WMBA 6605 Week 4 Personal Values Paper Example

Three Values That Could Be Broken: Bad News the Day It Is Known, the Formula Over the Favor and Credit in the Room, Each Tested by a Real Decision, One That Lost and What They Require Me to Refuse

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6605: Finding Your Inner Leader

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Three Values That Could Be Broken: Bad News the Day It Is Known, the Formula Over the Favor and Credit in the Room, Each Tested by a Real Decision, One That Lost and What They Require Me to Refuse

Why Values Must Be Breakable

A value stated as a virtue, such as integrity or respect, cannot be contradicted, because almost any behavior can be described as consistent with it. Schwartz (2012) defined values as beliefs about desirable goals that guide the selection of actions, and the useful part of that definition is the last word. A value that guides action must sometimes require one action and forbid another. Kouzes and Posner (2017) argued that leaders earn credibility by clarifying their values and then acting consistently with them, which only means something if others can tell when the leader has not. The three values below are written so that my team at Brookfield Dairy Cooperative, a composite dairy cooperative in central Wisconsin where I manage the month-end close, could catch me breaking them.

Value 1: I Tell the Controller About a Problem the Day I Find It

This value comes from my first job, at an audit firm, where a senior manager told me that a problem reported late is two problems: the original error and the decision to hide it. I have repeated that line to every accountant I have trained.

It was tested in January 2026, when the milk payment run failed on the day before payment. I told the controller within an hour, before I knew the cause. That part held.

It lost in November 2025. During the close, I found a $38,000 difference between the physical count of cheese inventory at our plant and the ledger. I spent four days tracing it, found that a transfer between warehouses had been entered twice and only then told the controller, with the problem already solved. I told myself I was being thorough. In fact I did not want to report a difference I could not explain. Detert and Burris (2007) found that employees speak up more when they believe their manager is open to hearing problems, and our controller is. The barrier was mine, not his. Four days is the number I now hold myself to beating.

Value 2: I Pay the Formula, Not the Favor

Our member farms are paid by a formula based on milk volume, components and quality. This value means I do not adjust a payment because a farmer asks, even one I like, unless the formula itself is wrong and is corrected for everyone.

It came from watching a predecessor make quiet exceptions. By the time he left, farmers who called often were paid differently from farmers who did not, and the cooperative spent a year undoing it.

It was tested in August 2025. A long-standing member farmer, whose herd had a bad month, asked me to "round up" his quality premium, which he had missed by a fraction of a point on somatic cell count. I declined, explained the threshold and pointed him to the cooperative's hardship loan program. He was angry, and he complained to a board member, who asked me about it. The value held.

Value 3: I Give Credit in the Room Where the Problem Is Reported

When someone on my team finds an error, I name that person at the meeting where the error is discussed, not later and not privately.

This one comes from being on the other side. Early in my career I found a revenue cutoff error, and my manager presented the fix as his own. I learned more from how that felt than from the error.

It was tested in May 2026, when an analyst, Maya, found that our freight accrual had been calculated on the wrong rate table for three months. At the close review I said, "Maya found this," before explaining the fix. The value held, and it cost nothing.

Where the Values Came From, Taken Together

All three values came from watching someone else fail. The audit senior who hid nothing, the predecessor who made exceptions and the manager who took credit for my work each taught me a rule by showing its absence. That origin has a weakness: values learned from others' failures can become rules I enforce on my team more readily than on myself. The November inventory episode shows that Value 1 is exactly that kind of rule. I demanded early disclosure from my accountants for years before I noticed that I did not practice it when the problem was mine.

When Two Values Conflict

Values 1 and 3 collided in June 2026. Maya made an error of her own, a reversed accrual of about $15,000, and found it herself late on the second day of close. She asked me to give her until morning to fix it before telling the controller. Value 1 required me to report it that day. Value 3, whose spirit is protecting people who bring problems forward, suggested giving her the night.

I reported it that afternoon and said in the same message that Maya had found and was fixing it. When the two conflict, early disclosure wins, because the cost of delay falls on the organization, while the cost to a team member's pride can be reduced by how the news is told. Maya was unhappy for a day. The controller's reply, thanking her by name, helped.

What These Values Require Me to Decline

A value that forbids nothing has not been stated as a value. These three require me to decline three things. I will decline to hold a known problem until I can present it solved, even when the delay would make me look more competent. I will decline any request, including from a board member, to adjust a single farm's payment outside the formula. And I will decline to present a fix in a meeting without naming who found the problem, even when that person is junior and absent. Each of these refusals will cost me something on the day it happens, which is the evidence that the values are real.

References

Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869-884. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.26279183

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge: How to make extraordinary things happen in organizations (6th ed.). Wiley.

Schwartz, S. H. (2012). An overview of the Schwartz theory of basic values. Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.9707/2307-0919.1116