Why You Should Never Compromise Your Values to Achieve Success
The following post is from the Medium portal and is written by Neel Raman, who has written the bestselling book «How to Build High-Performance Teams.»
What Not Being True to Yourself Will Cost You
If you want to be true to yourself, never compromise your values to achieve success or anything that isn’t aligned with what’s true for you.
You and I make many decisions every day that affect our experiences and achievements. Some decisions have little or no impact on the direction of our lives.
However, certain decisions can have long-term effects if we compromise what we value for short-term gain.
What does it mean to never compromise your values?
Never compromising your values means:
– Maintaining your integrity at all times, regardless of the consequences.
– You respect yourself as much as you respect those important to you.
– You speak your truth, even if it affects your relationships.
– You have principles that guide your life.
– You don’t let material success cloud your judgment or make bad decisions.
Among the things people value and don’t compromise are:
– Family and important relationships.
– Integrity.
– Self-esteem and respect for others.
– Accepting and following the truth.
– Doing the right thing, even if it’s difficult.
To avoid compromising your values, you first need to know what they are. A lack of clarity and awareness often leads people to make bad decisions.
Why You Should Never Compromise Your Values
Those with a high level of self-awareness will know when they’ve compromised their values. To stay true to themselves, they take responsibility for their decisions and correct them as soon as possible.
5 Reasons You Should Never Give Up on Your Values for Success
Here are five reasons to never give up on your values, so you can be true to yourself and feel good about the choices you make.
You Will Lose Trust in Yourself and Others
Once you do something that goes against your values, you compromise your integrity. You have evidence that you cannot trust yourself to do the right thing, even if it is difficult. That means your level of self-confidence will decrease. If you cannot trust yourself, others will not trust you either.
Your Word Will Mean Nothing
In the book «The Four Agreements,» by Don Miguel Ruiz, one of the agreements is: «Be impeccable with your word.» If you don’t keep your word, you will accomplish nothing. If you say you will do something and don’t follow through, your word will have no value or significance to you or others.
You Will Feel Mentally and Emotionally Exhausted
Doing things that are not aligned with your highest good is often exhausting and draining. This will cause stress, which will affect your mental and emotional health.
You Will Lower Your Standards
If you accept that you have done something wrong and then do it again, it means you expect little of yourself. This means you’ll lower your standards because doing the right thing will be based on what’s happening to you at the moment.
You won’t leave a lasting impression or a legacy worth remembering.
You won’t be a person who makes a notable impact if you don’t uphold your values. Before making an important decision, always ask yourself, «How will this decision affect the rest of my life?»
Final Thoughts
Your values are tested when things get difficult or when there’s the possibility of new success. The level of certainty you have about your values will determine how you respond.
If you compromise your values for success or when things get difficult, then they aren’t your values. You’re lying to yourself by saying they are.
If you get disappointed and violate your values, recommit to doing the right thing.
Action Step: The next time you have to evaluate an opportunity or make an important decision, remind yourself of your values and why they’re important to you.
Ask yourself: «What is my truth, and how will my decision affect me and those important to me in my life?»
Question: What other reasons are there for not sacrificing your values for the sake of success?
No-Nonsense Leadership
The following contribution is from the Your CEO Mentor portal, which defines itself as follows: This raises some fundamental questions:
How do people without strong mentors deal with these debilitating problems at work? (Answer: It’s difficult!)
How large is the negative impact of poor leadership on organizations? (Answer: Incalculable)
How are people with great potential supposed to become exceptional leaders if their leaders don’t model the right behaviors and competencies? (Answer: A lot of trial and error)
What practical resources exist to teach leaders to be exceptional, achieve outstanding results, and be truly satisfied with who they are? (Answer: Very few)
One of the tensions you will feel as a leader is the constant balancing of noble aspirations and practical results.
When facing any ethical dilemma, it is important to keep your feet firmly planted, which requires a deep understanding of the forces that drive corporate decisions.
Ensuring Your Perspective
This episode is about maintaining your perspective: ensuring you behave in a way that is consistent with your values, even if you are asked to do things that challenge your personal belief system.
To help you navigate the minefield of corporate imperatives, I present five mental frameworks that will enable you to act with confidence while maintaining strong ethics.
Developing and Improving Skills
As a leader, it is essential to constantly develop and improve your leadership skills to stay ahead of the curve.
Dilemmas of Ethical Leadership: Maintaining Integrity Under Pressure
ASPIRATION vs. REALITY
One of the tensions you will feel as a leader is the constant balancing of noble aspirations and practical results.
Along your journey to the top of the corporate hierarchy, you will undoubtedly be asked to do many things, some of which will challenge your ethical and moral boundaries.
When faced with any kind of ethical dilemma, it’s important to keep your feet on the ground, and one way to do this is by gaining a deep understanding of the factors that drive corporate decisions.
If you achieve this, you’re much more likely to reach the end of your career with your integrity and self-esteem intact… but if you get used to compromising your principles and values just to protect your position in the company, you’ll find it increasingly difficult to look yourself in the mirror.
This newsletter is about how to maintain perspective and ensure you’re consistent with your values, even if you have to do some pretty difficult things.
I analyze an article on the morality of firings from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge series. I highlight some of the inconsistencies between how people say they behave and how they actually behave.
I also briefly analyze the ins and outs of firings and present five mental frameworks that will take you beyond convenient rationalization, keeping you firmly grounded in your own ethics.
HBS RESEARCH ON CORPORATE ACTIONS
At some point in your leadership career, you’ll likely have to implement restructuring, cost-cutting, and layoffs.
While preparing this episode, I came across an article from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge series on the morality of layoffs. The article, «How Investors Feel About Corporate Actions and Their Causes,» is a summary of research by HBS professor Elisabeth Kempf, titled «Corporate Actions as Moral Issues.»
It was quite an interesting article, as the author presented it as definitive findings on how investors view corporate decisions. According to the article, investors believe companies shouldn’t lay off employees to increase profits.
You probably know me well enough to know that I don’t take these things at face value, and my immediate reaction was, «Hmm, that doesn’t sound right. I wonder who was in the sample?»
It turns out the sample size was 2,047 people, which can be statistically significant, so no problem… and the group was controlled for several factors:
Gender (50% women, 50% men);
Political affiliation (31% Democrats, 26% Republicans—a little less—, 43% independents); and
Investors (60% of respondents owned stock, 40% did not).
The group was composed of both investors and non-investors, but what it tells us is that at least 40% of respondents answered hypothetical questions in which they had no stake. And, for the rest, owning stock may not have been a priority when they were asked questions that spoke directly to their moral purity. In my opinion, this has about as much validity as the political opinions my Uber driver was kind enough to share with me last night.
The big problem with the results is that they don’t pass the test of reasonableness, at least for me. They simply don’t fit with everything I’ve seen, heard, read, and learned over the past 40 years.
I’m sure there are plenty of people in the general population who think layoffs are immoral, probably because they’ve been fired in the past or because they see the risk of being fired in the future; but those people don’t influence the behavior of a management team. The focus on shareholder value is driven by large institutional investors, private equity firms, and buy-side stock analysts.
The predictable conclusion the survey draws from this sample of investors is that they prefer decisions that favor people over those that favor investors.
Well, it’s not particularly earth-shattering. But it’s hard to know what they would choose if faced with a real-life dilemma: if they had to choose between having less money or saving a group of strangers from being laid off.
You’d have to see their decision in the moment to know what they would actually do.
To summarize the research findings, respondents were asked to rank 10 corporate actions based on their moral concerns. The 10 measures were:
– Cost cutting;
– Stock buybacks;
– Layoffs;
– Outsourcing;
– CEO pay raises;
– Tax avoidance;
– Use of fossil fuels;
– Reduction in diversity;
– Leverage; and
– CEO duality (being both CEO and chairman at the same time).
Over 85% of respondents said companies should not lay off employees. CEO pay increases came in second.
Interestingly, respondents seem much more comfortable with trivialities such as cost-cutting, stock buybacks, and tax avoidance.
What does this tell us about the sample population? In my opinion, a couple of things:
– People are still very interested in things they think might directly affect them, like layoffs
– They struggle to get the right answers on key, directly related issues, like CEO compensation and stock buybacks… or outsourcing and layoffs!
Overall, it seems like the right questions have been asked of the wrong people. If the same questions were asked of the people CEOs and boards pay attention to (like institutional investors), I suspect you’d get very different results.
That’s why I think the findings are interesting, but irrelevant.
LESSONS FROM ESG INVESTING
Why do companies largely ignore grassroots investors? Because they instinctively know they’re not the key stakeholders affecting their future.
There are many examples that reinforce the fact that, although people may have moral aspirations, in practice, they will predictably do what is in their own best interests.
Let me illustrate this principle with a data-rich example: energy companies constantly survey their customers on all sorts of issues. Imagine the amount of data that has been collected in the last decade or so on people’s green energy preferences.
In Australia, the vast majority of people would prefer their electricity to come from renewable sources. But guess what? Very few people are willing to pay more for it. It’s easy to say you want to reduce your carbon footprint, but will you actually do it with your words?
The influence of the fundamentals of behavioral economics is reflected in broader trends in the Environmental/Social/Governance movement, or ESG, as it is commonly known.
Historically, ESG has been associated with green investing. The theory was that ESG-focused funds would provide capital investment only to companies operating under strong ethical frameworks.
They focused specifically on companies seeking investment in green energy projects.
The expectation was that as more investors joined the ESG trend, there would be a natural decline in the availability of financing for fossil fuel projects in oil, gas, and coal. These companies would then have a harder time obtaining financing, and even if they could, the cost of funds would be higher.
But what ESG funds might have classified as «unethical investments» is actually crucial to a prosperous modern society. Demand for these commodities continues to grow unabated, especially in developing countries.
I dove into the topic and read several articles in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal to try to understand the current state of ESG investing, and even I was surprised by what I found.
Institutional investors who were firmly committed just a couple of years ago are moving away from green investing. According to Bloomberg, ESG funds have fallen dramatically:
In 2024, only 100 ESG funds were launched globally: this represented a 90% reduction from the nearly 1,000 funds launched in 2022;
Major global banks increased their funding of fossil fuels by 23% in 2024, reaching a total of $869 billion;
BlackRock, JP Morgan, and State Street have left the climate coalitions they previously participated in; and
BlackRock’s support for corporate climate risk resolutions fell from 72% in 2021 to 15% in 2022.
Why?
Because ESG funds significantly underperformed traditional funds between 2022 and 2024.
They remained short the fossil fuel stocks that fueled market growth.
This isn’t rocket science; some might call it «Supply and Demand 101.» It has also been amplified by the political and regulatory backlash, primarily in the US, but also in a Europe previously committed to the environment.
It’s just more evidence supporting what we already know: companies act in accordance with their fiduciary obligations. There is constant pressure on CEOs to pursue higher returns for their investors rather than make concessions on ESG.
And something I discovered in my travels that surprised me: both retail and young investors show a complete disinterest in pursuing ESG at the expense of financial returns.
Surveys like the one in the Harvard Business School article tell us how people feel… They tell us how they would like people to behave… but that’s not how it happens in the real world.
I’m a simple person, and at the risk of sounding a bit cynical, I’d like to establish a general rule that I see reflected, time and again, in the billions of words that have been written trying to explain this human behavior:
«I care a lot… but only if someone else pays the bill.»
ARE FIRINGS REALLY UNETHICAL?
I can already hear you thinking, «Okay, Marty, this is fun and interesting, but what does it have to do with my leadership?»
Well, the lesson here is not to get too attached to the aspirational vision of leadership presented on mainstream channels.
Articles, books, and research abound showing you what that world you aspire to should look like, but you find yourself in the unenviable position of having to deal with the harsh reality of leading people in complex environments… and eventually, economics will take over, no matter how much we’d
