Navigating Your Leadership Journey: Tailored Tips for Black Men in Mid-Level Roles
By Dominic George · August 9th 2025

Happy Saturday! Word Count: 1739…13.23 minutes. Copy edited by Dominic George

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Vision Leadership for Life newsletter, designed with the specific challenges faced by Black men in mid-level leadership positions in mind. We understand the unique journey you’re on, and our goal is to provide practical insights to help you thrive in your professional evolution. So, lets dive into today’s topic and Elevate Your Leadership.

Black Men: What Your Values Say About How You Lead

Your Values Are Not Optional

When you step into leadership as a Black man, you do not walk into the room alone. You bring with you a lifetime of experiences, cultural anchors, and a deep well of values. Values that shape not just how you lead, but why you lead in the first place. These values can be your compass or your constraint. They can elevate you beyond the noise of corporate politics, or they can be exploited if you haven’t taken the time to define and defend them.

In this moment of history, when Black leadership is both needed and tested, your values are not optional. They are the core architecture of your influence. And yet, too many Black men in leadership have never stopped to fully name, audit, and align their values with the way they lead.

This is not about vague “integrity” statements printed on office walls. This is about the lived code you operate from when the stakes are high, when you are the only one who looks like you in the room, and when your decisions are under a microscope.

Values Are Not Just Personal, They Are Strategic

For many Black men in leadership, values are framed as “personal beliefs,” separate from the bottom-line work of leadership. That’s a mistake. In reality, values are the invisible infrastructure of your decision-making, your relationships, and your leadership identity.

If you value loyalty, you will build teams differently than a leader who values innovation first. If you value equity, your performance reviews will look different from those of a leader who values efficiency above all. If you value freedom, you will make career choices that look risky to others but feel aligned to you.

The danger is this: if you do not define your values, someone else will define them for you and then use them to measure your worth. That’s how many Black leaders find themselves living under someone else’s playbook, constantly proving they belong, rather than shaping the game.

How Your Values Show Up in the Boardroom

Every decision you make is a reflection of your values.
But here’s the hard truth, what you say you value and what you show you value are not always the same. This gap is where leaders lose credibility.

• If you say you value transparency, but your team always finds out decisions after they’ve been made, the message is clear: your comfort matters more than their trust.

• If you say you value diversity, but you never advocate for more representation in leadership pipelines, your silence speaks louder than your statements.

• If you say you value excellence, but you let political relationships dictate promotions, your people will see through it.

Black men in leadership cannot afford that kind of gap. Too many eyes are watching. Too many people, inside and outside your organization, are looking to see if your leadership is real or rehearsed.

Additional Tip for Black Men: Audit your last three leadership decisions for value alignment.

Solution Shift: Replace reactive decision-making with intentional choices rooted in your principles.

The Cultural Weight of Black Leadership Values

Your values do not exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by culture, community, and lived reality.

Black men often carry values rooted in collective responsibility, resilience, and faith values formed by generations who had to navigate systems designed to exclude them. These values can be a source of incredible strength, but they can also put you in conflict with corporate cultures that prioritize individual achievement over collective success.

For example:

• If you were raised to “never leave anyone behind,” you may hold onto underperforming team members longer than you should, impacting results.

• If you were taught that humility is a virtue, you may undersell your accomplishments, allowing others to take credit or assume you had less impact.

• If you were conditioned to “work twice as hard to get half as far,” you may overwork yourself into burnout, believing rest is weakness.

None of these values are wrong, but they require calibration to thrive at the senior leadership level. Without that calibration, you risk leading from a place of exhaustion, compromise, or invisibility.

Alignment is the Leadership Multiplier

When your values align with your leadership actions, you create trust. That trust is not just between you and your team, it’s between you and yourself.

Alignment gives you:

• Clarity in decision-making. You don’t second-guess yourself because your choices are anchored in what matters most.

• Consistency in your leadership voice. People know what to expect from you, and that predictability builds confidence.

• Courage to lead authentically, even in hostile or high-pressure environments.

But alignment doesn’t happen by accident, it happens by intentional design.

Three Steps to Audit and Align Your Values

1. Name Them Out Loud
   Stop relying on an internal sense of “I know what I stand for.” Write your top five leadership values on paper. Be specific, “equity” is different from “fairness,” and “innovation” is different from “creativity.”

2. Audit the Evidence
   Look at your last three major leadership decisions. Did they reflect your stated values? Or did fear, politics, or pressure pull you out of alignment?

3. Close the Gaps
   Where your actions and values don’t match, name the reason. Then create one small but concrete change you can make this week to bring them closer together.

When Values Cost You

Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough: leading with your values can cost you. Promotions. Opportunities. Even relationships.

When you are a Black man who refuses to compromise on certain principles, you will be labeled as “difficult,” “not a team player,” or “not strategic enough.”
But here’s the deeper truth, leadership that abandons values for comfort is not leadership, it’s compliance.

The cost of values-driven leadership is real. But the cost of abandoning your values is far greater. That’s how you lose yourself.

From The Authentic Edge: The Leadership Values Compass

In The Authentic Edge: Leading Without Losing Yourself, I talk about the Leadership Values Compass, a framework for navigating leadership decisions when the pressure is high. It’s built on four anchor points:

• Integrity: Does this decision align with who I say I am?

• Impact: Does this decision create the kind of outcomes I want to be known for?

• Influence: Does this decision expand my ability to shape change?

• Identity: Does this decision reflect the leader I want to be long-term?

If you can answer “yes” to all four, you’re leading from a place of alignment. If you can’t, you’re at risk of betraying yourself in pursuit of short-term wins.

Additional Tip for Black Men: Integrate your values into performance conversations with your team.

Solution Shift: Shift from generic management to values-driven leadership that inspires trust and clarity.

Closing Thoughts:

In summary, the challenge for Black men in leadership is we live in a world where your leadership will be tested not only for results, but for how comfortably it fits into a system not built with you in mind. That means your values will be tested daily:

• When you push for diverse hiring and the pipeline is “not ready.”

• When you advocate for your team and are told to “stay in your lane.”

• When you refuse to stay silent in rooms where silence is the currency of advancement.

This is where leadership becomes less about position and more about posture. And posture is all about values.

Leading Without Losing Yourself

Black men, leadership is not about fitting into the mold, it’s about shaping the mold. Your values are your blueprint for doing that without losing your identity in the process.

But this only works if you:

1. Define your values clearly.

2. Align your actions consistently.

3. Protect your values fiercely, even when it costs you.

When you do this, you are not just leading, you are building a legacy. One that says: I did not just lead well. I led well and stayed whole.

That’s the new path forward.

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Fellas, your journey is both unique and powerful. If you’re ready to start leading from your authentic edge, then your on the roadmap for greatness. When you’re leading from within, you are not only advancing your career but also paving the way for future leaders.

Feel free to reach out for personalized coaching or share your success stories.

Your success is our shared triumph.

Real Talk: If you’re ready to:

• Reclaim your voice in high-stakes spaces.

• Lead with strategy, not survival.

• Build a legacy that doesn’t require you to perform to belong.

You don’t have to lose yourself to lead. You just have to reclaim who you are, and lead from there.

Have a POWERFUL Day!

Dominic George

Founder, Vision Leadership for LIFE - LLC

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