the music, whether they embody the values, and not just agree with them in principle. In a university with "love" as a core value, the People Analyzer eventually asks: in their hiring decisions, their feedback conversations, their response to a student in crisis, does this person demonstrate love? Not perform it. Personify it.

And Lead, Manage, and hold people Accountable (LMA) is how the organization tells the truth with enough care that the truth can be received. Accountability without love is punishment. Love without accountability is wishful, and fleeting. The discipline of LMA, practiced with genuine respect for the person being held accountable, is how an organization stays in tune over time.

None of these tools manufacture love. What they do is create the score, the rehearsal schedule, the shared language, the honest conversation; the conditions inside which people who already love something about their work can bring that love forward in a way the organization can sustain.

The Difference Between a Value and a Decision

When I work with a new leadership team, I ask a question that makes some people uncomfortable:

If I interviewed ten people in your organization, randomly selected, different roles, different tenures, and asked each of them to describe what your most important value looks like in their specific job, on a specific day, would I hear ten coherent variations on the same theme? Or would I hear ten different songs?

Most of the time, the answer is ten different songs. Sometimes silence. Sometimes the leaders know the behavioral norms. The rest of the organization knows the words.

The work of operationalizing a value, especially a word as large and as vulnerable as love, is the work of translation. Leadership must do it first. The president or CEO must be able to say: here is what love looks like when I am making a budget decision. Here is what it looks like when I am in a difficult personnel conversation. Here is how I know, at the end of a hard week, whether I have led this organization in a way that honors the word we chose.

Then each department does its own translation. Faculty articulate what love looks like in a classroom, in a curriculum, in the way they respond to student work. Administrators name what it looks like in their processes, in how they answer the phone, structure a policy, handle an exception. Students, and yes, this is the part of the conversation where people smile, name what it looks like in how they treat each other, their faculty, the community they help shape.

None of these translations are the same. And all of them are recognizable. That is the whole point.

A value that cannot be translated into behavior in your specific role, on a specific day, is not yet a value. It may be an aspiration, even one worth having. But an aspiration is not the same as culture. Culture is what you do when the aspiration meets the decision, and the decision is hard, and no one is reading the word on the wall.

The Question Worth Considering

This university chose the word love because they meant it. I believe that. The harder work will take longer than any strategic plan, any values retreat, any communication campaign and is the work of building the organizational structures, the rhythms, the honest conversations, and the daily practices that make that word audible in the life of the institution.

Not on the wall. In the room. In the decision. In the way the place runs mid-semester.

The way an organization runs every day is either amplifying its values or quietly contradicting them. Everyone inside it can feel which one is true, even when no one says so out loud.

The question is not whether you believe in your values. The question is whether, when you listen to how your organization actually sounds, you recognize the music you said you wanted to make.