We try to effectively free ourselves up to be creative, to think about what might be possible, to come up with truly innovative ways to enact our values-driven positions.

Interestingly, many of the organizational characteristics that have been identified as conducive to effectively managing diversity and as conducive to fostering innovation and creativity in the workplace are also important for enabling employees to voice their values.

Perhaps sometimes we have self-serving sense that we often experience when we believe we know better than our boss, our teacher, our spouse or partner, our friends, our political leaders - if only they would listen to us!

In short, we needed to shift our thinking and teaching about values-driven leadership from asking the question "What is the right thing to do?" to asking and answering the question "Once I know what I believe is right, how do I get it done?"

Throughout history we have seen the tyranny of the powerful over the less powerful - think of the history of colonialism or of slavery - and the tragic mistakes made when important information was not "heard" or valued.

Typically efforts to address values and ethics in business education and leadership development tend to focus on building Awareness and teaching Analysis. That is, we expose future leaders to the kinds of ethical and values conflicts they may encounter, so that they will recognize them and will have considered them in advance.

The whole endeavor becomes less about a constraint on action and rather about helping us to be more of who we would actually like to be, at our best and if we felt it were possible. Rather than positioning effort as being about "thou shalt not," it becomes all about "can do!"