Most leadership values are written to be agreed with, not tested — Michelle Peluso, CEO of Revlon, has spent a career finding out which ones actually hold.
Leadership philosophies are easy to write when they live on a slide deck. They’re much harder to build when they have to survive a bankruptcy, a product recall, a difficult hire, or a market that’s changing faster than your team can keep up with.
As part of our CEO Perspectives Salon Series, we sat down with Michelle Peluso, CEO of Revlon and a leader who has tested her convictions across travel, retail, financial services, healthcare, and now beauty. What she’s landed on isn’t a framework for optimism. It’s a set of commitments that hold even when things get uncomfortable.
Most leadership values are written to be agreeable. Integrity. Collaboration. Innovation. Put them on a wall, and no one pushes back because no one has to. They don’t ask anything of anyone. They don’t tell you what to do when two good ideas are competing for the same budget, or when a high performer is quietly poisoning the team, or when the consumer data says one thing and your instincts say another.
That’s the real cost of vague values: they create the feeling of alignment without any of the work. And when things get hard — when there’s actually something at stake — leaders discover they don’t have principles at all. They have aesthetics.
Peluso’s six principles don’t work that way. They’re specific enough to create friction. That’s not a flaw. Friction is what happens when a real standard meets a real situation. It’s uncomfortable, it forces a choice, and it’s the only way to know whether what you believe actually governs what you do.
Know your North Star. Every leader claims to be customer-obsessed. Peluso treats it as a literal first filter: if you can’t explain why an idea is better for the consumer, she’s not ready to talk about the financials. That’s not inspiration, it’s a gate. And gates have consequences. Good ideas get turned away at that gate every day. That’s what makes it credible.
Lead for the betterment of others. This one comes from an inscription at West Point, and it reframes the fundamental question of what leadership is actually for. The uncomfortable version: are you leading to build something, or to become something? Those aren’t always the same ambition, and most people in senior roles have never had to answer honestly.
Edit to amplify. Most senior leaders aren’t filtering bad ideas; those get screened before they arrive. The harder discipline is saying no to good ones. As Peluso puts it: “It’s very rare that bad ideas come to you. Usually when people are coming to you, they’re good ideas.” Which means the job isn’t judgment. It’s restraint. The cost of this principle is saying no to people who deserve a yes, in service of something that hasn’t fully emerged yet.
Be a learn-it-all, not a know-it-all. Borrowed from Satya Nadella, this one carries a sharper edge than it sounds. Intellectual humility isn’t a cultural nicety; it’s a confrontation with your own obsolescence. The leaders who resist it aren’t arrogant; they’re scared. Admitting you don’t know something at the top costs status, and status is something people in senior roles have often worked a long time to earn.
Play with joy. This is the one most likely to be misread as soft, so here’s the harder version: joy is a discipline, not a disposition. Peluso’s argument is that when things look great, they’re not as good as they seem, and when things are hard, they’re not as bad as they seem. That kind of equanimity requires constant work. It also requires resisting the instinct to perform urgency when your team is watching, which is one of the harder things to give up when you’re the person in charge.
Embrace the “and.” This is the sharpest of the six, and the one most organizations quietly refuse to live by. How many times has a leader’s bad behavior been excused because they hit their numbers? Peluso’s position is blunt: “It should be an expectation that you are incredible in your craft and you’re kind… anything else is just justification for bad behavior.” There is no tradeoff. High performance and decency are not in tension. Treating them as if they are is a choice, and it’s a choice that tells your team exactly what you actually believe.
The problem with leadership principles isn’t usually the principles themselves. It’s that organizations announce them and then expect behavior to change. A value isn’t real until it costs you something. That means passing on the candidate who would have crushed it but treated people badly. It means killing a good idea because it didn’t clear your North Star. It means saying publicly, in front of your team, that you fell short — and not leaving yourself out of it.
Peluso did exactly that when a quality issue at Revlon moved too slowly: “We didn’t actually put the consumer first in every single way we could have.” That kind of transparency isn’t performance. It’s what closes the gap between what a company says it believes and what it actually does. It’s also, not coincidentally, what makes a leader someone people will follow when things get genuinely hard.
The six principles aren’t a philosophy for when things are working. They’re a foundation for when they’re not, and the only way to know you have one is to have built it before you needed it.
