At one consulting firm I worked for, the values covered a whole wall. There were about ten of them, if I remember rightly. I never really knew what they were about, and I doubt many of my colleagues did either.
If I asked your team to recite your company’s values, how many would get past the first one? And how many could say what each one means in practice?
And yet chief executives and leadership teams will confidently say that “our values guide everything we do”. It’s a lovely sentiment, but it isn’t true when the values are vague, generic, or lifted straight from a corporate cliché handbook.
In practice, too many values are corporate wallpaper. They look nice and say the right things, but they don’t shape decisions.
The problem with vague values
Look at the average set of company values and you’ll see 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 our expenses honestly? Challenge poor behaviour? Speak up even when it’s uncomfortable?
Without definition and context, these words don’t hold up under pressure. They are abstract nouns: fine in theory, of little use in a crisis.
Why this matters
Values are meant to guide decisions, especially when the way forward is unclear. When there’s no obvious answer, your values should settle it.
When values are vague, people fill in the gaps with personal bias, office politics or habit. That leads to misalignment, inconsistency and sometimes hypocrisy.
Two teams can make opposite decisions while each believes it is following the same value. The result is confusion, and it undermines the culture the values were supposed to build.
A simple test
Here’s a quick way to see if 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 because of your values?
If the answer to any of these is no, what you have are slogans.
From buzzwords to behaviour
If you want your values to matter, describe them as behaviour. For example:
- Instead of “integrity”: “We admit mistakes quickly and take responsibility in public.”
- Instead of “innovation”: “We run weekly experiments and share what we learn, even when they fail.”
- Instead of “respect”: “We challenge ideas, not people, and we listen fully before we respond.”
These are values you can see and hear. You can coach to them, and hire and fire by them.
I call these values with verbs. When you describe your values as behaviour, they start to shape what people do.
What it looks like when it works
In the teams I lead, one principle matters more than any other:
We all work together to drive the business forward. We don’t point fingers, we solve the issues. We are all accountable for the result, because everyone has a role to play.
Every part of it describes something you can see. When a problem lands, does the conversation go to who caused it or to how it gets fixed? When a target is missed, does each function defend its own numbers, or does the team own the result together? People can check themselves against it, and leaders can coach to it.
I’ve seen what the opposite costs. In one programme I reviewed, the developers and the sales team had been blaming each other for the programme delays, and €50 million of work was at risk because of it.
A value like that costs something. It means giving up the comfort of blaming someone else, and that’s how you know it’s real.
Where values get tested: the weekly rhythm
Values are tested in the weekly operating meeting, where the leadership team looks at the same numbers and makes the trade-offs. Do we discount to win this deal? Do we take on a client who doesn’t fit? Who gets our best people? Those are the moments when a value either shapes the decision or gets ignored.
In my own teams, it was the weekly cadence that held everyone accountable. Everyone saw the same numbers, at the same time, in the same room. When something went off track, the conversation went straight to what we would do about it. The principle set the behaviour, and the weekly meeting made it visible.
I’ve written about that weekly review in The Six Numbers That Drive Profit in Professional Services.
How to fix your values
To turn wallpaper into working principles:
- Drop the generic ones. If you can find a value on a thousand other websites, bin it.
- Describe each value in action. Ask what it looks like when it’s done well, and when it’s done poorly.
- Test them under pressure. Run scenarios. Would these values help a new hire make a decision on their first day?
- Build them in. Put them into your hiring scorecards, onboarding, one-to-ones, peer feedback and recognition, and into the weekly operating review, where they will be tested most.
If your values only live in the HR handbook, they’ll die there too.
The challenge
If your values can’t help a new hire make a tough call on day one, they won’t build trust, shape the culture or steer the team through difficult decisions.
Values that work describe behaviour, can be seen, and sometimes cost you something. They are worth the effort.
So, what are yours? And would your team agree?
Turning values into behaviour is part of our Leadership Team Effectiveness work. If your leadership team’s values aren’t shaping its decisions, book an introductory call.
First published in my LinkedIn newsletter, Leadership & Transformation.