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.

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.

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.

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!"

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?"

When leaders are willing to talk through their own decision-making process, making visible that values are an important consideration, this sends a powerful signal to employees.

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.