Everyone worships something, whether they use the word or not. The thing you actually worship, not the thing you say you value, is the thing your decisions bend toward under pressure, and it is running your life whether you have named it or not.
Everyone worships something. The word makes people uncomfortable, especially people who do not consider themselves religious, but the thing the word points to is universal and unavoidable. There is something at the center of your life that your decisions ultimately bend toward, something you will sacrifice other things to protect, something that wins when your values come into conflict. That is what you worship, whether or not you would ever use the word.
And here is the uncomfortable part. The thing you actually worship is not necessarily the thing you say you value. People say they value family and worship their careers, and you can tell which is which by watching what gives way when the two conflict. People say they value integrity and worship security, and the truth comes out the moment integrity gets expensive. The stated values are what you would like to worship. The actual object of worship is revealed under pressure, in the decisions where something has to give, and the thing that never gives is the thing you actually worship.
This matters enormously for leadership, because what a leader worships runs their decisions, and therefore runs everything downstream of their decisions. A leader who worships their own image will make a thousand small choices to protect that image, and the organization will slowly bend around the leader's vanity. A leader who worships money will sacrifice people and principle to it, and everyone will eventually learn what the real god of the place is. A leader who worships being liked cannot tell the truth that costs them affection, and the whole enterprise suffers from the truths that never get said.
The thing worth understanding is that you do not get to opt out of worshiping something. The choice is not whether to worship but what. The person who worships nothing in particular is usually worshiping themselves by default, their own comfort, their own preferences, their own survival, and a life organized around the self is its own kind of worship with its own predictable fruit. There is no neutral position. Something is at the center, running the decisions, and the only question is whether you have named it honestly.
I worship God, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because the whole point of this is honesty about what is actually at the center. But the principle applies regardless of where a reader lands. Whatever is at your center is running your decisions under pressure, and if you have not named it honestly, it is running them in the dark, and a thing that runs your life from the dark is far more dangerous than a thing you have looked at directly. The unexamined object of worship is the one most likely to lead you somewhere you did not mean to go.
The practical work is to find out what you actually worship, which means watching your decisions rather than your statements. Look at what gives way when your values conflict. Look at what you sacrifice other things to protect. Look at what wins, consistently, under pressure. That is the real object at the center of your life, and naming it honestly is the beginning of deciding whether it deserves the place it holds.
You worship something. It is running your decisions right now, today, whether or not you have named it. The most clarifying question you can ask about your own life is what, actually, is at the center, and whether the thing you are really worshiping is the thing you would choose to worship if you looked at it in the light.