Everyone Has Values… Until It Costs Them

Everyone says they have values in business.
Integrity, honesty, transparency.
You’ve heard all the classics.
But the thing is, how many times are these values chosen to sound good to other people rather than being actual values that the company lives by?
Because what I’ve noticed is that brands are more than happy to brag about their values and ensuring customers align with them.
But when it comes to putting it into practice and actually saying no to money that compromises their values, suddenly those same values are not that important anymore.
So today we’re going to talk about values bullshit and why most people don’t actually stick to what they claim to stand for.
And this episode is a difficult one because I am actually one of those bullshitters who compromised on my own values recently, and I need to explain the lessons that I’ve learned from that very big mistake.
Hello, and welcome to Sniffing Out the Bullshit, a podcast for ambitious entrepreneurs who want help wading their way through the bullshit jungle of entrepreneurship and then the tools, skills, and mindsets that are actually required for success.
I’m your host, Sabrina Chevannes-Denman, the no-bullshit entrepreneur.
So I’ve been running my own business now for over 15 years.
And so I’ve seen the rise and fall of different trends, let’s say, in business.
And the values thing for me has always been there, but not really as prominently as it is now.
Because at the end of the day, we all have our own values as individuals.
And so often our businesses naturally reflect the values of the leaders.
But back in the day I feel like they were done more as an internal thing.
Like some of the classic business books out there such as Built to Last and Good to Great, both by Jim Collins.
They emphasise the importance of core values, purpose, and building organisations around them.
And then of course Simon Sinek, Start With Why and his Golden Circle concept that led to probably one of the most watched TEDx talks in the world.
So these ideas became hugely influential in business culture.
But as I said, values were mostly internal.
It was more about how companies operated, not how they actually marketed themselves.
But then the pandemic hit and the world just changed, as it seems to be a very common theme for this podcast and all the content I do.
Because I genuinely think that entrepreneurship just drastically changed everything in 2020.
There was this sudden massive shift in expectations.
Consumers didn’t care just about the products anymore.
They cared about what brands stood for, how they behaved, and whether those brands actually took a stance on social issues and obviously where they took that stance.
And the data all backs us up because around 64% of consumers say that they choose or avoid brands based on their beliefs about societal issues.
And one in two actually assume the worst if a brand stays silent.
So it’s kind of nuts what brands have to do now to be able to stay relevant for consumers.
And on top of that, 61% of Gen Z and millennials say they want brands to actively help address social issues.
So not just talk about it, but actually do something about it.
And then over 70% say brands building positive contributions actually increases trust.
So values didn’t suddenly become important.
They became visible, expected, and commercially powerful.
But because of this commercial influence, brands started to perform when choosing and communicating their values.
And what they said and what they did didn’t always add up.

So let’s start with a basic truth from behavioural science.
So behavioural science says that what people say they value is often completely different from how they behave.
And there’s a concept in psychology called the attitude-behaviour gap.
And this is what shows up everywhere.
For example, people say they care about sustainability but yet they’re still out buying fast fashion.
People say they value health but yet they don’t exercise and they’re sitting there eating junk food all the time.
And businesses say they value ethics, but yet they cut corners and do all sorts of shady things when they’re under pressure.
And this has been studied for decades now.
I may call it bullshit, but this is literally what is known as the attitude-behaviour gap in psychology and behavioural science.
And one of the classic examples is from consumer research.
Now around 60 to 70% of consumers say they want to buy ethically, but the real numbers show that actually only around 5 to 10% actually do so.
So even when people believe something, their behaviour doesn’t actually follow.
Now if we bring that into business, you can see that if individuals can’t align behaviour with values, why do we then assume that founders and companies magically do?
Because there’s also a huge body of research showing that under pressure people default to self-preservation, not principles.
And if you look at behavioural economics and decision-making under stress, it shows you things like when money is tight and uncertainty is high and the stakes feel big, people shift from long-term thinking to purely short-term survival.
And this is often where we are at now with the way the market and economy is.
And there is so much research and science-backed evidence to show this sort of behaviour and why this is.
For example, take loss aversion.
Now loss aversion, and this is talked about a lot, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow and all his stuff.
He talks about this a lot.
I think it’s actually his research and he originally did.
Loss aversion is essentially where people feel losses way more strongly than gains.
It’s a classic case of, say if I gave you £100, how would you feel?
And then compare that to me giving you £200 and then taking away the £100, you’re still left with net £100.
But somehow the second way feels more painful because of the loss aversion.
And so this is seen a lot in business and the fear of losing money is definitely greater than the desire to stick to your values.
And so this naturally leads to taking on bad clients and over-promising and cutting corners.
And the science shows that this is why people do it.
And then there’s cognitive dissonance.
So when your behaviour doesn’t match your beliefs, your brain doesn’t fix the behaviour, it somehow rewrites the belief.
So instead of you realising, oh, this client doesn’t actually align with me, you end up telling yourself, no, it’s not that bad.
Like I can make this work or it’s just temporary, which is pretty much the three things that I said during having a terrible client recently.
And it’s, you know, it’s not necessarily a character flaw and it’s not necessarily you being dishonest, but it’s just actually how your brain is protecting itself.
And the world is still struggling right now in a range of different ways.
Like most people I know are under financial pressure, even if they don’t want to admit it.
So I am seeing founders make compromises a lot, whether that’s taking shortcuts, embellishing here and there, or taking on clients that they know just aren’t right for them.
They’re doing whatever they can to survive, the self-preservation, right?

And the thing is, most founders think that losing alignment is a personal failure, but it’s not.
It’s a systemic pattern because in the world of entrepreneurship, you’re operating in an environment that rewards things like speed, revenue, visibility, and growth, right?
It doesn’t promote integrity, long-term thinking, and consistency.
So this is the systemic pattern that’s created.
There’s research in organisational behaviour that shows that incentives actually drive behaviour more than stated values.
So this isn’t actually your fault because if your incentives are given to you and they are things like close the deal, hit those revenue targets, and grow fast, because that’s what these NEDs and growth consultants and all that lot set as targets for founders, and they drill it into your head that this is what you need to be doing.
And if those are the incentives that they’ve given you, then guess what wins?
It’s not going to be your values, is it?
It’s always going to be your incentives.
And this is one of the reasons that I’ve always said that I’ve had issues with SMART goals.
And for those who aren’t aware of what I mean, SMART goals have been around for decades, right?
And it’s like an acronym to help you set goals.
It stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
Now I love it, it’s great.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s been used for decades obviously.
But the M and T for me have some shady areas.
I totally get why you need them because you do need to be specific, which I know is the S, but stick with me.
You need to be specific in terms of measuring whether it was successful or not.
So for example, saying we will increase revenue, that isn’t helpful.
But by saying we will increase revenue by 20% is much better.
So it needs to be measurable.
And then the T bit adds somewhat of a deadline.
So that would then become we want to increase revenue by 20% by the end of Q3, for example.
And so this sets clear goals, which I totally get why SMART goals are important and people like them.
However, for me, this means it also sets strict deadlines, which always adds pressure.
And people love achieving goals for obvious reasons.
And so they often end up finding shortcuts just to achieve them.
And this is classically seen in sales teams, right, where they try to reach their quota by year-end.
Like if you’re a customer, you’re loving it because you’ll get a great deal.
Like they discount things like crazy.
They try all sorts of dirty tactics just to get things over the line.
But then what ends up happening is that they compromise on customer satisfaction or they even hurt the company’s bottom line due to profitability just because all they wanted to do was hit their own sales goals.
So incentives are great.
They totally are.
But values are always going to be more important because when they go, what are you actually left with?
Where are your boundaries?
Is everything suddenly fair game then?

So this podcast has always been about sniffing out the bullshit in entrepreneurship.
Presenting you with the bullshit that is constantly talked about online or in networking circles amongst founders.
And I bring you the science to back up why it’s bullshit while presenting you much better alternatives.
But quite often I learn about the bullshit because I’ve fallen for it myself.
Or I found myself falling into the trap and learning from some terrible mistakes.
And this is why I bring them to you so that you don’t make those same mistakes.
I do a lot of self-reflection and a lot of analysis to make sure I don’t make those same mistakes again and again.
And recently I have certainly noticed myself compromising on my own values.
And I did it in multiple ways too.
Like it really disappointed myself.
The first was with N0BS, my members club that I’m building.
I promised that I would keep it at the highest quality.
Vetting every single member so thoroughly and ensuring that everyone was no-bullshit.
They were ambitious, they were honest, supportive and transparent.
And I absolutely did for every single one of them, don’t get me wrong.
But I just didn’t do a good enough job.
I gave some people the benefit of the doubt.
And I let people try before they buy and stuff, which ended up diluting the premium experience.
And I did it because I wanted more people in the room.
Because I thought this is what people would want.
I want a bigger room, you know, and just feel more buzzing.
And, you know, get more quality people and quality conversations because that’s what we’re all about.
But because I didn’t vet that thoroughly enough, I let people in who didn’t actually want that.
They said they wanted it, but actually if I looked carefully and vetted them more carefully and looked beyond social media, I would have seen that they just wanted to be at the Michelin-star restaurant.
Or they just wanted to be next to the influencers or the high-profile speakers that I invited.
They weren’t interested in sharing and caring but instead just taking and leaving.
And so it was my fault.
I compromised my values and the values of Knobs and I ended up causing myself a lot of distress around it.
Which led to me taking so much time off.
And then in that time off, I was taking on more freelance work so that I could fund Knobs and pay the bills while I spent time building it in the right way.
And I was lucky.
I was inundated with clients asking me to help them with strategy and marketing because I’ve built up a great personal brand for years.
And so I could have been incredibly picky with whom I took on.
But somehow I wasn’t.
I picked someone because they were referred to me by someone I liked.
I assumed that if they worked with that person I liked, then they must be good.
They must be a good person.
They must be someone else I’d like.
I just took their word for it.
And I noticed red flags very early doors.
So did my team.
And I ignored them all because I just thought, oh, this is great.
I want to do good work.
And I was excited by something new.
And the other person that they were working with was really great.
But this client was everything I was speaking up against.
They were full of bullshit.
Not no-bullshit.
They were fobs instead of knobs.
It was crazy.
They did so many shady things.
They were incredibly dishonest throughout our entire relationship.
And they did not align with any of my values.
Now, of course, on the outside they did.
Oh, they were telling the world they did.
But because I knew them behind closed doors, it was a very different story.
And as soon as I learned that difference between how they behaved online or in public versus how they really were behind closed doors, I should have walked away.
But I was torn.
I signed on to do a good job.
And I wanted to show how great I was at my job and that I could produce some great results.
But I actually felt sick working with someone so dishonest.
And plus they didn’t actually listen to me at all.
Anyway.
Each time I presented an honest and ethical strategy or plan, a bullshit version of that would be released instead.
And so much dodgy and shady stuff was going on.
There was no respect, no strategy and no real business going on.
It was just hacks and tricks and hope.
And it was everything I speak up against in business.
And my team were also miserable.
But I kept working with this client for another couple of months in the hope that things would change.
And, you know, knowing that my team could get paid properly for the work they were doing too.
There was obviously that.
But eventually I just could not hack it anymore.
The cognitive dissonance was there for me and I could no longer handle it.
No amount of incentives, pressure, or justification I was giving myself could keep me working with them.
Because I saw the tension I was creating by causing this split between what I say I stand for versus what I was actually doing.
And that tension was the cognitive dissonance in real time.
And oh my God, it’s uncomfortable because you can feel it.
You know something’s off.
And instead of fixing it immediately, you somehow rationalise it.
And that’s how the drift happens, right?
And I’m someone who calls out bullshit for a living, but I still fell for it.
And it hurt.
It made me feel like I lost a sense of identity.
Like if I continued going and ignored all the signs, I may have lost who I was completely.
I may have just been broken.
Like I was so miserable and I hated every minute of working with that client.
But I continued to do it for loyalty.
But what good is loyalty if you don’t have your values?

Now I’ve been researching content around this topic because of everything that’s happened and it’s quite interesting.
There’s a fair bit of founder reset and, you know, some stuff on finding yourself, but it doesn’t really talk about the serious consequences of all this happening.
Most of the time it’s kind of woo, like it’s done in a light-hearted way.
And people talk about misalignment like it’s just a feeling, but it’s not, right?
There are some real measurable consequences for this.
And I’m going to give you just some examples of what happens if you’re not correctly aligned with what you do.
The first one is decision fatigue increases because when you’re constantly operating out of alignment, you burn way more mental energy.
And this links to all the research on ego depletion and cognitive load.
And there’s a lot of stuff out there if you want to look at it.
But because you’re constantly second-guessing decisions, right, you’re having to justify your actions.
And so you’re managing this internal conflict and it slows you down both mentally and physically.
And it can genuinely lead to health problems if it goes on for too long.
And number two is that your performance drops.
Like there is strong evidence that intrinsic motivation drives better performance than extrinsic pressure.
If you’ve never read Drive, I recommend it.
It’s one of the best books I’ve read.
I think it’s such a good book all about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.
Because essentially when you’re aligned properly, you’re more engaged, you’re more creative, you’re more consistent.
But when you’re not, then work feels so much heavier and output quality drops.
And I bet you’ve definitely felt this.
When you don’t enjoy your work, you definitely don’t do as good a job, right?
But that’s not just because you’re not putting as much effort into it.
It’s actually genuinely harder to perform when you’re not aligned to what you do.
And then there’s brand inconsistency and, well, trust erosion.
Because from a marketing perspective, trust is built on consistency over time.
So if your messaging says one thing, but then your actions show another, people feel that even if they can’t articulate it.
They feel it.
And then the trust just drops.
And I think the biggest one is number four, that you attract more of the wrong people.
And your behaviour signals your positioning.
And so if you accept misaligned clients or tolerate certain behaviours, you are reinforcing that as your market fit.
And suddenly that nightmare client that you took on for all the wrong reasons, all your clients are going to be like that.
You’re going to start attracting them.
And that’s the last thing you want.
So you absolutely do need to think about value alignment from day one.
And so the question is, why does this bullshit keep happening?
Because it’s not just you, it’s pretty much everyone.
And it happens because values are very easy to market, but they are hard to operationalise.
Think about it.
It’s super easy to just write some values down, say them, and post about them.
But it’s a different thing if you’re trying to enforce them, you’re trying to measure them, and you’re trying to sacrifice for them.
So that’s why most people stop at that branding layer.
And when you have a team, you need to ensure that every member of your team knows your values, they resonate with them, and they embody them.
Because as soon as one team member doesn’t, it throws the whole team off.
And as a leader, you have to be leading by example.
So if you’re showing behaviour or making decisions that don’t align with your company values, your team will lose trust in you.
And they also just won’t perform because after all, who’d want to produce good work for a boss who’s bullshit?
So let me tell you something important.
Values are not statements.
They are constraints.
They are supposed to limit your options, to slow your growth and to filter people out.
But when you listen to that, you think that sounds horrible.
No one likes constraints.
But it’s actually a good thing.
It’s the same reason why we niche down or we think about our target audience rather than trying to cater for everyone.
Constraints help us find the right people so we can do our best work.
So if your values aren’t constraining you in a way that helps you find the right customers, albeit in a much slower way, you don’t actually have values.
You just have marketing fluff.
And so operating with values means things like saying no earlier.
Defining clear client filters.
Accepting slower growth.
And not chasing every opportunity, which is difficult when you’re trying to grow a business and you want the income to come in.
But it is important.
And probably most importantly, you need to design your business so that your incentives match your values.
Because if they don’t, you absolutely will break them again.
So if you feel like you’ve lost yourself in your business, it’s probably actually not a strategy problem.
It’s most likely a misalignment problem.
And the fix isn’t adding more.
It’s removing what doesn’t belong.
Because at the end of the day, everyone has values until it costs them.
I know it cost me.
And so that’s it for me this week.
And until next time, please do keep sniffing out the bullshit.