Over the course of my career in municipal HR, I’ve been involved in several large compensation and job evaluation redesigns. One project in particular stands out because of what it taught me about leadership, values, and culture.
At the time, I had been asked to lead a complete overhaul of a union job evaluation system. The mandate was simple in concept and enormous in practice: rebuild everything.
- New job descriptions
- A new job evaluation tool
- A new committee
- New terms of reference
- An entirely new evaluation process
When I asked leadership what they wanted the new system to accomplish, they didn’t start by describing what they wanted to build. Instead, they described what had gone wrong.
Nearly 99 percent of jobs that went through evaluation increased by at least one pay level, and increases of two levels were not uncommon. The evaluation committee had become polarized along union and management lines, with both sides arriving at meetings already convinced where the job should land on the pay grid. Job descriptions were written so broadly that it was difficult to distinguish one role from another within the same job family.
Labour costs were rising and leadership had lost confidence that the system was protecting internal equity.
What they wanted instead was something very different.
They wanted a system built around rigour, clarity, and discipline. A system that required clear evidence before jobs moved upward. A system with factor definitions detailed enough that committee members could confidently distinguish between levels. A system that encouraged curiosity and investigation rather than advocacy and negotiation.
Underneath those requests sat a deeper foundation: organizational values.
The leader who commissioned the work valued long-term thinking, careful planning, collaboration, and fiscal stewardship. Decisions were expected to be thoughtful. Analysis mattered. Accuracy mattered. Teamwork mattered.
Those values shaped the system we built.
With a small but talented HR team, we spent the next two years designing and implementing a new framework. When it was finished, the system functioned exactly as intended. Job descriptions were clearer, evaluations were more consistent, and internal equity was protected by a process designed to reward accuracy rather than speed.
The project was completed on time and under budget, and the results attracted attention well beyond our organization.
Municipal HR leaders began calling regularly to learn about the model. The union co-chair of the job evaluation committee and I were eventually invited to speak internationally at a conference focused on pay equity and income inequality after someone there heard about the work through a network of consultants.
For a while, my team felt like the Justin Bieber or Christine Sinclair of job evaluation.
Several years later, a leadership transition occurred.
Culture Changes Faster Than Values on the Wall
The new leader was hired for a different purpose than the previous one.
Where the previous administration had focused on thoughtful planning and organizational effectiveness, the new leadership prioritized speed, efficiency, and lean operations.
Those priorities were not wrong. Organizations evolve, and leadership is often hired precisely because different challenges require different strengths.
But here’s the problem: the values never changed.
The posters on the wall still spoke about collaboration, thoughtful decision-making, and innovation.
The culture, however, had shifted.
- Efficiency replaced effectiveness
- Lean methodology replaced experimentation
- Frugality replaced long-term planning
- Individual accountability was emphasized over collective problem solving
- Speed began to trump accuracy
Gradually, the job evaluation system that had once been celebrated was no longer aligned with the organization’s evolving priorities.
A system designed for careful analysis was now considered too slow. A process designed to ensure fairness was criticized as inefficient. Documentation that once protected the organization from unnecessary labour costs was now viewed as bureaucracy.
Where my team had once been recognized for its expertise, we were now increasingly described as being “bogged down in the details.”
And, unsurprisingly, job evaluations once again began producing two- or three-level increases — not because jobs had substantively changed, but because decisions were now being made faster and with less scrutiny.
At first glance, this story may sound like it’s about job evaluation.
It isn’t.
It’s about values and culture.
Espoused Values vs. Actual Values
Most organizations proudly display their values.
They appear on websites, in strategic plans, and on posters throughout the workplace. Organizational theorist Edgar Schein described these as espoused values — the values organizations say they believe in.
But the values that truly shape culture are what Schein called enacted values: the behaviours leaders reward, tolerate, and model through their decisions.
As leadership researcher Brené Brown puts it, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” When organizations say they value one thing but reward another, employees experience confusion, frustration, and eventually disengagement.
Similarly, organizational psychologist Adam Grant has written extensively about the role leaders play in shaping culture through the behaviours they reinforce. Culture, he argues, is not defined by slogans or mission statements — it is defined by what leaders actually do.
When espoused values and enacted values align, organizations experience clarity and trust.
When they don’t, employees notice.
And the disconnect becomes the culture.
“Culture is ultimately created and reinforced by what leaders pay attention to, measure, and reward.”
- Edgar Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership
How Organizations Create Values
Organizations typically establish values in one of two ways.
Some adopt a top-down approach, where leadership defines the values that support the organization’s strategic goals. This approach creates strong alignment between leadership priorities and organizational direction, but it can feel imposed if employees are not engaged in the process.
Others use a bottom-up approach, inviting employees to identify the values that best represent their experience within the organization. This approach often produces authentic insights, but it can also become unwieldy. When hundreds of employees participate, the result can be a long list of values that are difficult to remember or apply.
Neither approach is inherently wrong.
But both approaches struggle when leadership changes and the values guiding the organization quietly shift.
The Leadership Reset Organizations Rarely Talk About
Leadership transitions are rarely just about a new person in the top role.
They often signal a shift in priorities, strategy, and expectations.
Leaders are typically hired because the organization needs something different: faster execution, stronger financial discipline, greater innovation, or a different leadership style.
When that happens, culture inevitably shifts as well.
Yet organizations rarely acknowledge this directly.
Instead, the values displayed on the walls remain unchanged while leadership behaviours gradually reshape the culture in a different direction.
The result is confusion. Employees attempt to follow the values the organization claims to uphold while observing leaders reward different behaviours.
If organizations are serious about setting new leaders — and their organizations — up for success, this moment cannot be ignored.
When a new leader arrives, part of the transition process should involve re-examining and clearly communicating the values that will guide the organization moving forward. Not as an afterthought once employees begin to notice cultural shifts, but as an intentional part of leadership transition and organizational alignment.
Organizational culture researchers have long emphasized that clarity around values is essential for effective leadership. Edgar Schein, one of the most influential thinkers in organizational culture, argued that leaders create and reinforce culture primarily through the behaviours they reward and tolerate.
When stated values and leadership behaviour diverge, employees quickly notice.
That gap between espoused values and enacted values becomes a source of confusion, frustration, and disengagement.
Equally important is ensuring there is a mechanism for employees to provide feedback on how the organization’s values are being experienced in practice.
Research consistently shows that organizations with strong feedback cultures perform better because leaders gain visibility into how their behaviours and decisions are shaping the workplace environment. Organizational psychologist, Adam Grant has noted that organizations improve when leaders actively seek information about how their actions affect others, rather than relying solely on intention.
Without that feedback loop, leadership may believe they are reinforcing one set of values while employees experience something entirely different.
For organizations, the goal should not be to eliminate cultural change when leadership changes.
Instead, it is about acknowledging those shifts openly and deliberately — and having the professionalism and kindness to consider what will help employees realign expectations quickly and navigate through the confusion that so often accompanies leadership transitions.
“Culture is not what leaders say. It’s what they consistently do.”
- Adam Grant, organizational psychologist and author of Think Again
The Cost of Silent Cultural Drift on Employee Engagement
Looking back, the most difficult part of the experience for my team was not that the culture changed.
Organizations evolve. That is normal.
The difficult part was that no one acknowledged it.
The values displayed across the organization still suggested that careful analysis, collaboration, and thoughtful planning were highly valued. Yet the behaviours rewarded by leadership suggested something very different.
That gap between what the organization said it valued and what leadership behaviour reinforced created uncertainty about whether the work we were doing was still aligned with the organization’s direction.
Over time, that kind of disconnect erodes clarity, trust, and engagement.
Why Leaders Must Communicate Value Changes During Leadership Transitions
Leadership transitions are moments when organizations redefine themselves.
Leaders are hired because they bring different priorities, different strengths, and often a different vision for how the organization should operate.
Rather than allowing those changes to unfold quietly while the stated values remain frozen in time, organizations would be better served by acknowledging the shift openly.
Aligning purpose, values, and culture is not simply an exercise in communication — it is a crucial step to setting both leaders and employees up for success.
Because when values change, the confusion that follows can be far more damaging than the change itself.
Brown, B. (2018). Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. Random House.
Grant, A. (2021). Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know. Viking.
Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Kotter, J. (2012). Leading Change. Harvard Business Review Press.
