If you asked your team to recite your company's values, how many would get past the first one?
Most people cannot remember them, let alone live by them. And yet leadership teams will confidently declare that their values guide everything they do. It is a lovely sentiment. It just is not true when the values are vague, generic, or lifted from a cliché handbook. In practice, too many values are corporate wallpaper. They look nice and say the right things. They do not shape decisions.
The problem with vague values
Look at the average set of company values and you find the usual suspects. Integrity. Respect. Innovation. Excellence. Customer-centric. All good words. But what do they mean in practice?
Say integrity is a core value. Does that mean we tell the truth? Report expenses honestly? Challenge poor behaviour? Speak up when it is uncomfortable? Without definition and context, the words do not hold up under pressure. They are abstract nouns. Fine in theory, useless in a crisis. History is full of companies that shouted integrity from the rooftops while acting in complete contradiction. Enron had it printed on the lobby wall. Saying the word is not the same as living it.
Why it matters
Values are meant to be the compass for decision-making, especially when the route is unclear. In moments of ambiguity, when there is no obvious answer, your values should be the tiebreaker. The steady hand.
But when values are vague, people fill the gaps themselves. They fall back on personal bias, office politics, or habit. And that leads to misalignment, inconsistency, and sometimes hypocrisy. I have seen teams make wildly different decisions because each person interpreted the same value differently. That is not culture. That is chaos.
The litmus test
A quick test for whether your values are doing any real work. Can every team member explain what each value means, with examples? Are the values built into hiring, performance reviews, and exits? Can you name a tough decision your team made recently specifically because of your values?
If the answer is no, what you have are not values. They are slogans.
From buzzwords to behaviour
If you want your values to matter, they need to be active, not abstract. Give them verbs.
Instead of integrity, say: we admit mistakes fast and take public responsibility. Instead of innovation, try: we run weekly experiments and celebrate the learning, even when it fails. Instead of respect, go with: we challenge ideas, not people, and we listen fully before we respond.
These are values you can see, hear, recognise, coach to, and hire by. When you give a value behaviour, you give it power.
I worked with a CEO who scrapped the old values deck and replaced it with three clear behavioural principles. One of them was: we take the harder right, not the easier wrong. It changed everything. In hiring, in performance conversations, in contract negotiations, that one principle became a litmus test. When a shortcut looked profitable but felt ethically shaky, the team had the confidence to say no. That is the point of values. They cost you something. That is how you know they are real.
How to fix yours
A process I have used with leadership teams to turn wallpaper into working principles.
Kill the generic stuff. If you can find it on a thousand other websites, bin it. Describe each value in action by asking what it looks like done well and done poorly. Pressure-test them against real scenarios. Would this value help a new hire make a decision on their first day? Then bake them in, into hiring scorecards, onboarding, one-to-ones, peer feedback, and recognition. Because if your values only live in the HR handbook, they will die there.
If your values cannot help a new hire make a tough call on day one, you do not have values. You have slogans. And slogans do not build trust, shape culture, or steer teams through complexity. Real values are behavioural, visible, and costly. That is exactly why they are worth it.