Your Values Are Not What You Say, They Are What You Repeat.

Bobby Humes talks in metaphors, and by the end of an hour with him you start to see why. Leadership as double Dutch, leadership as a roller coaster, leadership as Braveheart. Underneath the color is a genuinely rigorous framework built from ten years as an Army combat veteran, a term as Chief HR Officer for the City of Seattle, and a consultancy that now works with executives, senior leaders, and public sector teams who are trying to build cultures where people can actually contribute.

This conversation on The Brand Lab covers what misalignment actually looks like in a leader long before anyone names it out loud, the specific patterns that separate bad leadership from good, how to translate a values statement into behavior that survives contact with pressure, and what it takes to confront a toxic political alliance without becoming part of the problem yourself. Here is what came out of it.

What Misalignment Actually Looks Like in a Leader

Ask Bobby what a misaligned leader looks like, and he does not start with strategy, he starts with the body, and a specific kind of burnout: the leader who does not want to get up in the morning, who dreads the day before it has even started and it rarely stays contained to one person. Misaligned leaders burn out the people around them too, creating bottlenecks that choke off creativity and quietly convert an organization into a place full of talking heads and very little actual value creation.

The fix, in Bobby's experience, is getting outside yourself entirely, through coaching, through what he calls reverse mentoring, deliberately learning from the generation coming up beneath you rather than assuming seniority equals insight. The hardest part of this prescription is the ego required to accept it.

“Whenever I'm in a room, I don't want to be the smartest person in that room. I don't want to have all the ideas, because if that's the case, then I shouldn't be in that room.”  — Bobby Humes

Bobby is candid that this was not always true of him. Early in his military career, as a young sergeant, he describes himself plainly as a jerk who thought he had all the answers, someone who would find every possible way to re-condition a subordinate's thinking if they did not do things his way. What changed his mind was simpler than a leadership seminar, he noticed that people give you far more when they know you actually care about them, and that noticing took years of bumps, bruises, and missed opportunities to fully land.

The Double Dutch of Leading From Front and Behind

The double Dutch metaphor is the one Bobby returns to most, and it earns the repetition. Leadership, in his framing, is a constant, moving tension between walking in front of your team and walking behind them, and knowing which posture the moment actually requires is the whole skill.

Walking behind means asking your team what they see from their own vantage point rather than assuming your view from the top is the complete picture, walking in front means setting the vision, holding the line when a budget decision gets uncomfortable, and being the one willing to say we need to stop pouring money into this so we can invest in that instead. Bobby is direct that leaders often confuse compassion with permanence in this posture, staying behind when the moment actually calls for stepping forward, particularly when hard financial or strategic calls have to be made.

“Upstream, you're out in front. What's the vision? Where are we going and why? We also need to be in front when things aren't going well. We've got to get over this idea of the cost fallacy, that if we just keep putting more money into it, it's going to get better. As the leader, we've got to be the one to say, hey everyone, I know this doesn't feel good, but we need to say no to that so we can say yes to this over here.”  — Bobby Humes

The image he keeps returning to is a cruise ship, with every person seeing a different slice of the horizon through their own porthole. The leader's job is not to have the best porthole, it is to synthesize what everyone else is seeing into something the whole organization can act on together. That synthesis, done well, looks almost like the coordinated timing of two ropes swinging at once. Done poorly, it looks like one person throwing darts alone in a room.

Three Quiet Patterns of Bad Leadership

Bobby names three recognizable patterns of bad leadership, each subtler than the last. 

The first is the leader who makes the organization about their own preferences, down to keeping an actual list of personal pet peeves that the whole team is expected to memorize and avoid triggering. The absurdity of the example, a boss who fires people over whistling, makes the underlying pattern easier to spot: when a leader centers their own comfort over the mission, everyone around them learns to manage the leader instead of doing the work.

The second pattern is what Bobby calls the traffic light, the leader who requires so much control that nothing moves without their explicit approval. He offers his own counter-example from coaching his sons' youth football team: he missed the first game of the season, and the team ran fine without him because he had built three other coaches capable of running it in his absence. The mark of good leadership, still something he says he is learning, is that the organization keeps functioning when you step away.

“I think the mark of a good leader, I'm still learning, is that you're able to step away and the thing can still happen without you there. I think poor leadership wants to control every bit of everything, and it really slows things down.”  — Bobby Humes

The third and most subtle pattern is the leader who cannot make a genuinely hard decision. Bobby draws this from his time as Chief HR Officer, presenting recommendation slates to Seattle's city council where every available option was uncomfortable. When a council member observed that all his options were unpleasant, his response captured the whole distinction between leadership and administration.

“That's leadership. Our decisions won't be like making a pop tart. You just push down, wait for it to get hot, and serve it. It's more the calling of a leader, in my mind, is richer than plug and play.”  — Bobby Humes

From Aspirational Language to Measurable Culture

Every organization has a retreat where values get written down, the strategic plan binder, the mantra on the wall. Bobby's entire firm exists in the six months after that retreat, when the excitement of the creative process meets the much harder work of actually executing on what got decided.

His method is specific: start with the value as stated, then ask what behaviors would actually demonstrate it. If an organization says it wants to be best in class on green spaces, what does that mean concretely, and who are the specific people affected by that commitment. From behaviors, move to performance measures: what would you actually track to know the behavior is happening and from performance measures, move to the question that makes people uncomfortable, which is where the organization's money is actually going, because a value that never receives budget is not a value the organization holds, it is just a sentence the organization once agreed to.

“What behaviors inform those values, and where are we putting our dollars? That also has some accountability to what we say we want to be. I've seen so many of my clients say they want to do a great thing, do the work of saying these are the behaviors, here are the performance targets, but spend their time and resources doing the same thing they've been doing before.”  — Bobby Humes

Bobby is equally clear that stating the vision once is not enough, he recommends repeating the core message so consistently, across so many verticals of the organization, that people start finishing your sentences before you say them. Anything less and the values remain aspirational language that never crosses into lived culture.

Confronting Toxic Alliances Without Becoming the Problem

Every organization eventually develops political alliances that have nothing to do with competence and everything to do with proximity, loyalty, or simple inertia. Bobby's method for confronting this starts with inquiry rather than accusation. He asks the leader who shaped this vision, who was in the room when it was decided, and whether middle management was genuinely consulted or simply informed after the fact.

When the misalignment traces back to the leader themselves, the conversation moves into coaching. Bobby's first move is to help the leader identify that they have what he calls a growth edge around people's decisions, then bring in data, surveys across communication, direction, and leadership presence, so the leader can act on evidence rather than defensiveness. When Bobby is brought in as a consultant rather than a coach, he is more direct: he names what he sees plainly, in the lobby, in casual conversation, and lets the organization decide whether they want to hear it.

“I think as a consultant, I come in and I say that. Now if they want to not work with me anymore because I'm coming in too rough, that's a gift, because I got other people I can work with. But typically they'll take me up on it and say, how do we address it. And then I'm just a mirror. Well, when's the last time you talked to Bobby about his performance?”  — Bobby Humes

His bottom line on toxic political dynamics is unsentimental People form alliances that serve their own comfort over the organization's stated strategy, and the leader's job is to name that plainly, with candor, rather than let it calcify into something everyone quietly tolerates and nobody addresses.

Self-Awareness as a Crutch vs. Self-Awareness as Action

Bobby draws a sharp line between self-awareness as a genuine practice and self-awareness as a convenient excuse. He has met leaders who reach a surface level of insight about themselves and then use that insight as a shield: this is just who I am, take it or leave it. That is not the work, the real work is asking whether the pattern you have identified in yourself is actually serving your relationships, or whether naming it has simply given you permission to stop examining it.

His framework for staying honest is what he calls a kitchen cabinet: five to seven people, not necessarily formal advisors, who will tell you what you need to hear rather than what you want to hear. Coaches, faith leaders, therapists, and often other leaders navigating something structurally similar to what you are building. The distinguishing feature of this group is that they do not have time to coddle you, and they are willing to push you toward your next level even when it is uncomfortable to do so.

“Who are the five to seven people that are not going to tell you what you want to hear? They're going to tell you what you need to hear. They don't have time to coddle you. They want you to be your best, and they're going to do everything they can, other than commit a crime, to help you get to your next level.”  — Bobby Humes

In the middle of the conversation I even ended up pushing back on one piece of this framework during the conversation, specifically the idea that a leader should never arrive. The concern raised was real: taken too literally, never arriving can strip meaning from milestones you have genuinely earned and become a hiding place from commitment or defined success, but Bobby's answer landed on balance rather than either extreme: Celebrate the milestone, buy the shoes but do not mistake the celebration for the finish line.

Key Takeaways

• Misalignment in a leader shows up first as burnout, then spreads outward as bottlenecks and unmet promises. It rarely gets named until it has already cost the organization real value.

• Leadership is a constant, moving tension between walking in front to set vision and walking behind to see what your team sees. Confusing which posture a moment requires is one of the most common leadership failures.

• Three quiet patterns predict bad leadership: centering your own preferences over the mission, requiring control over every decision, and being unable to make a genuinely hard call.

• Values are revealed by repetition, not intention. A value that never receives budget or gets translated into a measurable behavior is not a value the organization actually holds.

• Confronting toxic political alliances starts with inquiry, not accusation: asking who shaped a vision and whether middle management was genuinely consulted surfaces more truth than a direct challenge ever will.

• Self-awareness without action is a crutch, a kitchen cabinet of five to seven people who will tell you what you need to hear is what turns insight into actual change.

About Bobby Humes

Bobby Humes is an executive coach, leadership strategist, and founder of BH Consultancy, based in Tacoma, Washington. He served ten years in the United States Army as a combat veteran before leading human resources at the organizational level, including a term as Chief HR Officer for the City of Seattle. He holds a master's degree in human resource management and an executive coaching certification from the Hudson Institute of Coaching. His upcoming book, The Table, explores trust-centered leadership and what it actually takes to build cultures where people can contribute and belong. Find him on LinkedIn at Coach Bobby or at https://www.bhconsultants.co/ 

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This episode of The Brand Lab covers leadership diagnosis, executive presence, translating culture into behavior, confronting toxic organizational politics, and what it actually takes to keep growing without losing sight of what you have already earned.

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Connect with Bobby Humes on LinkedIn at Coach Bobby or at https://www.bhconsultants.co/ 

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