[pyrale]

Defending the company's goals is not necessarily an adversarial thing. Many teams have a very local observable area, and giving them context for the company's decisions and facilitating their alignment to these decisions, if well done, is enough. Not every company has a sketchy business model or anti-social ethics (hello Google), so in many companies, alignment issues are not quintessential, and solving them can be done pacifically.

In other words, sure, management is about authority, but there are many things from which authority can be derived: the authority of a respected teacher is very different from the authority of a coercitive cop.

Also, from a sociologic perspective, values are an outcome. If someone has to defend "the company's values", that means they are wishes, not values.