Values Create the Rules Nobody Has to Write

Inspired by my conversation with Amanda Collier, Why Care? Season 7, Episode 65

There’s a moment in my recent Why Care? conversation with Amanda Collier, former Detective Chief Inspector with the Metropolitan Police and one of the most compelling figures from Series 4 of BBC One’s The Traitors, that has stayed with me.

In the quick-fire round, I asked her: “Rules or values?”

“Values. Because from values comes internal rules that appear naturally. We’re a nation of queuers. There’s no rule that says you must queue. But if people didn’t, there’d be chaos. Values create unwritten rules.”

It’s the kind of answer that sounds simple until you sit with it. Then it starts to dismantle quite a lot of what organisations believe about how culture works.

The Rule-Writing Trap

When it comes to changing behaviour, many organisations reach for the same lever: policy. A new code of conduct, updated guidelines or a refreshed set of company values printed on a wall or embedded in an employee onboarding deck.

The assumption underneath all of it is that behaviour follows instruction, i.e. write the rule clearly enough and people will internalise it and act accordingly.

Behavioural science tells a more complicated story. Rules govern compliance. Values govern judgement. In the moments that matter most - under pressure, in ambiguity, when no one is watching - it is judgement, not compliance, that determines what a leader actually does.

Amanda spent thirty years making high-stakes decisions in environments where the rulebook wasn’t necessarily completely helpful - counter-terrorism operations, serious and organised crime, the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bombing. In those moments, she was drawing on something far more deeply encoded: a set of values about people, about fairness, about what it means to lead.

“You’ve got to be able to make tough decisions,” she told me, “but do it in a way that’s emotionally intelligent.” That’s a skill you develop by knowing, at depth, who you are and what you stand for.

What Values Actually Do

Here is what the research, and Amanda’s thirty-year career, suggest values do in practice.

They compress decision-making. In high-pressure environments, the cognitive load of evaluating every decision from first principles is unsustainable. Deeply held values act as heuristics (fast, reliable guides to action) that don’t require conscious deliberation every time. Leaders who know their values don’t freeze in ambiguity. They act, and they can explain why afterwards.

They create coherence across a team. When a colleague was shouted at during the Manchester Arena response briefing, Amanda intervened - not because there was a rule about how to treat junior staff, but because her values about expertise, respect and psychological safety were non-negotiable.

They travel. Rules are bounded by jurisdiction, context, seniority. Values go wherever the person goes. They are, in the truest sense, portable leadership infrastructure.

The Paradox of Values-Led Leadership

Here is where it gets uncomfortable and where most leadership thinking stops short.

Amanda’s queuing example feels universal but it isn’t. It is a culturally specific norm - one that feels like common sense to people who grew up inside it, and like an arbitrary social rule to people who didn’t. A values-led leader who mistakes their own cultural programming for objective fairness will consistently and invisibly disadvantage people whose values were formed in different contexts.

This is the paradox at the heart of values-led leadership: the very thing that makes values powerful, i.e. that they operate automatically, below the level of conscious deliberation, is precisely what makes them risky when they go unexamined.

Values-led leaders don’t just make decisions that feel right. They make decisions that feel fair. And ‘fair’, unless it is interrogated, tends to mean ‘consistent with my own lived experience and the norms I absorbed growing up’. That’s not fairness. That’s familiarity dresses up as fairness.

The result: in hiring, in promotion, in who gets trusted with stretch assignments, there becomes a pattern of decisions that each feel individually sound, but collectively reproduce the same profile of leader, the same distribution of opportunity, the same definition of potential.

Values without self-awareness = a bias engine.

The Hiring Implication

Amanda made one of the most practically useful observations: “It’s not necessarily the person who can do the job best. You can teach people how to do a particular role. What you can’t teach people is how to be kind. How to be respectful. How to have emotional intelligence.”

This is a performance argument. Organisations that select primarily for technical competence and assume values alignment will follow are routinely surprised when it doesn’t.

But here is the harder question: which values are you hiring for? If the answer is ‘people who feel like a cultural fit’, the organisation needs to interrogate what that phrase is doing. Cultural fit is often the most socially acceptable way of selecting for sameness. It rewards familiarity over capability, shared background over complementary perspective, and comfort over the productive friction that genuinely diverse thinking creates.

Hiring for values only works if the organisation has done the harder prior work: interrogating whose values the culture is built around, and whether those values have been examined or merely inherited.

The Queue Nobody Organised Revisited

I keep coming back to Amanda’s queue.

The queue is a powerful example of values creating order without enforcement. But it is also a reminder that the norms which feel most natural to us are often the ones most worth examining because their invisibility is what gives them power.

The organisations that successful create a positive culture don’t just invest in articulating their values but in the harder discipline of interrogating them i.e. asking where they came from, whose experience shaped them, and who they naturally advantage.

That is the work that turns values from a leadership asset into a leadership practice.

Amanda Collier didn’t need the Traitors’ rulebook to know how to behave in the castle. She had something far more durable than that.

The question for every leadership team is whether the people around the table have leaned Beyond Discomfort to question what their values are built on.

Amanda Collier appeared on Episode 65 of Why Care? is available now on all major podcast platforms.

Nadia Nagamootoo is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist, executive coach, and author of Beyond Discomfort. She is the host of Why Care? Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.