Knowing Your Values Isn’t Enough — You Have to Live Them

On the evening of Friday, March 14, 2025, the White House issued an executive order that listed the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI) among federal entities to be eliminated to the maximum extent allowed by law. My phone lit up, and my inbox was flooded within the hour. I have the privilege of serving as the CEO of B:Side Capital, a Small Business Administration (SBA) lender and certified community development financial institution, and the order had just put a large part of my organization directly in its crosshairs. I knew that come Monday morning, I would need to present a clear plan for my team and board members.

I knew that mission-based lenders wouldn’t escape the scrutiny of the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but I didn’t think that the CDFI fund would be targeted in such a dramatic manner. I didn’t have a plan in place for this move. Nobody did. What I had in its place was a code, and it turned a chaotic weekend into a sequence of decisions that had been explored long before the crisis hit.

I also teach leadership at Arizona State University, and from both the classroom and the boardroom, the same pattern is impossible to ignore: When real pressure arrives, the values we espouse are too vague to help. Concepts like “Integrity” or “People First” cannot tell you whether to cut staff, go public with your concerns or just quietly wait for the courts. Those words can sit alongside almost any decision without consequence, which is exactly why leaders who rely on them drift from their core beliefs.

What you need instead is a code: a short set of written commitments specific enough to be violated. I spent years studying leaders who navigated far worse than a bad news cycle, from the Roman Senate to the Depression-era Army, for my latest book on crisis-era leadership. The leaders who held in the face of crisis did not share a temperament or a strategy. They shared a moral architecture or code that held up under pressure. Their codes looked different, reflecting their unique backgrounds and perspectives, but they had one important thing in common: They were developed before the crisis hit. You can do the same by following these three simple steps.

Write a line specific enough to violate

State one thing you will not do regardless of what it costs you, and state it as a behavior, not a value. Platitudes like “I will not compromise my integrity” are useless; you can rationalize just about anything and convince yourself that your integrity remains unviolated. “I will not tell my team the business is fine when I know it is not” is different. It represents a real line in the sand. You either crossed it or you did not.

That weekend in March, my line was already written: I would not soften the truth with my team just to calm fears and placate them. Instead, I filmed a quick video telling the team, plainly, that we were facing an existential threat to part of our business, and that we would meet it methodically with our culture intact. It was uncomfortable, and part of me felt like I should have done more to soothe their nerves. However, I knew deep down that this approach represented the fastest path to finding an actual solution, and that is precisely what my team deserved.

Test your own line against the hardest situation you faced in the last two years. If it does not produce a clear answer, it is not specific enough yet.

Build the restraint before the offer arrives

Former President George Washington’s most consequential and lasting act was refusing power that no law required him to refuse. He could have been king, but he decided to take a different path years before the temptation showed up. That is the part that matters: The moment of maximum temptation is the worst possible time to be working out your principles for the first time. By then, the offer arrives dressed in arguments that almost always lead to justification.

Be wary of the temptation to do what feels good, for that instinct almost always betrays you. In the weeks after the order, there was a very real temptation to engage in public fight framing the battle as one of good against evil. This was nonsense, of course, but plenty of voices in our industry lashed out at the administration anyway. At times the pull to join them was real.

My team’s culture of restraint had been established and cultivated long before: We would not attack, and we would not let the response turn emotional. Instead, we worked our channels in Washington, engaging as constructively as we could to make the program’s value plain to the people who would decide its fate. You can do the same. Simply write down your non-negotiables before the pressure mounts, then tell it to someone who will hold you to it. A restraint kept private is only a preference.

Test your values every quarter

Leaders rarely fail in one dramatic moment. They fail one defensible decision at a time, each small compromise drawing them slightly further from the person they want to be. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who ended up justifying the crimes of Nero’s court, is history’s sharpest warning that intelligence is no protection against drift.

The test that catches it is simple. Identify the person whose moral judgment you trust above your own, the one who would never let you get away with the comfortable version of the story or the easy way out. Then explain your hardest current decision to them, out loud or on paper, and look for the weak point: the place where the logic skips a step, or depends on them not asking the obvious question. That weak point is where character collapses and the drift lives.

Run this test quarterly, on a strict schedule, regardless of how the last 90 days felt. The test exists for the decisions that feel fine, because those are the ones eroding you.

There are two more components in the full framework, a growing edge and a transmission plan, and they matter. But the three above are the ones that carry you through a Friday night shock.

You cannot predict which black swan event will hit your business next. All you can do is trust that it will come. Prepare yourself this week by deciding who you will be when it does. Block out an evening, write your code in a language specific enough to test and hand a copy to someone who will hold you to it. The crisis will demand a code from you either way. The only question is whether you built it before the pressure arrived.

On the evening of Friday, March 14, 2025, the White House issued an executive order that listed the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI) among federal entities to be eliminated to the maximum extent allowed by law. My phone lit up, and my inbox was flooded within the hour. I have the privilege of serving as the CEO of B:Side Capital, a Small Business Administration (SBA) lender and certified community development financial institution, and the order had just put a large part of my organization directly in its crosshairs. I knew that come Monday morning, I would need to present a clear plan for my team and board members.

I knew that mission-based lenders wouldn’t escape the scrutiny of the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but I didn’t think that the CDFI fund would be targeted in such a dramatic manner. I didn’t have a plan in place for this move. Nobody did. What I had in its place was a code, and it turned a chaotic weekend into a sequence of decisions that had been explored long before the crisis hit.

I also teach leadership at Arizona State University, and from both the classroom and the boardroom, the same pattern is impossible to ignore: When real pressure arrives, the values we espouse are too vague to help. Concepts like “Integrity” or “People First” cannot tell you whether to cut staff, go public with your concerns or just quietly wait for the courts. Those words can sit alongside almost any decision without consequence, which is exactly why leaders who rely on them drift from their core beliefs.