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Key Takeaways When institutions wobble, vague values collapse. A written code makes your hardest decisions before the pressure arrives.
You cannot predict which crisis will hit your business next. All you can do is know that it will come someday, so prepare yourself by deciding who you will be when it does now.
On the evening of Friday, March 14, 2025, the White House issued an executive order that listed the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI) among federal entities to be eliminated to the maximum extent allowed by law. My phone lit up, and my inbox was flooded within the hour. I have the privilege of serving as the CEO of B:Side Capital, a Small Business Administration (SBA) lender and certified community development financial institution, and the order had just put a large part of my organization directly in its crosshairs. I knew that come Monday morning, I would need to present a clear plan for my team and board members.
I knew that mission-based lenders wouldn’t escape the scrutiny of the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but I didn’t think that the CDFI fund would be targeted in such a dramatic manner. I didn’t have a plan in place for this move. Nobody did. What I had in its place was a code, and it turned a chaotic weekend into a sequence of decisions that had been explored long before the crisis hit.
I also teach leadership at Arizona State University, and from both the classroom and the boardroom, the same pattern is impossible to ignore: When real pressure arrives, the values we espouse are too vague to help. Concepts like “Integrity” or “People First” cannot tell you whether to cut staff, go public with your concerns or just quietly wait for the courts. Those words can sit alongside almost any decision without consequence, which is exactly why leaders who rely on them drift from their core beliefs.
What you need instead is a code: a short set of written commitments specific enough to be violated. I spent years studying leaders who navigated far worse than a bad news cycle, from the Roman Senate to the Depression-era Army, for my latest book on crisis-era leadership. The leaders who held in the face of crisis did not share a temperament or a strategy. They shared a moral architecture or code that held up under pressure. Their codes looked different, reflecting their unique backgrounds and perspectives, but they had one important thing in common: They were developed before the crisis hit. You can do the same by following these three simple steps.
Write a line specific enough to violate
State one thing you will not do regardless of what it costs you, and state it as a behavior, not a value. Platitudes like “I will not compromise my integrity” are useless; you can rationalize just about anything and convince yourself that your integrity remains unviolated. “I will not tell my team the business is fine when I know it is not” is different. It represents a real line in the sand. You either crossed it or you did not.
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