When Your Values Make the News for the Wrong Reason

Last week, the York Revolution forfeited a baseball game.

Not because of an injury, a weather delay, or anything that happens on the field. The Revs forfeited their 11th annual Pride Night game because several players refused to wear the rainbow-sleeved jersey scheduled for the night. Faced with too few players willing to take the field, leadership made the call to forfeit the game while keeping Pride Night itself alive as a free community celebration.

I work in equity. So in the days that followed, a lot of people asked me what I thought.

Here's what I keep coming back to: this is a leadership team that has shown up for the LGBTQ+ community for over a decade. Eleven years of Pride Night is not an accident or a marketing checkbox. In their own statement, the Revs said the players' refusal was "completely inconsistent with our vision as the Most Welcoming Place in York." I believe them. The values at the top are real.

And that is exactly what makes this worth talking about.

The problem almost always starts upstream

When something like this surfaces publicly, it's tempting to treat it as the problem. It isn't. It's the symptom. The actual problem showed up much further upstream — long before anyone was standing in a clubhouse the week of the event discovering that fewer than nine players were willing to suit up.

I spend a lot of my time going "up river" with organizations, because that's where these things are actually solved. A standoff that becomes public on a Thursday night didn't begin on Thursday night. There was a gap between what leadership believed the organization stood for and what every person inside that organization understood those values to mean for them, in their role, on a specific day.

That gap is incredibly common. I see it constantly. A leadership team declares its values — welcoming, inclusive, respectful — and genuinely lives them at the top. But declaring values and ensuring an entire team understands those values, and what they translate into in practice, are two very different things. The first is a statement. The second is work.

Why this keeps happening

Most organizations avoid this work for a reason that's deeply human: we don't like conflict. It's uncomfortable to sit a team down and ask, out loud, "Do we actually agree on what we stand for? And do you understand what that asks of you?" Those conversations can surface disagreement. They can get tense. So we skip them, assume alignment, and hope the values speak for themselves.

But avoiding the hard conversation doesn't make the disconnect go away. It just leaves it unmanaged — sitting quietly under the surface until an event, a deadline, or a Pride Night jersey forces it into the open at the worst possible moment, with the least possible room to navigate it well.

By not leaning into those challenges early, you inadvertently leave your team vulnerable to unmanaged conflict. And unmanaged conflict has a way of choosing its own timing.

What a values audit actually does

This is the heart of the work I do with a Communications Audit — and specifically, the piece of it I'd point any leader toward first: a core values communications audit.

It's a proactive way to answer three questions that most organizations assume they already know the answers to:

• Does your team actually understand your core values?

• Do they understand what those values look like inside their specific roles?

• Where are the disconnects — the places where leadership believes one thing is shared and understood, but it isn't?

It's not about catching people. It's about finding the gaps while they're still quiet, while you still have time and room to address them with care — instead of discovering them in a crisis, in public, on a clock.

The case for a facilitator

Here's the part leaders often underestimate: even when you want to have these conversations, having them well is a skill.

I've seen firsthand how invaluable it is to have someone experienced in the room when the conversation gets hard. A skilled facilitator makes sure every party is genuinely heard while keeping the conversation centered in respect. That changes outcomes. When people feel heard, they're far more likely to understand the full picture, to grasp the real impact of their choices, and to make informed decisions about a path forward — together, rather than from opposite sides of a standoff.

That's the difference between a conversation that builds a team and one that fractures it.

This is cheaper than the alternative

There's a hard-nosed business case here too, and I won't pretend otherwise. Proactively building a team that's aligned on its values — and equipped to talk honestly when they're tested — saves real money. It saves the cost of crisis communications. It saves the cost of internal strife, lost trust, and the time leadership pours into damage control instead of mission.

And here's the thing: conflict is still inevitable. A values audit doesn't make disagreement disappear. What it does is build the foundation — trust and respect — that lets your team handle conflict well when it inevitably arrives. Organizations that have done this work aren't conflict-free. They're conflict-ready.

You don't have to do everything at once

A full internal-and-external communications audit is the gold standard, and it's worth it. But I understand that not every organization is ready for that on day one.

If that's you, start smaller. Even a focused core values communications audit — just getting clear on whether your team shares an understanding of what you stand for and what that means in their roles — is worth prioritizing. It's the single highest-leverage place to begin.

Because your values are only as strong as the shared understanding behind them. And the time to find out whether that understanding actually exists is before it makes the news.

If you're a leader wondering whether your team is truly aligned on what your organization stands for, I'd love to talk it through — no pressure, no pitch. Just a conversation about where you are and what might help. Reach out, and let's start there.

— Nicole Shaffer, Founder & Principal Consultant, Changing Currents Communications