A Values Audit Every Festival Director Needs to Take
Let me ask you something most leadership books won't. Not what your values are. Not what they should be. But this:
When is the last time your budget reflected your stated values — dollar for dollar?
If you had to pause before answering, you're not alone. And that pause? That's where ethical drift begins.
I've spent more than three decades producing large-scale festivals. I've sat across tables where the money was pulling one direction and the mission was pulling another. I've watched good leaders make decisions that quietly dismantled what they said they stood for — not out of bad character, but out of the absence of a clear, tested, written-down values framework.
The hard truth about leadership in the live events industry is this: you are constantly making decisions under pressure, with incomplete information, on someone else's timeline. And when you don't have your values named, mapped, and pressure-tested — you will lead by default instead of by design.
This post is your invitation to change that.
The Gap That Quietly Kills Leadership Credibility
Research on ethical leadership — pioneered by scholars Brown, Treviño, and Harrison — defines ethical leaders as those who demonstrate normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and who promote that conduct through their decision-making. In other words: your decisions are your values made visible.
A landmark study published in the Journal of Human Resource & Leadership outlines four phases of ethical decision-making: recognizing moral issues, making ethical analyses, forming moral intentions, and taking ethical action. Notice what comes first — recognition. You cannot act on values you haven't identified.
This is the gap that quietly erodes leadership credibility in our industry. Not scandal. Not crisis. Just the slow accumulation of decisions made without a named ethical framework — until one day the gap between what we say we value and what our operations actually reflect becomes visible to everyone except us.
The Values-Decision Gap: Signs You May Have One
- You have core values on your website that you haven't referenced in a meeting in months.
- When a sponsorship offer arrives, financial urgency drives the conversation — not mission alignment.
- Your most talented team members are burning out quietly because "resilience" has become a cover for poor boundaries.
- When asked why you made a key decision, you answer with logistics — not values.
What a Values Audit Actually Does
A values audit isn't a feel-good exercise. It's a diagnostic tool — the kind of operational self-assessment that high-performing organizations use to ensure their stated identity and their lived operations are actually the same thing.
According to Gallup's research on strengths-based leadership — which studied over 1 million work teams and conducted more than 20,000 in-depth interviews with leaders — the most effective leaders know their strengths, invest in others' strengths, and understand the needs of those who follow them. But here's what Gallup also found: that knowledge only activates when it's named. Teams where members can articulate what each person contributes and why it matters perform at substantially higher levels than those who cannot.
The same principle applies to values. You can't operationalize what you haven't named. And in festival and live events leadership — where every decision has a public dimension, a team dimension, a community dimension, and often a legal or ethical dimension — unnamed values are a liability.
The gap between what we say we value and what our decisions reveal is where ethical drift begins — and where leadership credibility dies quietly.
The Values Audit: 5 Questions That Will Show You the Truth
These aren't soft questions. They're designed to surface operational data — the kind that tells you whether your leadership is integrated or fractured. Take your time with each one.
1. Where Does Your Budget Actually Go?
Pull your last operating budget and your stated organizational values side by side. For every value you've listed — community, sustainability, artist equity, team wellbeing — can you point to a line item that reflects genuine investment? Or are those values aspirational while your spending tells a different story?
What it reveals: The gap between resource allocation and stated values is one of the most reliable indicators of ethical drift in organizations.
2. Who Has Your Ear in a Crisis?
When things go sideways — and in festivals, they always do — who are the first three people you call? Are they the people most aligned with your values and mission? Or are they the loudest voices, the largest stakeholders, the most politically expedient advisors?
What it reveals: Your crisis advisory circle reflects your real value hierarchy, not your stated one.
3. What Gets Cut First?
When the budget gets tight — and it always gets tight — what's the first thing that goes? Mental health resources? Staff development? Community programming? Accessibility provisions? The order in which you cut reveals the order in which you actually prioritize.
What it reveals: Scarcity decisions are your values under stress. They're the most honest data you have.
4. How Do You Handle Sponsorship Misalignment?
Has a sponsor ever approached you with an offer that created a tension with your mission or your community's trust? What happened? Did you have a clear framework for evaluating it — or did you improvise? Leaders who haven't named their values make sponsor decisions on the fly and often pay for it in community trust.
What it reveals: Sponsorship decisions are some of the highest-visibility ethical choices festival leaders make. Without a named framework, they're made reactively.
5. Can Your Team Name Your Values Without Looking Them Up?
Ask three team members at different levels to tell you your organizational values — without referencing your website or handbook. What do they say? How close is it to what you believe you've been modeling?
As the International Journal of Leadership Studies confirms in its research on values-based leadership, ethical culture is not transmitted through policy documents. It's transmitted through behavior — and your team is watching every decision you make for signals about what's actually valued here.
What it reveals: Values only become culture when they're consistently modeled, named, and reinforced by the leader. If your team can't name them, you're not yet leading with them — regardless of what's on your website.
Your Strengths Are Part of Your Values Architecture
Here's a dimension of values auditing that rarely makes it into traditional leadership content — and it's one I'm deeply passionate about: your natural strengths are not separate from your values. They are one of the most powerful expressions of them.
When I look at my own Top 5 CliftonStrengths — Belief, Learner, Strategic, Positivity, and Responsibility — I can trace each one directly to the decisions I make under pressure, the way I build teams, and the ethical lines I'm simply not willing to cross. My Belief strength means I lead from a core set of values that don't bend to convenience. My Responsibility strength means I hold myself accountable even when no one would know if I didn't. My Strategic strength means I'm always running scenarios — including ethical ones — before I act.
The intersection of your strengths and your values is where your most authentic leadership lives. And it's where your decision-making becomes instinctive rather than reactive.
Strengths Reflection — Add These to Your Audit
- Which of your strengths naturally inform your ethical decision-making?
- Are there strengths on your team you're underutilizing in values-alignment conversations?
- Where might an overuse of a strength be creating a blind spot in how you're leading?
Why This Matters More Right Now Than Ever Before
The live events industry is at an inflection point. Audiences are more values-conscious than any previous generation. Artists are increasingly requiring alignment — not just compensation. Team members, especially younger professionals, are choosing organizations whose stated values match their operational reality.
At the same time, economic pressure in independent festival production has never been tighter. Sponsorship pools are consolidating. Talent fees are escalating. Operational costs are compressing margins in ways that create constant ethical pressure points.
Research published in the Journal of Values-Based Leadership notes that the gap between stated organizational values and actual behavior is where the most significant leadership failures occur — not in dramatic scandal, but in the slow erosion of alignment under sustained pressure. Sound familiar?
Festival leaders who have done the values audit work — who have a named, tested, decision-making framework — are not just more ethical. They're more sustainable. They make faster decisions. They recover from crises with their credibility intact. They attract the talent and partners who align with their mission because that mission is legible and operational, not just aspirational.
The leaders who survive the next decade of industry pressure won't just be the most resourceful. They'll be the most rooted.
A Final Word
The values audit is not a one-time exercise. It's the beginning of a practice — the ongoing work of aligning who you say you are with how you actually lead. It's the work that separates the leaders who survive industry pressure from the ones who are shaped by it.
You got into this work because something in you believes that what we create together — the gathering, the music, the shared experience — matters. That belief is a value. Name it. Protect it. Lead from it.
And if you're ready to build the full framework, I'll see you inside Festival Leadership Foundations.
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