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!

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.

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?"

It seems that simply being willing to express our views clearly, persuasively and without malice, can be a powerful invitation to others who may be lurking out there, in agreement with us but unsure whether their position is speakable or practical.

I believed that we would all come to better decisions and we would create more humane and ultimately more livable and more sustainably productive workplaces if we knew how to speak to each other about difficult issues and if we were more able to listen to and learn from diverse points of view.

By creating explicit occasions to invite dissenting viewpoints on a new project, strategy or policy, leaders enable employees to feel that their questions are welcomed and appreciated.

Often we fail to voice and act on our values because, before we even apply our best thinking to developing an action plan, we engage in process of "pre-emptive rationalization." At some deep level, we anticipate difficulty and resistance so we start to back away from our own instinctive values perspective.