She wasn't looking for a perfect organization. What she was looking for, and what the interview process seemed to promise, was a place that meant what it said. She accepted the offer with genuine excitement. By month eight, she was quietly updating her resume.

This pattern has a name. Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (1974) called it the gap between espoused theory and theory-in-use: the distance between what an organization says it believes and what its behavior actually reveals. The gap rarely lives in ethical failures or visible hypocrisy. It lives in the intricacies of ordinary decisions, made under ordinary pressure, by people who probably do believe in the values they posted. The problem isn't conviction, it's design.

Read the full post to explore the four places where the values gap most reliably lives, the questions worth asking before your next promotion cycle or all-hands, and what it actually takes to close it.