“My door is always open.” That is what the sign says. That is what the leader says in all-hands meetings. But when someone actually walks through that door, the leader glances up from the laptop with visible irritation, keeps typing for another thirty seconds, and then says, “What do you need?” with a tone that communicates the real message: this better be important. The team learns quickly. The door may be open, but the leader is not. They stop coming.

This is the gap that destroys leadership credibility. Not scandal. Not incompetence. Just the slow, daily mismatch between what you say and what you do. Researchers call it behavioral integrity: the perceived alignment between a leader’s words and actions. When those two things match, trust compounds. When they do not, trust erodes, and it erodes faster than most leaders realize.

The examples are everywhere once you start looking. “I value feedback,” says the leader who becomes defensive the moment someone pushes back. “Work-life balance matters,” says the leader who sends emails at 11 PM and expects responses by morning. “We are a team,” says the leader who takes credit for wins and assigns blame for losses. “Mistakes are learning opportunities,” says the leader who publicly humiliates the first person to admit an error. The words sound right. The actions tell a different story. And people always believe the actions.

Jesus had a term for this pattern. He called it hypocrisy, from the Greek word for stage actor. The hypocrite wears a mask, saying one thing while being another. His harshest words were reserved for religious leaders who preached virtue but practiced something else. “They preach, but do not practice,” he said of them. “They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger” (Matthew 23:3-4). The principle applies beyond religion. Any leader who demands standards they do not keep is building on sand.

Here is what makes this so difficult: most leaders are not lying. They genuinely believe they value feedback. They genuinely believe their door is open. They genuinely believe they care about work-life balance. The problem is that belief is not behavior. You can believe something sincerely and still fail to embody it under pressure. Intentions live in your head. Integrity lives in your calendar, your reactions, and your repeated choices when no one is grading you.

Your team is running a continuous audit on this gap. They are not tracking it consciously, but they are tracking it. Every time your stated values and your actual behavior align, you make a deposit. Every time they diverge, you make a withdrawal. The math is brutal: withdrawals count more than deposits. One visible hypocrisy can cost you months of credibility. People forget the ten times you kept your word. They remember the one time you did not.

The fix is not better messaging. It is fewer messages. Stop announcing values you are not yet living. If you are not ready to leave at 5 PM, do not give a speech about work-life balance. If you are not ready to hear hard feedback without defensiveness, do not tell people you value their input. It is better to say nothing and let your actions speak than to say everything and let your actions contradict you. Silence is neutral. Hypocrisy is corrosive.

There is a simple test you can run on yourself. Pick your three most frequently stated leadership values. For each one, identify the last three times you were tested on that value. Did your behavior match your words? If you say you trust your team, think about the last three times someone made a decision without checking with you first. How did you respond? If you say you are approachable, think about the last three times someone interrupted you with a problem. What was your body language? The pattern in those moments is your real value system. Everything else is just marketing.

Proverbs puts it simply: “The integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them” (Proverbs 11:3). Integrity here is not just moral purity. It is structural wholeness, the state of being undivided. A leader with integrity is the same person in the meeting and after the meeting, the same person when the team is watching and when no one is around. That consistency is what people trust. Not your words. Your pattern.

The good news is that behavioral integrity can be rebuilt. Start small. Pick one value you have been preaching but not practicing, and close the gap this week. If you say you value feedback, go ask for some and visibly thank the person who gives it, especially if it stings. If you say your door is open, put your laptop down and make eye contact the next time someone walks in. If you say mistakes are learning opportunities, respond to the next error with a question instead of a lecture. One aligned action will not fix years of drift, but it is the only place to start.

What is the gap between what you say and what your team sees you do?

I write about leadership at the intersection of timeless principles and modern workplaces. Follow for weekly insights on building teams that actually work. For more articles like this consider subscribing to my Substack at: https://christianleadership.now