removing the sign: the hidden cost of values-aligned leadership

I cannot tell you how many conversations I had in the last week about the greengrocer.

Prime Minister Mark Carney's speech at Davos last week certainly made waves in the geopolitical context. As a Canadian, I was proud to see him stand up for our country and our values on the world stage, especially with the state of the world these days. Carney's point was simple but profound: harmful systems stay in power not mainly by forcing people to comply, but because ordinary people go along with them. Each person maintains the system while believing they're merely surviving it.

Many of my conversations have not about politics at all. They focused on the underlying message in the story of the greengrocer and its implications for workplace culture.

Our choice to stay quiet seems small, reasonable, even necessary. But when everyone makes that same "reasonable" choice, the harmful system runs perfectly.

So why does this happen so frequently?

The Psychology of Silence

Amy Edmondson's research demonstrates that without psychological safety, people are less likely to speak up. And psychological safety isn't about creating a warm-and-fuzzy environment where everyone is 'nice' to each other. According to Edmondson, it's the shared understanding within a team that you can speak up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes without fear of punishment or humiliation.

Creating these types of environments has always felt like a basic principle of leadership to me. Yet I have not always found myself in environments that were psychologically safe.

So I get it. I have been there. In addition to just surviving, the fear of reprisal and reputational harm are real. In environments where bad behaviour has not only gone unchecked but is actively rewarded, speaking up feels like career self-sabotage. I've seen notoriously bad actors simply moved laterally, only to be promoted years later.

Meanwhile, those who go against the grain—raising wrongdoings, challenging harmful behaviour, questioning the system—often get labeled as difficult, struggle to rebuild their reputation, and can end up wondering why they bothered in the first place.

The Personal Cost of Speaking Up

As a leader in the public service, I've been both the person who goes against the grain and the person who has supported employees to do the same. Calling out harm requires an enormous amount of emotional labour, something that is consistently underestimated and seldom recognized. Taking on the role of the greengrocer—removing the sign, standing up for what's right—may eventually turn the tide, but at what cost?

Back in 2021, I raised the lack of gender-neutral washrooms as an issue in our return to work planning. While our senior management understood the importance and I had support from many colleagues, it became a battle. There were roadblocks, no clear path forward, and mounting frustration from people who should have been enablers.

The issue grew old for people fast. I could see it in the tension, the eye rolls, the sighs when I would raise it at Executive meetings. Eventually I was encouraged to just let it go. It wasn't going to happen. Enough time had been invested, so we should just move on, we were told.

I was incredibly frustrated. I had put in months on this, above and beyond my normal work, but I justified it because I knew I was advocating for something important. I wasn't ready to let it go. This was a human rights issue. It was hard for me to see in that moment to impact that it was having on me personally.

Then, a few weeks later, the colleague who had been working on the issue from the facilities perspective laughed as he told me he was relieved I was finally talking about something else. I was furious. Not only was the importance of the issue dismissed, but my reputation was being tarnished for pursuing what was right. It made me question how many others felt the same way about me.

This was only one example of feeling the rub between my values and my work. I was told I was too aligned with my staff. I was reminded of my role as an Executive to toe the line. It became clear that my views on particular issues were not always welcome. Each time I spoke up, I could feel the professional price I was paying.

When Values and Work Collide

These weren't isolated incidents, they were symptoms of a deeper problem. The truth is that leadership decisions, even when they look purely strategic, are values-based decisions. So when we experience misalignment, it shows up as friction, exhaustion, or indecision. This all started to pile on, pushing over the edge to burnout.

When I returned from my leave for burnout in 2023, I came back with tremendous clarity on my values and my boundaries. I knew what how I wanted to lead and what I wanted my leadership to stand for. This clarity made the misalignment only more apparent. It wasn't long before friction, exhaustion, and indecision showed up for me again. Being the greengrocer who removes the sign comes at a cost. I had lived that cost, felt it in my body, seen it in my relationships.

At some point, I had to decide whether the cost to my own wellbeing was worth it. I have realized that there is no shame in that calculation. Sometimes the most values-aligned choice is removing yourself from a system that refuses to change. Ultimately, my decision to leave the public service was about honouring my values.

That decision brought me back to a question I've carried with me for years. In his book Who Not How, Dan Sullivan defines hell as the person you became meeting the person you could have become on your last day on Earth.

I don't want to live with regret. I hold my legacy as my north star. How I want to be remembered by those I love most is what guides my actions and decisions. It's also how I approach my coaching practice.

The greengrocer's choice isn't just a political metaphor. It's the daily reality for leaders who care about doing what's right. You can't always change the system. But you can always choose whether to participate in perpetuating it.

The best way to embody the way you want to be remembered is to show up as that person today—in the meeting, in the hard conversation, in the choice to stay or go.