If you had spinach stuck in your teeth after lunch and didn’t know it, would you want someone to tell you?
The answer is always yes. Every single time. I have never once had someone say, “No, I’d rather walk around like that all afternoon than feel the momentary embarrassment of being told.”
And yet.
When we see someone with spinach in their teeth, most of us say nothing.
We notice. We might even feel a small flicker of discomfort on their behalf. And then we let it go — because telling them feels awkward, because we don’t want to embarrass them, because the moment passes and it seems easier to just move on.
We take the discomfort onto ourselves so they don’t have to feel the embarrassment. And in doing so, we leave them walking around with spinach in their teeth.
This plays out in organizations constantly — and the stakes are considerably higher than lunch.
Leaders who say they value transparency, honesty, and open communication often have a version of this same dynamic running underneath their culture. People see things that aren’t working. They notice when behavior doesn’t match stated values. They observe when accountability is being used as punishment rather than as a tool for growth and alignment. And they say nothing — not because they don’t care, but because bringing it up feels risky, uncomfortable, or simply not worth the cost.
The result is a culture where the gap between stated values and lived reality quietly widens, and nobody says a word about it.
There’s another layer to this worth naming. Most leaders assume that because their values came from them, those values are somehow automatically of them — that having articulated something means they’re living it. But that’s not how it works. Writing values is not the same as living them. Creating a mission statement doesn’t make you capable of embodying it any more than writing a recipe makes you a chef.
The gap exists. The question is whether anyone has the courage to name it.
On both sides.
For the leader, the courageous act is asking — genuinely asking, on a regular basis — whether the people around them are experiencing what they’ve promised. Not “does that make sense?” at the end of a meeting, but something more honest: are you seeing me live the values I say I hold? And if not, where am I falling short?
For the people around the leader, the courageous act is being willing to say something when they see something — knowing that their input is genuinely wanted and that the response will be curiosity rather than defensiveness.
That kind of culture doesn’t happen by accident. It gets built, deliberately, by leaders who are willing to be told they have spinach in their teeth — and who respond with gratitude instead of embarrassment.
If you’re ready to close the gap between the leader you intend to be and the one your team is experiencing, let’s have that conversation.
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
