Living Values When They Are Not (Always) Welcome

Picture sitting across from a new potential client whose priorities seem to be at odds with your own, collaborating with a coworker who openly challenges your stance on an important social issue, or taking over leadership of a team whose members’ political leanings and worldviews remain a mystery. Each of these scenarios poses a common challenge: many professionals want to live in alignment with their personal or professional values at work, but doing so may feel uncertain and risky.

As recent research has illustrated, this dilemma is increasingly common.[i] Across sectors including education, government, healthcare, and business, political sensitivities can run high, and professionals regularly work alongside others who hold very different values. Scholars have rightly emphasized the benefits of “living out your values” at work.[ii] But that may be easier said than done when personal or professional values clash with political constraints, social trends, organizational norms, or client expectations.

Such clashes over values can pit employees and managers alike between two unappealing extremes: constantly suppressing their own values and feeling inauthentic or always expressing those values bluntly and risking relational conflict or professional fallout.

Our research on a group of professionals who face this tension every day—business school career advisers—offers an alternative.[iii] Living out your values at work when they are not always welcome, we found, is not a binary choice between speaking up and staying silent. Rather, navigating partners, clients, or employees with potentially conflicting values is a skill that hinges on when and how you express your values rather than simply whether you do.

The Research Behind the Challenge

Business school career advisers occupy a valuable vantage point on this issue. Their professional training instills values like helping clients find purposeful work and a career that genuinely fits their clients’ skills and personalities. But many of their clients are focused squarely on wealth, prestige, and the approval of peers and parents. As a result, advisers who believe deeply in purpose-driven work often find themselves coaching clients who want nothing more than an offer from the most prestigious employer possible. And advisers who care deeply about individual fit spend hours with clients who are set on simply chasing whichever job pays best.

Based on 59 interviews with career advisers across nearly 50 top business schools, 22 interviews with their clients, and over 100 hours of observed advising sessions, what we found speaks to a challenge that extends far beyond career advising. Moreover, the strategies the most effective advisers use to navigate these clashes in values provide a framework that can be applied in any organization or profession.

Rather than defaulting to always speaking their minds or always keeping quiet, the most effective advisers enact two key strategies. First, they skillfully discern the values of their various audiences. Second, they then modulate when, how, and to what degree they enact their own values across different interactions. These strategies allow them to act authentically without alienating those who see the world differently or putting their careers at risk, and they can help you do the same.

STRATEGY 1: Discern the Values of Your Audience

Before deciding how to act on their own values, effective advisers first take time to size up their clients. For instance, one adviser explained that a critical first step is that you have to “read the people” to understand where clients are coming from and where their values may be aligned with or opposed to your own. Our research uncovered three actionable tactics to successfully discern others’ values in your own workplace.

Tactic 1: Ask deep questions and listen for language cues

One adviser begins new advising sessions by asking questions like “Why did you decide to pursue business?” and then listening intently to not only what clients say but how they say it. This allows her to identify her clients’ motivations (e.g., family pressures or a sense of calling) and what matters most to them before she begins giving career advice.

The language people use to justify their stances or decisions is often laced with clues about their values. This tactic can be employed in any type of work. For instance, statements like “it’s only fair” may indicate values around equity; statements like “I couldn’t do that to the company” may indicate values around loyalty. Asking deep questions about others’ motives and then listening for values-signaling language is a powerful way to start mapping out where someone stands.

Tactic 2: Watch behavioural and emotional cues

Advisers also pay close attention to what happens in the room, not just the words that are said. One described her job as “assessing affect,” which includes watching for “anxiety behaviours… through fidgeting, through lack of eye contact, through redness in the face, through breathiness.” Sometimes emotional cues are less subtle; one client started crying heavily when discussing her current career trajectory, offering a strong signal of her true values.

These types of behavioural and emotional cues can offer a window into what others value most. When situations or conversations indicate support of someone’s values, they light up. When a deeply held value feels threatened, people often get defensive. An unexpected pause, a defensive tone, or a flash of relief can sometimes tell you more about someone’s values than their words alone.

Tactic 3: Check your assumptions out loud

Listening deeply and watching for behavioural and emotional cues provide pieces to the puzzle, but skilled advisers aren’t afraid to ask if they are putting those pieces together correctly. One makes a habit of saying, “It sounds like you value these three things. Is that pretty accurate?”

This kind of tactful confirmation can help correct any misread signals before they cause a problem. Additionally, it can indicate to the other person that you’re genuinely listening, which can build trust and signal understanding.

Together, these tactics centre potential clashes of values on curiosity rather than pure self-expression. Living out your values, especially when they misalign, requires first understanding others’ systems of values so you can meet them where they are and avoid potential landmines. However, this is just the first step.  

STRATEGY 2: Modulate How You Enact Your Values

Discernment tells you where someone stands. Modulation is what you do with that information. It involves adjusting when, how, and how strongly you express your own values. Modulation is about strategically and intentionally tailoring expressions of values to the moment. For advisers, sometimes this means holding back values that might create unnecessary friction; other times, it means gently introducing values when the conversation allows. And in moments of strong alignment, it means leaning fully into shared commitments. Modulation, therefore, is not a single behaviour but a repertoire of tactics that advisers draw on fluidly depending on the cues they discern. Below, we outline three approaches—masking, moderating, and magnifying—that together make up this strategic toolkit.

Approach 1: Masking values when misalignment is deep, through selective non-disclosure

When you recognize a profound gap between your own values and those of a powerful audience, especially one that is unlikely to be persuaded, it can be wise to withhold discussing certain values temporarily rather than pressing them in ways that invite conflict. When career advisers recognize that their own values are in direct conflict with those of a client, they sometimes choose not to voice them at all. As one adviser put it, “I will bite my tongue.” Rather than manufacturing conflict, advisers redirect the conversation to neutral ground, discussing résumés, interview prep, or application deadlines. Critically, this can leave the door open for a different and deeper conversation down the road.

“Masking is not about being deceptive or abandoning principles but about knowing when the other party is unlikely to engage constructively.”

Masking is not about being deceptive or abandoning principles but about knowing when the other party is unlikely to engage constructively. By strategically keeping certain convictions in the background, advisers protect the relationship, preserve their influence, and avoid unnecessary tension. Used judiciously, this tactic helps individuals stay true to their values at work while managing situations where voicing certain values would do more harm than good—for themselves, their teams, or their clients.

Approach 2: Moderating values when there is partial alignment, through “both/and” thinking

When advisers encounter situations where their values and their client’s values are neither fully aligned nor fundamentally opposed, they tactically look for a middle path that honours both perspectives. One adviser worked with a client who was passionate about healthcare but drawn to accounting for its higher pay. Rather than pushing the client toward one or the other, the adviser helped her find accounting roles within healthcare organizations she cared about. Another adviser described this kind of solution as helping clients find jobs “that feed your soul” alongside the paths they were pursuing for more instrumental motives.

This approach uses “both/and” thinking to integrate what each party values, creating options that preserve the adviser’s principles while respecting the client’s goals. Moderating expressions of values allows individuals to move forward collaboratively without forcing a choice between competing commitments.

Approach 3: Magnifying values when alignment is strong by prioritizing opportunities for expression

When advisers identify strong alignment of values with clients, they don’t treat it as incidental; they leverage it. In these moments, advisers drop the hedging. One told a client who felt pressured toward a lucrative auditing career by his peers, “You don’t have to listen to people like that!” Another joyfully described using in-depth assessments and interest inventories only with clients she perceived to be open to finding jobs that fit their specific skills and sense of purpose because that’s when she could really “dive into values.”

Leaning into shared values can be a powerful source of motivation and replenishment, especially in roles where tensions over values are common and alignment is rare. This approach may involve seeking out projects with clients who share your priorities or joining initiatives with like-minded peers and using these moments to fully express the values that matter most. Amplifying alignment in this way helps offset the emotionally taxing work required in other situations where one’s values have to be moderated or masked.

Dynamic Iteration: Reading the Room in Real Time

Crucially, the best advisers do not just select one approach and stick to it forever. They move fluidly among them as conversations evolve. Across many interactions, we observed a dynamic, iterative process: discernment informs modulation, and modulation creates new openings for further discernment.

In one meeting we observed, an adviser began cautiously with a client who seemed committed to the competitive, high-status world of finance, holding back on any talk of purpose or fit. Partway through, the client began to tear up, describing herself as feeling like “just a calculator” among her peers. The adviser observed that emotional cue, which prompted a change in approach. The adviser named the toll of the constant comparison the client was describing (“It’s exhausting… all the comparison”) and then began leaning into her values—directly encouraging the client to reconsider whether her chosen career path was really the right fit.

This iterative cycle allows advisers to uphold their values while meeting clients where they are, moment by moment.

No matter your industry, role, or level of authority, the most effective professionals reread the room continuously, recalibrate in real time, and pivot among these pathways rather than relying exclusively on any single strategy.

The Payoff: Living Your Values While Remaining Professionally Effective

Discernment and modulation paid off. When advisers successfully discerned their clients’ values and modulated their own enactments of values accordingly, clients reported viewing the advisers as more helpful, expressed greater confidence in their career decisions, and returned more frequently for additional career advice. One client, recalling an adviser who had picked up on her hesitation about a job offer and gently helped her reach her own decision to turn it down, said simply: “I felt relieved… I wanted someone to tell me that… and to make me feel more confident about the decision.”

The cost of getting it wrong was real, too. When advisers pushed their own values onto clients who weren’t ready to hear them, clients disengaged, stopped returning, and sometimes filed negative evaluations. One adviser explained of a client she had advised recently, “She didn’t come back, and wrote an evaluation about how frustrating it was for her.”

Given advisers’ reliance on positive evaluations for repeat visits, new clients, and positive ratings from their superiors, the fallout from failing to properly discern and modulate their enactments of values can be severe.

Ultimately, discernment and modulation are a tactful form of strategic wisdom: choosing when and how to reveal your values. Being guarded about deeply held beliefs does not mean being inauthentic, and discretion can strengthen, not weaken, relationships and the ability to influence others down the line.

Five Key Takeaways

1. Living out your values at work when they are not (always) welcome is a situational skill, not a one-time decision about whether to speak up.
2. Discern first: Ask deep questions and listen for justification, watch behavioural and emotional cues, and check your assumptions out loud.
3. Modulate your expressions of values using a three-part toolkit—masking, moderating, and magnifying—rather than a single default approach.
4. Treat discernment and modulation as a continuous loop, not a fixed strategy set at the outset.
5. Living out your values at work, especially when they’re potentially unwelcome, is not about always standing apart from your environment but learning to adapt your expressions of values to maintain both authenticity and influence.

[i] M. G. Pratt, L. N. Hedden, and H. Khan, “‘MOB’ Mentality?: On the Formation and Consequences of Moralized Opinion-Based Intergroup Conflict in Organizations,” Academy of Management Review (2025).

[ii] E. Reid, L. Ramarajan, and B. B. Caza, “3 Ways to Live Out Your Values at Work,” Harvard Business Review, September 27, 2023.

[iii] C. K. Chan and L. N. Hedden, “The Role of Discernment and Modulation in Enacting Occupational Values: How Career Advising Professionals Navigate Tensions with Clients,” Academy of Management Journal 66, no. 1 (2023): 276–305.