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A Culture of Values: The Principles of Transformational Leadership
From an executive coach comes a human-centered approach to leadership that emphasizes why authentic core values matter and how they can transform both individuals and the workplace. With over 20 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, and organizations worldwide, Laura Thompson reveals how deeply held values drive meaningful leadership, creating a culture of trust, integrity, and growth. She explains why developing qualities like empathy, humility, self-awareness, and honesty is essential for making ethical decisions, strengthening relationships, and leading with authenticity and teaches how leaders can cultivate them. Through compelling insights and real-world applications, Thompson demonstrates how leaders can reconnect with their true selves, creating alignment and purpose within their teams. More than just theory, A Culture of Values provides practical exercises and strategies, offering a clear, actionable roadmap for leaders committed to fostering a values-driven culture and inspiring meaningful change within themselves, their teams, and their organizations.
262 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 13, 2026
About the author
Laura Thompson
94 books184 followersPlease note: Laura Thompson's account is mistakenly merged with another author's account by the same name. Goodreads Librarians are working to solve the issue.
Laura Thompson writes about life - and is unapologetic in what she captures. She is a sexual assault survivor, has navigated near death traumas with her daughters' medical issues, and possesses the ability to capture what is true, honest, and worthy.
True to form, her writing will resonate powerfully with other survivors and with anyone who knows a survivor - because she embodies the word.
Thompson has worked in nonprofit administration for seven years. She and her husband, Edward, have three children: identical twin daughters, Jane and Claire, and son, Stephen. They reside in the Lowcountry of Charleston, SC.
Laura Thompson writes about life - and is unapologetic in what she captures. She is a sexual assault survivor, has navigated near death traumas with her daughters' medical issues, and possesses the ability to capture what is true, honest, and worthy.
True to form, her writing will resonate powerfully with other survivors and with anyone who knows a survivor - because she embodies the word.
Thompson has worked in nonprofit administration for seven years. She and her husband, Edward, have three children: identical twin daughters, Jane and Claire, and son, Stephen. They reside in the Lowcountry of Charleston, SC.
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February 4, 2026
Beyond Performance – Toward Purpose: Why “A Culture of Values” Made Me Rethink Influence, Integrity, and the Tuesday Workday
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 4th, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Laura Thompson’s “A Culture of Values” arrives in a moment when workplace language is being litigated in public – and rewritten in private. One week, a company’s homepage trumpets diversity with the confidence of an era that believed progress moved in a single direction; the next, the same organization replaces the word with something safer, softer, supposedly more “unifying.” Thompson does not pretend this whiplash is imaginary. She names it, works inside it, and then does something harder than branding: she asks what a life looks like when “values” are not nouns we display, but verbs we practice – especially when the room is tense, the timeline is short, and everyone is watching.
The book is structured like a walk through a bright museum of leadership ideas, pausing often to ask what you feel, what you notice, what you keep avoiding. In its opening movements, Thompson builds her case with an approachable blend of lived experience, organizational anecdotes, and research touchstones. She is a coach by trade, and the book reads the way good coaching feels: less like instruction delivered from above and more like a sequence of invitations. Try this. Notice that. Breathe here. Ask the question you’ve been dodging. It is not that she has no prescriptions; it is that she distrusts the fantasy that prescriptions alone change human behavior.
What Thompson wants, above all, is to rehabilitate “values” from the corporate wall – those laminated nouns that hover in lobbies like weather – back into behavior. That means the book keeps returning to a simple proposition: leadership is less a title than a practice of attention. Attention to language, to nervous systems, to the emotional weather in a room, to what gets said in the chat and what never makes it into the minutes. If “Dare to Lead” tried to make vulnerability legible to a management class trained to distrust it, Thompson’s project is adjacent but distinct: she wants to make mindfulness operational, compassion durable, and integrity repeatable. She is less interested in the leader’s charismatic peak moment than in the leader’s Tuesday.
The most persuasive pages are the ones that refuse the false choice between softness and rigor. Thompson’s best example is her discussion of trust. Drawing on work associated with Paul Zak, she argues that high-trust cultures don’t merely feel better; they tend to perform better, too. Trust, in her telling, is a moral environment – the oxygen that allows people to take risks without panic, to disagree without humiliation, to innovate without fear of punishment. What makes this argument land is that Thompson does not treat trust as a mood; she treats it as infrastructure. You do not declare it. You build it – through consistency, clarity, boundaries, and the everyday competence of keeping your word.
Her chapter on mindful communication extends that pragmatism into the world of hybrid work. Thompson argues that the modern workplace is not merely distributed; it is easily misconstrued. A text message strips tone, a Slack reaction becomes an interpretation, and in the absence of face-to-face nuance people fill in the blank spaces with story – usually the story that flatters their fear. To counter this, she offers a three-level model of listening and speaking – subjective, objective, intuitive – focused on content, emotion, and subtext. The model is simple enough to remember in a heated moment, which is precisely when models earn their keep. When communication fails, Thompson suggests, it is often not because people lack intelligence, but because they are acting from unexamined agendas, assumptions, and nervous-system shortcuts.
Thompson is at her best when she makes the case that inner work is not a self-improvement hobby but a governance issue. She cites the “amygdala hijack” idea as a metaphor, even acknowledging that some older brain models are no longer widely accepted in neuroscience, and uses the metaphor for a practical point: leaders who cannot pause between stimulus and response will turn their anxieties into policies. Mindfulness, here, is not incense; it is the practice of creating a fraction of space in which a person can choose something other than reflex. That fraction of space – a breath, a pause, a question asked rather than a verdict delivered – is where values become visible.
The book’s middle section shifts into what it calls “Eighteen Short Takes on Universal Themes” – a sequence of essays that feel like dispatches from the front lines of coaching: empathy without absorption, sensitivity as skill and liability, intuition as cultivated coherence, belief-shifting in baby steps, self-forgiveness as leadership hygiene, people-pleasing as fear, imposter syndrome as transitional humility, social intelligence as influence without authority. Taken together, the short takes form a kind of emotional skill atlas for people who are expected to lead in conditions that keep changing. You could quibble with the genre – these are not research papers; they are reflective provocations – but the cumulative effect is persuasive: leadership is not only strategy; it is the management of self in the presence of others.
If there is a single through-line, it is the question of agency under constraint. Thompson is honest about the ways people become stuck: the high performer absorbing extra projects because competence becomes punishment; the low performer who cannot admit misfit; the leader who micromanages because trust feels like a threat. Again and again, she returns to the idea that beliefs – “I’m shy,” “I shouldn’t boast,” “I can’t change” – harden into identities. Her nod to Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s “Immunity to Change” is well-chosen: the obstacle is not ignorance; it is the hidden commitment to staying safe. Thompson’s coaching sensibility shines here because she does not scold. She asks the reader to observe the trade being made – the quiet bargain between comfort and growth – and then to renegotiate it.
Her chapters on conflict offer similarly pragmatic hope. Drawing on “Nonviolent Communication,” she presents the four steps – observation, feeling, need, request – not as therapy-speak but as a way to keep a conversation from collapsing into accusation. Her workplace scenes are deliberately ordinary: concrete examples, a clear ask, and a refusal to mind-read. Leadership, Thompson suggests, is often less about heroic confrontation and more about creating conditions in which reality can be spoken without the relationship detonating. In a culture that rewards performative certainty, this is a countercultural skill: the ability to stay present while naming what is happening.
One of the book’s most contemporary admissions is that the game exists. Thompson does not pretend workplace politics can be avoided by the pure of heart. She suggests it can be played with integrity, with an understanding of informal power, and with a refusal to confuse self-advocacy with self-aggrandizement. For introverted readers – a constituency she repeatedly addresses with empathy – this is perhaps the most immediately useful material. In that sense, “A Culture of Values” sits in conversation with books that try to demystify influence without collapsing into cynicism. Thompson’s contribution is to insist that you can learn the rules and still refuse the cruelty.
The book’s timeliness, and its fragility, becomes clearest when Thompson moves from interpersonal work into cultural messaging. One short take discusses the NFL’s decision to replace “End Racism” with “Choose Love,” a shift that landed publicly as both aspiration and evasive maneuver. Thompson reads it generously, as a broadened invitation toward heart-centered leadership. She is not naive about backlash, but she trusts the reader to recognize what love would require if taken seriously: the hard labor of repair, the willingness to remain in relationship without tolerating harm, the courage to treat human beings as ends rather than instruments. In other words, “choose love” is not a slogan; it is a standard, and standards are inconvenient.
Her treatment of the corporate DEI retrenchment is similarly pragmatic. She notes the way some organizations have maintained commitments while others have adjusted language and suggests a kind of linguistic judo: rename without retreating, translate values into the dialect the institution can hear. It will feel familiar to anyone doing values-work inside risk-averse organizations. Yet the realism also produces a tension: at times, the book risks making adaptation sound too tidy, as if a reframed label can fully protect the substance beneath it. Readers who want sharper teeth – a more explicit diagnosis of power, an angrier accounting of structural injustice – may feel that Thompson’s tone errs on the side of harmony.
The section titled “Take 17” offers the book’s most vivid metaphor for strategic reinvention: “Moneyball.” Thompson uses Billy Beane’s rejection of baseball’s old romance and Michael Lewis’s account of sabermetrics to argue for “playing the game differently.” It’s about getting to first base – small wins, compounding insight, traction you can measure. This is a familiar lesson in entrepreneurial culture, but Thompson refreshes it by applying it to meaning-driven work rather than mere advantage. Her case study, Chaplain Karim’s imagined food truck ministry – faith, food, and community on the move, with success measured in “meaningful conversations” as much as revenue – is almost absurd in its sincerity, which is precisely why it works. In Thompson’s hands, the metaphor becomes a defense of modest beginnings: start where you can, define success carefully, and keep showing up.
That turn toward metrics is important because it reveals Thompson’s operating balance: heart-centered does not mean hazy. In fact, much of the book’s quiet argument is that values without operationalization become performance, and operations without values become extraction. Thompson wants leaders to hold both. She keeps her focus on the human texture of organizations: emotion, belonging, fear, meaning.
Her most resonant parable comes in the chapter on legacy: the story of three bricklayers, one laying bricks, one building a wall, one “building a cathedral.” Thompson uses this to distinguish task, role, and purpose, and to ask leaders to help teams locate their work inside a larger human project. The point is not inspiration as a sugar rush; it is empowerment as a reduction in micromanagement. People who understand the cathedral do not need to be hovered over for every brick. Thompson pairs this with a quietly radical question – What monument am I building? – that reframes leadership as something that outlives quarterly cycles. It is one of the few moments where the book’s tone turns almost literary: leadership as a form of meaning-making, a narrative you inhabit with others.
The final short take, a twenty-one-day experiment in listening to the heart, is where Thompson’s spiritual framework becomes most explicit. Each morning she places a hand over her heart and asks, “What would you like me to know today?” Each evening she tests the day’s message: was it merely “true” – ego perception – or Truth – heart consciousness. The exercise risks sounding like a wellness ritual destined for an Instagram carousel. But Thompson writes it with enough narrative texture – a grandmother’s service, a failed business venture, the small accumulations of joy – to make it feel less like a hack and more like a discipline. Whether the reader shares her metaphysics is almost beside the point. What she is modeling is attention: the willingness to interrogate one’s own motives, to notice the voice of the inner critic, to practice self-compassion not as indulgence but as a condition of sustainable leadership.
If “Atomic Habits” is an engineer’s manual for micro-change and “Antifragile” a polemic about thriving under stress, “A Culture of Values” is neither manual nor polemic. It is closer to a field guide – a book you can keep on the passenger seat of your professional life and return to when you feel yourself tightening. Thompson’s style is warm and exhortative, sometimes bordering on devotional, and that tone is part of the book’s appeal: it speaks to readers who are tired of being told that leadership is domination in better clothes. It is also where the book can falter. The skeptics she nods to are sometimes dispatched too quickly, and “choose love” can, in weaker hands, become a way to bypass conflict rather than engage it. There are moments when one wants a tougher interrogation of institutions that profit from the very stress they claim to reduce, and a sharper accounting of what values work costs the person doing it.
Yet to judge the book solely on what it does not do is to miss what it offers with real generosity: a usable ethic. Thompson’s insistence on dignity and respect is not a rhetorical flourish; it is a standard. She asks leaders to notice how power moves through daily interactions: who is interrupted, who is praised, who is trusted with ambiguity, who is made to feel small. She offers tools – breath, listening, reframing, structured requests, incremental experiments – and she repeats, almost obsessively, that progress is built in the invisible spaces: before the meeting, after the call, in the choice to ask a clarifying question rather than deliver a verdict. This is not glamorous work. It is, however, the work most organizations actually need.
The acknowledgments reinforce the thesis: this book is shaped by friends, editors, mentors, and clients who served as “co-thought partners.” It is not a victory lap so much as an admission of dependence.
In the end, “A Culture of Values” is a book about leadership as endurance art. It asks the reader to keep practicing when the novelty wears off, when the quarterly targets return, when the group chat becomes acidic, when the news cycle rewards cruelty. It is less interested in the charismatic leader than in the consistent one: the person who can be “eyes on, hands off,” who can engage conflict without humiliation, who can pursue visibility without vanity. Thompson’s writing is strongest when it turns values into scenes: a leader scheduling time after calls to update records, a manager asking what support is needed, a micromanager admitting she does not trust her team, a hand on the heart in the morning quiet. These moments accumulate into a portrait of leadership that is less about grand strategy than about the steady repair of relationship.
For readers who want a manifesto, the book may feel too conciliatory. For readers who want a checklist, it may feel too reflective. But for those who suspect that the future of work will demand something stranger and harder – a literacy in emotion, a tolerance for ambiguity, a capacity to tell the truth without shattering the bond – Thompson offers a companionable guide. It is not perfect, and it does not claim to be. It is, in her own preferred measure, progress.
My rating: 81 out of 100.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | February 4th, 2026
Watercolor Piece by Demetris Papadimitropoulos
Laura Thompson’s “A Culture of Values” arrives in a moment when workplace language is being litigated in public – and rewritten in private. One week, a company’s homepage trumpets diversity with the confidence of an era that believed progress moved in a single direction; the next, the same organization replaces the word with something safer, softer, supposedly more “unifying.” Thompson does not pretend this whiplash is imaginary. She names it, works inside it, and then does something harder than branding: she asks what a life looks like when “values” are not nouns we display, but verbs we practice – especially when the room is tense, the timeline is short, and everyone is watching.
The book is structured like a walk through a bright museum of leadership ideas, pausing often to ask what you feel, what you notice, what you keep avoiding. In its opening movements, Thompson builds her case with an approachable blend of lived experience, organizational anecdotes, and research touchstones. She is a coach by trade, and the book reads the way good coaching feels: less like instruction delivered from above and more like a sequence of invitations. Try this. Notice that. Breathe here. Ask the question you’ve been dodging. It is not that she has no prescriptions; it is that she distrusts the fantasy that prescriptions alone change human behavior.
What Thompson wants, above all, is to rehabilitate “values” from the corporate wall – those laminated nouns that hover in lobbies like weather – back into behavior. That means the book keeps returning to a simple proposition: leadership is less a title than a practice of attention. Attention to language, to nervous systems, to the emotional weather in a room, to what gets said in the chat and what never makes it into the minutes. If “Dare to Lead” tried to make vulnerability legible to a management class trained to distrust it, Thompson’s project is adjacent but distinct: she wants to make mindfulness operational, compassion durable, and integrity repeatable. She is less interested in the leader’s charismatic peak moment than in the leader’s Tuesday.
The most persuasive pages are the ones that refuse the false choice between softness and rigor. Thompson’s best example is her discussion of trust. Drawing on work associated with Paul Zak, she argues that high-trust cultures don’t merely feel better; they tend to perform better, too. Trust, in her telling, is a moral environment – the oxygen that allows people to take risks without panic, to disagree without humiliation, to innovate without fear of punishment. What makes this argument land is that Thompson does not treat trust as a mood; she treats it as infrastructure. You do not declare it. You build it – through consistency, clarity, boundaries, and the everyday competence of keeping your word.
Her chapter on mindful communication extends that pragmatism into the world of hybrid work. Thompson argues that the modern workplace is not merely distributed; it is easily misconstrued. A text message strips tone, a Slack reaction becomes an interpretation, and in the absence of face-to-face nuance people fill in the blank spaces with story – usually the story that flatters their fear. To counter this, she offers a three-level model of listening and speaking – subjective, objective, intuitive – focused on content, emotion, and subtext. The model is simple enough to remember in a heated moment, which is precisely when models earn their keep. When communication fails, Thompson suggests, it is often not because people lack intelligence, but because they are acting from unexamined agendas, assumptions, and nervous-system shortcuts.
Thompson is at her best when she makes the case that inner work is not a self-improvement hobby but a governance issue. She cites the “amygdala hijack” idea as a metaphor, even acknowledging that some older brain models are no longer widely accepted in neuroscience, and uses the metaphor for a practical point: leaders who cannot pause between stimulus and response will turn their anxieties into policies. Mindfulness, here, is not incense; it is the practice of creating a fraction of space in which a person can choose something other than reflex. That fraction of space – a breath, a pause, a question asked rather than a verdict delivered – is where values become visible.
The book’s middle section shifts into what it calls “Eighteen Short Takes on Universal Themes” – a sequence of essays that feel like dispatches from the front lines of coaching: empathy without absorption, sensitivity as skill and liability, intuition as cultivated coherence, belief-shifting in baby steps, self-forgiveness as leadership hygiene, people-pleasing as fear, imposter syndrome as transitional humility, social intelligence as influence without authority. Taken together, the short takes form a kind of emotional skill atlas for people who are expected to lead in conditions that keep changing. You could quibble with the genre – these are not research papers; they are reflective provocations – but the cumulative effect is persuasive: leadership is not only strategy; it is the management of self in the presence of others.
If there is a single through-line, it is the question of agency under constraint. Thompson is honest about the ways people become stuck: the high performer absorbing extra projects because competence becomes punishment; the low performer who cannot admit misfit; the leader who micromanages because trust feels like a threat. Again and again, she returns to the idea that beliefs – “I’m shy,” “I shouldn’t boast,” “I can’t change” – harden into identities. Her nod to Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s “Immunity to Change” is well-chosen: the obstacle is not ignorance; it is the hidden commitment to staying safe. Thompson’s coaching sensibility shines here because she does not scold. She asks the reader to observe the trade being made – the quiet bargain between comfort and growth – and then to renegotiate it.
Her chapters on conflict offer similarly pragmatic hope. Drawing on “Nonviolent Communication,” she presents the four steps – observation, feeling, need, request – not as therapy-speak but as a way to keep a conversation from collapsing into accusation. Her workplace scenes are deliberately ordinary: concrete examples, a clear ask, and a refusal to mind-read. Leadership, Thompson suggests, is often less about heroic confrontation and more about creating conditions in which reality can be spoken without the relationship detonating. In a culture that rewards performative certainty, this is a countercultural skill: the ability to stay present while naming what is happening.
One of the book’s most contemporary admissions is that the game exists. Thompson does not pretend workplace politics can be avoided by the pure of heart. She suggests it can be played with integrity, with an understanding of informal power, and with a refusal to confuse self-advocacy with self-aggrandizement. For introverted readers – a constituency she repeatedly addresses with empathy – this is perhaps the most immediately useful material. In that sense, “A Culture of Values” sits in conversation with books that try to demystify influence without collapsing into cynicism. Thompson’s contribution is to insist that you can learn the rules and still refuse the cruelty.
The book’s timeliness, and its fragility, becomes clearest when Thompson moves from interpersonal work into cultural messaging. One short take discusses the NFL’s decision to replace “End Racism” with “Choose Love,” a shift that landed publicly as both aspiration and evasive maneuver. Thompson reads it generously, as a broadened invitation toward heart-centered leadership. She is not naive about backlash, but she trusts the reader to recognize what love would require if taken seriously: the hard labor of repair, the willingness to remain in relationship without tolerating harm, the courage to treat human beings as ends rather than instruments. In other words, “choose love” is not a slogan; it is a standard, and standards are inconvenient.
Her treatment of the corporate DEI retrenchment is similarly pragmatic. She notes the way some organizations have maintained commitments while others have adjusted language and suggests a kind of linguistic judo: rename without retreating, translate values into the dialect the institution can hear. It will feel familiar to anyone doing values-work inside risk-averse organizations. Yet the realism also produces a tension: at times, the book risks making adaptation sound too tidy, as if a reframed label can fully protect the substance beneath it. Readers who want sharper teeth – a more explicit diagnosis of power, an angrier accounting of structural injustice – may feel that Thompson’s tone errs on the side of harmony.
The section titled “Take 17” offers the book’s most vivid metaphor for strategic reinvention: “Moneyball.” Thompson uses Billy Beane’s rejection of baseball’s old romance and Michael Lewis’s account of sabermetrics to argue for “playing the game differently.” It’s about getting to first base – small wins, compounding insight, traction you can measure. This is a familiar lesson in entrepreneurial culture, but Thompson refreshes it by applying it to meaning-driven work rather than mere advantage. Her case study, Chaplain Karim’s imagined food truck ministry – faith, food, and community on the move, with success measured in “meaningful conversations” as much as revenue – is almost absurd in its sincerity, which is precisely why it works. In Thompson’s hands, the metaphor becomes a defense of modest beginnings: start where you can, define success carefully, and keep showing up.
That turn toward metrics is important because it reveals Thompson’s operating balance: heart-centered does not mean hazy. In fact, much of the book’s quiet argument is that values without operationalization become performance, and operations without values become extraction. Thompson wants leaders to hold both. She keeps her focus on the human texture of organizations: emotion, belonging, fear, meaning.
Her most resonant parable comes in the chapter on legacy: the story of three bricklayers, one laying bricks, one building a wall, one “building a cathedral.” Thompson uses this to distinguish task, role, and purpose, and to ask leaders to help teams locate their work inside a larger human project. The point is not inspiration as a sugar rush; it is empowerment as a reduction in micromanagement. People who understand the cathedral do not need to be hovered over for every brick. Thompson pairs this with a quietly radical question – What monument am I building? – that reframes leadership as something that outlives quarterly cycles. It is one of the few moments where the book’s tone turns almost literary: leadership as a form of meaning-making, a narrative you inhabit with others.
The final short take, a twenty-one-day experiment in listening to the heart, is where Thompson’s spiritual framework becomes most explicit. Each morning she places a hand over her heart and asks, “What would you like me to know today?” Each evening she tests the day’s message: was it merely “true” – ego perception – or Truth – heart consciousness. The exercise risks sounding like a wellness ritual destined for an Instagram carousel. But Thompson writes it with enough narrative texture – a grandmother’s service, a failed business venture, the small accumulations of joy – to make it feel less like a hack and more like a discipline. Whether the reader shares her metaphysics is almost beside the point. What she is modeling is attention: the willingness to interrogate one’s own motives, to notice the voice of the inner critic, to practice self-compassion not as indulgence but as a condition of sustainable leadership.
If “Atomic Habits” is an engineer’s manual for micro-change and “Antifragile” a polemic about thriving under stress, “A Culture of Values” is neither manual nor polemic. It is closer to a field guide – a book you can keep on the passenger seat of your professional life and return to when you feel yourself tightening. Thompson’s style is warm and exhortative, sometimes bordering on devotional, and that tone is part of the book’s appeal: it speaks to readers who are tired of being told that leadership is domination in better clothes. It is also where the book can falter. The skeptics she nods to are sometimes dispatched too quickly, and “choose love” can, in weaker hands, become a way to bypass conflict rather than engage it. There are moments when one wants a tougher interrogation of institutions that profit from the very stress they claim to reduce, and a sharper accounting of what values work costs the person doing it.
Yet to judge the book solely on what it does not do is to miss what it offers with real generosity: a usable ethic. Thompson’s insistence on dignity and respect is not a rhetorical flourish; it is a standard. She asks leaders to notice how power moves through daily interactions: who is interrupted, who is praised, who is trusted with ambiguity, who is made to feel small. She offers tools – breath, listening, reframing, structured requests, incremental experiments – and she repeats, almost obsessively, that progress is built in the invisible spaces: before the meeting, after the call, in the choice to ask a clarifying question rather than deliver a verdict. This is not glamorous work. It is, however, the work most organizations actually need.
The acknowledgments reinforce the thesis: this book is shaped by friends, editors, mentors, and clients who served as “co-thought partners.” It is not a victory lap so much as an admission of dependence.
In the end, “A Culture of Values” is a book about leadership as endurance art. It asks the reader to keep practicing when the novelty wears off, when the quarterly targets return, when the group chat becomes acidic, when the news cycle rewards cruelty. It is less interested in the charismatic leader than in the consistent one: the person who can be “eyes on, hands off,” who can engage conflict without humiliation, who can pursue visibility without vanity. Thompson’s writing is strongest when it turns values into scenes: a leader scheduling time after calls to update records, a manager asking what support is needed, a micromanager admitting she does not trust her team, a hand on the heart in the morning quiet. These moments accumulate into a portrait of leadership that is less about grand strategy than about the steady repair of relationship.
For readers who want a manifesto, the book may feel too conciliatory. For readers who want a checklist, it may feel too reflective. But for those who suspect that the future of work will demand something stranger and harder – a literacy in emotion, a tolerance for ambiguity, a capacity to tell the truth without shattering the bond – Thompson offers a companionable guide. It is not perfect, and it does not claim to be. It is, in her own preferred measure, progress.
My rating: 81 out of 100.
April 5, 2026
This book contains practical advice and exercises to help you understand yourself and grow on your leadership journey. Some of the exercises are maybe a little obvious but it’s good to have reminders.
In a way the title doesn’t quite relate as the book contains practical advice anyone can use, rather it be specific to leadership positions. However, as leadership is now often synonymous with influence instead (rather than a specific position), I understand the aim.
In terms of tone and prose, this is ok. However, there were a few odd words in there like ‘moreover’ which jarred me a bit - they are ones that are more often seen in an inexperienced writer. Is it enough to make you leave it on the shelf? No.
All in all, this was an ok book. I didn’t quite give me the insight I was hoping for but is worth a read, hence why it’s straight down the middle for me.
Thanks to the author, publishers & NetGalley for access to this ARC, in return for an honest review.
In a way the title doesn’t quite relate as the book contains practical advice anyone can use, rather it be specific to leadership positions. However, as leadership is now often synonymous with influence instead (rather than a specific position), I understand the aim.
In terms of tone and prose, this is ok. However, there were a few odd words in there like ‘moreover’ which jarred me a bit - they are ones that are more often seen in an inexperienced writer. Is it enough to make you leave it on the shelf? No.
All in all, this was an ok book. I didn’t quite give me the insight I was hoping for but is worth a read, hence why it’s straight down the middle for me.
Thanks to the author, publishers & NetGalley for access to this ARC, in return for an honest review.
Review of advance copy received from Author
I love this book. The author has really impressive amounts of useful information, and one of the best features of it is, she illustrates her points with lived-it experience from her many years of consulting. If you're looking to up your game when it comes to leadership, this book is for you. My late father (he co-founded the Sheraton Hotel Chain back in the 1930s,) used to say,"One good idea can change your life." This book has a great, big, free-flowing abundance of good ideas!
February 6, 2026
What do values have to do with leadership? Global Coach and Strategic Communication Advisor Laura Thompson has the answer to that one. In her new book, A Culture of Values, she shares her experiences, her expertise, and a wealth of information. She even throws in some exercises to bring the point home and a poem or two to guide you along. A one of a kind book of great value.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews