“People Are Our Greatest Asset” … Poster or Practice?

Let’s talk about something every CEO says: “People are our greatest asset.” We’ve all nodded along to the quote:

“If you leave us our money, our buildings, and our brands, but take away our people, the company will fail. But if you take away our money, our buildings, and our brands, but leave us all our people, we can rebuild the whole thing in a decade.”  P&G’s former CEO Richard Deupree.

It’s powerful. It’s right. It’s also incongruent: “our greatest asset” is accounted for as… an “expense”. We capitalize factories. We depreciate equipment. We analyze return on capital. But trust? Culture? Leadership capacity? Those don’t live on our balance sheet. They live in the background, until they erode enough to surface as performance issues.

So, if people are truly the most valuable asset, where’s the investment strategy? Where’s the leadership allocation? Where’s the accountability for return on invested leadership?

Mind the Gap

This is the tension we see inside so many high-functioning leadership teams: The message is people-first. The mechanics don’t often match-up. We say people matter most. But when budgets get tight, what's the first line item on the chopping block?

• Leadership development becomes a “nice-to-have.”
• Culture work gets postponed.
• Reflective space disappears from calendars.

This is incongruence - the growing gap between what we say and what we build. And as we explore in “Mind Your How”, the how matters more than ever in moments of complexity. Because the how is what people feel. The how is what culture registers.

The Expectations Nobody Says Out Loud

There’s another, quieter form of incongruence at play in most organizations between what’s expected and what’s accepted. We expect our people to:

• Take initiative.
• Model accountability.
• Navigate ambiguity with resilience.
• Lead without burning out.

But what do we accept / tolerate in meetings, in calendars, in how leaders show up? What do we incentivise and reward?

Do we call out the gap between our cultural aspirations and our lived behaviors? Do we track the human equivalent of return on assets and hold ourselves to reconciling the difference? If the expected return on a factory dropped by 20%, we’d do variance analysis to death. We’d run scenarios. We’d adjust inputs. We’d double-click dashboards. But when people performance dips; when trust is low, clarity is frayed, or the energy in the room is off; how often do we unpack that delta with the same level of rigor?

This is precisely what we help teams do in Sharpening Team Practices—a session designed to turn well-meaning intentions into reliable, aligned behaviors. Because it’s not just what you say you value. It’s what you repeat, reinforce, and evolve.

As we explore in “Echoes in the Room”, the signals are there. But if we don’t have the space, the courage, or the method to name them, they compound. Quietly. Systemically. And that’s when culture starts to drift.

Where Leadership Lives or Unravels

Every leader wants to create a resilient organization. But resilience isn’t a metric. It’s a muscle. And like any muscle, it requires reps.

Yet here’s the quiet truth: most CEOs we meet have gone years without a space to strengthen that muscle. They’re surrounded by data and decisions—but not depth. Their calendars are full, but their clarity is frayed. They carry culture. They carry outcomes. But who helps them carry congruence?

This is why we built the Congruence Series: to help leaders stop treating alignment like a one-and-done event, and start seeing it as a dynamic capability.

We need the ability to dynamically align … together and in real-time

Rethinking ROI: Return on Intentionality

So, what if we redefined ROI? Not only as Return on Investment. But also, as Return on Intentionality. What if we treated our people strategy with the same rigor as our capital strategy? What if culture wasn’t just what we believe, but what we practice, measure, and protect? What if leadership development was a reward for performance, AND a prerequisite for congruence?

We’ve seen it time and again: when a team pauses to recalibrate, the ripple effects are real.

• Trust deepens.
• Communication sharpens.
• Energy returns.
• And leaders stop leading on fumes.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s lived. And the leaders who commit to it aren’t just better at business. they’re clearer, calmer, and more congruent.

Final Thought: It's Not a Poster | It's a Practice

“People are our greatest asset” should be more than a wall decal. It should be a design principle.
A capital strategy. A leadership imperative. So, here’s the reflection we leave you with:

Where in your business are you saying one thing… but building another? And what would it take to close that gap – not with platitudes, but with practice?

Because that gap? That’s where leadership either comes alive…or begins to quietly unravel.

Curious where your team stands on congruence? Explore the Team Congruence Assessment or connect with us to create a space where leadership isn’t performed – it’s practiced.