Riviera Group Consulting

ARTICLE 07  /  RIDE THE WAVE

When Values Become Behaviors

Most organizations can name their values. Fewer can describe what those values look like on a difficult Tuesday afternoon.
Consider a value like communication. Does it mean sharing decisions promptly? Raising concerns directly? Making sure a colleague has the context to do their work? If people interpret the same word differently, the value may inspire them without guiding them.

The next step is to translate each value into observable behavior. If partnership matters, what does collaboration look like across departments? If accountability matters, how do people acknowledge a missed commitment and reset the plan? If courage matters, what should someone do when a decision is not serving the mission?

Boards have a particular responsibility here because culture is reinforced by what leaders notice, reward, and tolerate. A board that says it values transparency but discourages difficult questions sends a mixed message. An executive team that celebrates teamwork while rewarding individual heroics does the same.

Choose one value and test it against a real decision. What behavior would demonstrate it? What behavior would undermine it? How will the organization recognize the difference?

This makes values useful in onboarding, performance conversations, board evaluations, and strategic planning. It also gives people a shared language for addressing concerns without turning every disagreement into a personal judgment.

Values become culture when they influence what happens—not only what appears on the website.

REFLECTION  Which of your organization’s values is hardest to observe in everyday behavior?
Cover of book "High-Courage Conversations"
About the Book
You cannot control every wave. You can decide how you meet it. That lesson started in the ocean at a young age, when Lauren Sweeney's father taught her to stand to the side of an incoming wave and let it move through her instead of trying to fight it or turning her back on it, and it never really left her. In High-Courage Conversations, Sweeney, SHRM-CP, B.S., draws on two decades of leadership, from being a Retail Pharmacy Manager to building a sales team of hundreds to sitting in the C-suite, to make one central argument: courage is not the absence of fear; it is what happens when clarity meets capacity.

Across thirteen chapters, Sweeney tackles the conversations most leaders quietly avoid. The feedback that feels too risky to give. The values conflict that looks like a personality clash. The burnout hiding behind a full calendar and a fuller sense of obligation. The identity crisis that shows up when a title changes, or disappears, faster than your sense of self can catch up. She writes about chasing a credential to feel like enough, and about learning to stay present in hard conversations with her husband instead of freezing and disappearing behind her own eyes. This is not a book of tidy frameworks handed down from a distance. It is a field guide written from inside the moment right before you say the hard thing, by someone who has stood in that moment as a store manager, a Vice President, a co-founder, a board chair, a wife, and a mother, and who has learned, sometimes the hard way, what actually helps.

Readers will find practical tools alongside the stories: a way to name what's really draining you before you try to fix it, a script for the conversation before the conversation, three questions to ask in any transition. But mostly they will find permission to feel the racing heart and go anyway, to ask for clarity before demanding courage of themselves, and to trust that meeting the wave well matters more than controlling it ever could.
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