Your Values Are Too Vague - Why Most Leadership Values Are Meaningless

If I asked your team to recite your company’s values, how many would get past the first one?

Let’s be honest. Most people can’t remember them… let alone live by them.

And yet, CEOs and leadership teams will confidently declare that “our values guide everything we do.” It’s a lovely sentiment. It just isn’t true. Not when the values are vague, generic, or worse, lifted straight from a corporate cliché handbook.

In practice, too many values are nothing more than corporate wallpaper. 

They look nice, say the right things… but they don’t actually shape decisions.

Let’s talk about that.

The Problem with Vague Values

Take a 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 actually mean in practice?

Let’s 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’re abstract nouns… nice in theory, useless in a crisis.

And it’s not just about semantics. History is littered with companies that shouted “Integrity!” from the rooftops while acting in complete contradiction. Enron springs to mind… a company that literally had Integrity as one of its values printed on their lobby walls.

Clearly, saying the word is not the same as living it.

Why This Matters

Values are meant to be the compass for decision-making, especially when the route is unclear.

In moments of ambiguity, when there’s no obvious answer, your values should be the tiebreaker. The steady hand. The cultural North Star.

But here’s the catch: when values are vague, people fill in the gaps. They rely on personal bias, office politics, or habits. And that leads to misalignment, inconsistency, and even hypocrisy.

I've seen it myself, teams making wildly different decisions because they're each interpreting the same value in entirely different ways. That’s not culture, that’s chaos.

The Litmus Test: Are Your Values Real?

Here’s a quick test to see if your values are doing any real work:

1. Can every team member explain what each value means - with examples?

2. Are values baked into hiring, performance reviews, and exits?

3. Can you name a tough decision your team made recently, specifically because of your values?

If the answer is no… then what you’ve got aren’t values. They’re slogans.

From Buzzwords to Behaviour

If you want your values to matter, they need to be active, not abstract.

Here’s how that looks:

• Instead of Integrity, say: “We admit mistakes fast and take public responsibility.”

• Instead of Innovation, try: “We run weekly experiments and celebrate learnings, even if they fail.”

• 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. Hire and fire by.

Think of it as “values with verbs.”

When you give your values behaviour, you give them power.

Stories of Impact

I’ve worked with a CEO who scrapped their old “values deck” and replaced it with three clear behavioural principles.

One of them? “We take the harder right, not the easier wrong.”

It changed everything. In hiring decisions, performance conversations, and even contract negotiations, that one value became a guiding principle. A litmus test. If a shortcut looked profitable but felt ethically shaky, the team had the confidence to say no.

That’s the point of values. They cost you something. That’s how you know they’re real.

How to Fix Your Values

Here’s a process I’ve used with leadership teams to turn wallpaper into working principles:

1. Kill off the generic stuff. If you can find it on a thousand other websites, bin it.

2. Describe values in action. Ask: “What does this look like when done well and poorly?”

3. Pressure test them. Run scenarios. Would these values help a new hire make a decision on their first day?

4. Bake them in. Integrate values into your hiring scorecards, onboarding, 1 to 1s, peer feedback, and recognition schemes.

Because if your values only live in the HR handbook, they’ll die there too.

Closing Challenge

If your values can’t help a new hire make a tough call on day one, you don’t have values, you have slogans.

And slogans don’t build trust. They don’t shape culture. They don’t steer teams through complexity.

Real values? They’re behavioural. They’re visible. They’re costly. But they’re worth it.

So, what are yours?

And more importantly… Would your team agree?

Dr. Stephen McCormac

Leadership Cohesion - Strategy Execution - Revenue Growth | CEO | Professional Services