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The best leadership lessons rarely come from a framework. They come from a story: a decision made under pressure, a career turn that required courage, a manager who saw potential before the person did. That kind of storytelling was at the heart of a recent Power of Purpose: Values-Driven Leadership in Silicon Valley event at the Leavey School of Business, where NVIDIA's Deb Shoquist and Allison Wagonfeld joined more than 300 undergraduates to speak openly about what it actually means to lead with values when the pressure is real, the pace is relentless, and the stakes are high.

Shoquist, Executive Vice President of Operations at NVIDIA and Santa Clara University alumna, and Wagonfeld, NVIDIA's Chief Marketing Officer, were joined in conversation by Professor Barry Posner, co-author of The Leadership Challenge and Chair of Leavey's Management and  Entrepreneurship Department. University President Dr. Julie Sullivan offered opening remarks, grounding the evening in Santa Clara's commitment to developing leaders of competence, conscience, and compassion.

Values show up when it's hard

Both speakers were clear from the outset: values aren't something you declare, they're something you discover. "Your values are something you don't usually realize that you have until you're put up against a problem," Shoquist said. "It sort of makes you decide: do you go this way or do you go that way?"

Wagonfeld, who had joined NVIDIA just three months before the event, described using her values as a deliberate filter when deciding to leave Google after a decade. "I didn't go to NVIDIA to be safe," she said. "I went to go push myself." Her core value of being comfortable with discomfort made the leap feel not just acceptable, but necessary.

On the question of values alignment in the workplace, Shoquist was direct: "Find a company where your values match, because then it's just work and work is not stressful. Work is fun. Unless your values are different, and then it's stressful every day, no matter how easy the job is." She has left companies when asked to act against her values and said she would do it again.

Developing leaders means stretching them - and protecting them

Both speakers pointed to the same formula for growing others: meaningful stretch opportunities paired with genuine psychological safety. Wagonfeld described building environments where mistakes aren't just tolerated but examined. "It's not only pushing someone outside the comfort zone, but creating a safe place to ask questions and even celebrate mistakes," she said. "Creating this constant learning environment is really critical as a leader."

Shoquist described NVIDIA's culture of "swarming," placing developing leaders in high-stakes roles while surrounding them with colleagues invested in their success. "I've watched people develop extremely fast in that environment," she said, "as opposed to development classes and coaching. It's throwing someone in the fire and swarming them to make sure they're going to be successful."

The simplest form of recognition

In one of the evening's most memorable exchanges, a student asked how leaders authentically celebrate their teams inside a high-intensity tech culture. Shoquist's answer came from experience. After multiple rounds of surveys and formal recognition programs failed to improve engagement scores, she returned to her team with a simple question: what do you actually want? The response stopped her. "One guy said, 'I just want my boss to look up at me in the hallway and say hello like I exist.'"

The lesson she took from it was equally simple: "You want another human to tell you you're valued as a human. I don't think the certificates or the congratulations go anywhere."

A through line that starts here

For Shoquist, the evening carried personal resonance as a return to her alma mater. She reflected on how a guiding principle she had long held - approaching every situation by assuming the best in others - turned out to have roots she hadn't recognized. A presentation at a Santa Clara board of trustees meeting connected it to a core Jesuit value. "It was something I had absorbed while I was here," she said. "This is what excites me about Santa Clara: it is an environment guided by values that you absorb and then actually take forth with you in anything you do."

The Power of Purpose series is part of Leavey's required leadership curriculum for first- and second-year students, designed to bring the frameworks of the classroom into contact with the realities of the career. On this evening, with two executives from one of the world's most consequential companies speaking without a script, that gap felt very small.