CONTAGION: Preach Your Values All the Time. When Necessary, Use Words

24 June 2026

Dr Leandro Herrero:

This is plagiarism, of course. I am stealing a line attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi: “Preach the Gospel all the time. When necessary, use words.”

It is one of the most beautiful paradoxes I know.

The phrase has survived for eight centuries because it captures something fundamental about human beings. We learn from what people do far more than from what they say.

In management circles the idea has been recycled as “walk the talk”. I have always thought the sequence was wrong. I prefer: talk the walk. Walk first. Then explain the walk.

Leaders do not create credibility by describing behaviours. They create credibility by exhibiting them. The explanation comes later.

This may sound obvious. Yet organisations seem determined to forget it.

We are living through the most communication-intensive period in organisational history. There are more channels, more content, more videos, more podcasts, more town halls, more newsletters and more messaging than ever before.

At the same time, many organisations struggle to change even the simplest behaviour.

Perhaps the problem is not that we communicate too little. Perhaps we expect communication to do jobs that only behaviour can do.

Take values. Most organisations have them. Many have beautifully crafted versions. They are displayed in reception halls, annual reports, onboarding programmes, intranets and performance management systems. They are discussed in leadership meetings and polished endlessly by well-meaning committees.

Yet the more organisations talk about values, the less interested I become in their values. Show me the behaviour instead.

People cannot imitate a value statement. People cannot copy a PowerPoint slide. People imitate people.

This simple observation has profound consequences. Human beings are social learners before they are rational analysts. We are constantly watching each other. We observe who gets promoted, what gets rewarded, what gets ignored and what happens when things go wrong.

Long before we analyse, we imitate.

This is why I have spent years arguing that organisational culture is not primarily a communications problem, a training problem or even a leadership problem. It is a social spread problem.

Ideas may start in the boardroom, but behaviours spread through the organisation in exactly the same way fashions, habits, rumours and social movements spread: from person to person.

Words are pre-social. The revolution is social.

That is why the behavioural translation of values matters so much. Every value must have a visible expression. Every belief must have observable evidence attached to it.

The question is never whether we believe in collaboration, accountability, innovation or customer focus. Most organisations already do.

The real question is: what do those things look like on a Tuesday morning?

What behaviours would convince a sceptical observer that the values are real?

What would they see?

What would they hear?

What would people be doing differently?

Without answers to those questions, values remain aspirations. With them, they become behaviours capable of spreading through imitation.

This is where communicators have a far more important role than many realise.

Communication matters enormously. Words inspire. Words educate. Words challenge. Words provide meaning. Every movement starts with language of some kind.

But communication is often at its most powerful when it amplifies behaviour rather than substitutes for it.

The communicator’s task is not simply to distribute messages. It is to make visible the behaviours that deserve to spread. To identify examples. To tell stories. To shine a light on what people are already doing when nobody is looking.

Words can introduce an idea. Words can explain an idea. Words can celebrate an idea. But only people can normalise an idea.

One of the great confusions of organisational life is the belief that declaring something makes it more likely to happen. It often does not. Sometimes the declaration becomes a substitute for the thing itself.

A company publishes values and assumes it has strengthened culture. A leadership team launches a transformation and assumes change has started. An organisation announces collaboration and assumes collaboration exists.

Words are mistaken for evidence. But words are not evidence.

Words are invitations.

Evidence arrives later, in behaviour.

As the poet William Stafford observed, “The things you do not have to say make you rich.”

Saint Francis may never have intended his famous phrase as a lesson in organisational culture, leadership or communication. Yet it contains a truth that many modern organisations still struggle to accept.

People ultimately believe what they see.

So preach your values all the time. And when necessary, use words.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is Chief Organizational Architect at The Chalfont Project, psychiatrist, author, and international speaker. For over 25 years, he and his team have transformed organizational cultures worldwide through his pioneering Viral Change™ methodology – where a social movement approach creates lasting change. Follow Dr Herrero on LinkedIn for his latest updates.