From Values to Systems: How Courageous Leadership Turns JEDI Commitments into Everyday Practice

Many B Corps were founded on the belief that business can, and should, be a force for good. Justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) have long been part of the B Corp ethos. These values are often intrinsic to how certified companies think about impact, accountability, and responsibility to the people connected to their work. Yet until recently, those principles were more assumed than explicitly operationalized within the standards themselves.

At the same time, beyond the B Corp community, and especially in today’s deeply divided socio-political climate, commitment to JEDI is far from universal and increasingly contested. Over the past year, equity-focused work has taken a visible hit. Public backlash, legal scrutiny, and political polarization have led many organizations to soften language, pause initiatives, or quietly retreat. 

In this context, B Lab’s updated JEDI standards represent a meaningful shift. By making justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion explicit, measurable, and embedded across business practices, the standards clarify what this moment requires of leaders: not performative alignment, but practiced leadership.

This article explores how inclusive and equitable organizations are built through leadership practice, not statements or symbolic commitments. Drawing on real-world experience, it examines how leaders shape culture through everyday decisions, power dynamics, and accountability, and how JEDI must be embedded into how organizations operate rather than treated as a separate initiative. The goal is not perfection, but alignment between values and behavior, intention and impact, humanity and systems.

Case Study: When Values Are Tested by Systems

One organization we partnered with (a long-standing, successful, mission-driven institution) believed deeply in fairness, inclusion, and community. Leadership cared. Values were clearly articulated. Yet constituent* feedback told a more complicated story.

Employees described inconsistent expectations across departments, unclear decision-making processes, and hesitation to speak openly about concerns. Within the people they served, some groups felt ‘othered’ while other groups felt ‘invisible’. Trust had begun to erode because systems had not evolved alongside stated values, and people were not being held accountable for what the organization stated was important to them.

The organization took these concerns to heart and began addressing them with a comprehensive equity audit. It included a review of policies, decision-making pathways, leadership structures, and cultural norms, alongside confidential opportunities for constituents to share their lived experiences. 

From the audit, several patterns emerged:

• Decision-making authority was unclear and inconsistently applied
• Leadership expectations varied by role and identity
• Feedback mechanisms existed, but constituents did not trust that speaking up would lead to change
• Certain groups of constituents, in particular those of non-majority race and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, felt excluded and engagement data from both groups confirmed that belief.

Rather than treating these findings as failures, leadership approached them as data.

Interventions followed in phases. Leaders engaged in CARES® Certification to develop a shared leadership framework grounded in courage, acceptance, respect, empathy, and success/accountability. This effort was paired with executive coaching focused on decision clarity, power awareness, and responding to harm without defensiveness. Organization-wide training ensured shared language and reduced the burden on marginalized constituents to explain or justify their experiences.

Over the following year, outcomes were tangible:

• Constituent engagement survey participation increased by 22%, signaling improved trust
• Reported comfort with speaking up rose by 30–35% across departments among employees
• Internal conflict escalations decreased by nearly 40%
• Leadership turnover stabilized after two years of volatility

No single program produced these results. The shift came from aligning leadership behavior with redesigned systems. True change happened from the inside out.

*Please note that US² Consulting uses the term constituents rather than stakeholders (while also acknowledging that B Lab uses stakeholders). For the duration of this article, the word constituents will be used to recognize the historical roots of the word “stakeholder” and its connection to ownership and exclusion. “Constituent” more accurately reflects the people impacted by organizational decisions, whether or not they hold formal power.

Accountability, Psychological Safety, and Power: Leadership as the Lever

One of the most persistent myths in organizations is that accountability damages morale. In reality, unclear accountability is what erodes trust.

When accountability is framed as punishment, people hide mistakes. When it is framed as learning, people engage. 

Organizations that build healthy cultures treat accountability as a shared practice: expectations are clear, decisions are transparent, and progress is visible.This is where leadership behavior matters most. 

Leaders set the tone by:

• Naming goals publicly and owning outcomes, including the requirement of JEDI2.a to publish a public JEDI commitment statement approved by senior leadership.
• Reporting progress honestly, including where targets are missed, satisfying the requirements of JEDI2.n.
• Inviting feedback and responding with action, satisfying JEDI1 while helping surface priorities to achieve through JEDI2’s implementation measures.

When leaders model this behavior, accountability becomes stabilizing rather than threatening. Morale improves because people know where they stand and what success looks like.

Psychological safety plays a similar role. Too often, it is treated as a soft skill or Human Resources (HR) responsibility. In reality, psychological safety is a governance issue. It is shaped by who holds power, how decisions are made, and whether policies protect, or punish, those who speak up.

Organizations that take psychological safety seriously embed it into:

• Leadership training and evaluation
• Policy review and decision-making processes
• Regular, structured opportunities for constituents to share experiences

When psychological safety is designed into systems, belonging becomes sustainable rather than situational.

From Values to Systems: Why the New JEDI Standards Matter Now

For years, many organizations within the B Corp community have articulated strong values around justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. These values have guided mission statements, culture decks, and public commitments. But values, on their own, do not govern how decisions are made, how power is exercised, or how harm is addressed when it occurs. Systems do.

B Lab’s new JEDI standards represent a critical evolution: a move from values as aspiration to equity as infrastructure. Rather than asking organizations what they believe, the standards ask how those beliefs are operationalized: through data, governance, accountability, and leadership behavior. 

In a moment when JEDI work is being politicized and, in many spaces, actively rolled back, this shift is both timely and necessary.

JEDI1 functions as the mirror. By requiring disaggregated data and structured opportunities for constituents to share their lived experiences, organizations are asked to confront the gap between intention and impact. This is not about catching leaders doing something wrong; it is about making the invisible visible. Without this mirror, organizations risk mistaking good intentions for equitable outcomes and silence for satisfaction.

JEDI2 provides the muscle. It moves organizations from awareness into action by requiring executive ownership, leadership development, third-party equity audits, transparent progress reporting, and collective action beyond the organization itself. These elements are not add-ons; they are the mechanisms through which values become durable. They ensure that equity does not depend on individual champions or political climate, but is embedded into how the organization operates.

Importantly, the standards also surface what is often left unnamed: power. Who makes decisions? Who sets priorities? Who is accountable when commitments fall short? By calling for representative leadership, equity audits that examine the impact of decisions on different groups, and policies reviewed through a JEDI lens, the standards acknowledge that inclusion without power-sharing is incomplete.

For leaders feeling overwhelmed, this framing offers relief. The work is not about saying the right thing or having all the answers. It is about designing systems that support dignity, belonging, and accountability; especially when external pressure makes those commitments harder to hold. The new JEDI standards do not raise the bar to make leadership unattainable; they clarify where leadership matters most.

In this way, the standards serve as both a roadmap and a safeguard. They protect equity work from becoming performative, episodic, or optional. And they remind leaders that sustainable organizations are built not through optics, but through consistent, values-aligned practice: one decision, one policy, and one act of accountability at a time.

An Invitation to Leaders: What This Looks Like in Practice

For leaders feeling overwhelmed, the work does not begin with sweeping change. It begins with disciplined leadership practice.

That means:

1. Audit before acting: Use data and constituent feedback (achieved through JEDI1 measures) to understand lived experience before proposing solutions
2. Clarify accountability: Make expectations visible (JEDI 2.a), track progress (JEDI1 and JEDI2.e), and normalize learning over perfection
3. Invest in leadership capacity: Equip leaders with the skills to navigate power, feedback, and harm (JEDI 2.b and JEDI2.i)
4. Design for psychological safety: Embed it into governance, policies, and decision-making pathways (JEDI2.c, JEDI2.f)
5. Commit publicly and consistently: Not for optics, but for alignment (JEDI2.n, JEDI2.p, JEDI2.s)

Inclusive and equitable organizations are not built through performative commitments. They are built when leaders align values with behavior and systems with humanity.

The new JEDI standards do not ask leaders to be perfect. They ask leaders to be intentional, accountable, and courageous.

And that work, done well, is not only possible. It is essential.

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B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.