Examples of Core Values in Action

Honesty. Fairness. Justice. These are the words people usually reach for when asked to name a core value, and for good reason — they point to something we all recognize: a central belief we feel bound to live up to. Once we've internalized a value like that, it doesn't stay theoretical. It shows up in what we do.

At an organizational level, core values get applied in conjunction with ethics — the set of principles a company leans on to tell right from wrong. That's the theory, anyway. What I find more interesting is watching which companies actually live it.

Organizations that actually live their values

Every international company has a mission statement full of noble language. Fewer of them let it change how they behave when it costs something. Here are a few that, in my view, clear that bar.

Ben & Jerry's

Ben & Jerry's built its values around community support, sustainable financial growth, and product quality — and, notably, doesn't rank one above the others. That balance is harder to hold than it sounds. What impresses me more is what they did with it: when the company founded Ben & Jerry's Foundation in 1985, it committed 7.5% of its annual pre-tax profits to funding activism and community-targeted projects, including work on climate change and GMO labeling — a structure that has since evolved following the company's acquisition by Unilever. That's not a slogan. That was a standing financial commitment.

Southwest Airlines

Southwest calls its defining trait the "warrior spirit" — persistence, ambition, a sense of urgency about doing right by the customer. In 2011, a passenger learned his grandson was dying in hospital and asked the pilot to hold an urgent flight so he could see the boy one last time. The pilot held the flight, violating policy to do it. Here's the part I keep coming back to: Southwest didn't discipline him — a company spokesperson publicly backed his decision, calling it the right call given the extenuating circumstances. That single decision generated years of goodwill and press. You can't buy that kind of story. You can only earn it, one hard call at a time.

KPMG

KPMG operates in well over 100 countries worldwide (the firm has cited figures ranging from roughly 138 to over 150 depending on the year), and its stated values — leadership, respect, commitment, openness, honesty — are meant to create one shared identity across all of them. Whether that fully holds up across so many countries, I'll leave to the reader. But by their own account, people are expected to lead by example, share advice and information openly, and show candour and courage when things get difficult. The firm also frames its community commitment in terms of environmental protection and widening its own people's skills and perspective. For what it's worth, KPMG announced record revenues of $29.75 billion for fiscal year 2019 — so whatever they're doing culturally, it isn't hurting the balance sheet.

Deloitte

Deloitte points to commitment, integrity, and respect for cultural diversity as the values that define its culture — inclusivity and tolerance, as told by its own employees, of whom there are 312,000 worldwide. To Deloitte, reputation is treated as the single most important asset, with integrity as the non-negotiable behind it. Their bet, essentially, is that a borderless, collegial culture is a genuine competitive advantage — that people get sharper by working across cultures, not despite it.

Strong values at the individual level

Here's something worth sitting with: values-based action isn't fixed. It shifts depending on where you are in your own life, which tracks with Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Someone fighting for basic safety and security acts very differently than someone pursuing their full potential. Neither is wrong. They're just answering different questions.

And yet — history gives us Nelson Mandela and Steve Jobs, people who held onto their purpose even while struggling to survive. So the hierarchy isn't destiny. A person can also have every basic need met and still feel unmoored, with no sense of purpose at all. Maslow noticed this in his later years and coined "being-values" — wholeness, completion, justice — to describe what separated truly self-actualized people from those who had everything materially and psychologically (food, shelter, safety, love, belonging, prestige, accomplishment) and still drifted without direction.

Below that self-actualization level, most people don't fully know what their own core values are. I think that's genuinely regrettable, because the evidence and the lived experience both point the same way: we suffer less distress when we're actually living in line with what we value.

Ikigai: staying aligned with values

So how do some people manage to stay aligned with their values through real adversity, while others let go the moment things get hard? One answer, at least partially, comes from ikigai — a centuries-old Japanese concept often linked to the country's remarkable life expectancy. Ikigai translates roughly to finding joy in life through purpose: "iki" meaning life, "gai" meaning worth or value.

The idea sits at the overlap of four things: what you love doing, what you're good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world actually needs. Ikigai is that crossover point.

In 2017, a Japanese television special profiled elderly residents of Kyotango, a town known for its unusually high number of centenarians. The crew followed a group of residents through their daily lives, and ran some informal blood and hormone testing on them — nothing close to a peer-reviewed study, worth noting. Every single one of them, it turned out, had a hobby they loved and practiced daily — woodcarving, fishing, painting, that sort of thing. And the testing reportedly turned up notably high levels of DHEA, a hormone secreted by the adrenal gland.

The takeaway on offer was fairly simple: having something that keeps you focused and genuinely intrigued sustains your sense of purpose into old age, and that seems to go along with higher DHEA. It's a modest claim, and really more of a striking anecdote than confirmed research. Living by your values, in other words, might be part of the secret to staying happy and active late in life.

The dark side of values-based action

Now for the uncomfortable part. We live in a complicated world, and even positive values can produce negative outcomes. Schwartz and Bilsky mapped this out with a circumplex model of ten value types:

• Benevolence (welfare preservation, helpfulness)
• Universalism (equality, environmental protection)
• Tradition (humility, respect)
• Security
• Conformity (honoring parents and other authority figures, being obedient)
• Power (dominance, authority)
• Achievement (ambition, personal success)
• Self-direction (creativity, independent thought)
• Hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure)
• Stimulation (having a rich, exciting life)

A correlation study by Jarden (2010) found negative relationships between depressed mood and stimulation, self-direction, and hedonism. A separate study on Hong Kong Chinese architecture students found a link between burnout and conformity. In a study of American Indian youth of the Northern Plains, higher tradition and benevolence values were linked to fewer depressive symptoms — a protective effect, in other words, rather than a risk factor (Journal of Youth and Adolescence). And research on values and psychopathy subdimensions has found power, hedonism, and achievement values positively associated with boldness and disinhibition (Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2017) — though I'd want the exact sample population confirmed before leaning too hard on that one.

A 2015 study by Kajonius and colleagues went further, finding a direct connection between power, hedonism, and achievement and the so-called "dark triad": narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. There was also a positive correlation between benevolence and universalism and a tendency toward guilt — which, if you think about it, makes a strange kind of sense.

Finally, this study on personal values and clinical constructs found achievement values positively associated with both depression and stress, while hedonism and stimulation were associated with lower anxiety and stress — though related research suggests these relationships can shift depending on the population studied. Put plainly: people with little interest in stimulation or pleasure-seeking may run higher on anxiety, stress, and depression, at least in some groups. And yet the pursuit of pleasure carries its own destructive potential. Neither extreme comes free.

These same patterns show up at the organizational level too — which is a sobering thought, given that you could trace at least part of the outbreak of wars and other disasters back to exactly this kind of values misalignment.

How do values actually drive action?

There's a reason recruitment experts tell you to ask candidates for a concrete example of demonstrating a core company value, not just a description of it. The best employees aren't just skilled — their values genuinely line up with the organization's.

Organizations need to look at past behavior to find these people, because past behavior is remarkably predictive of future behavior. Take caring, which you'd expect to be a core value at any healthcare organization. One such organization asked a candidate to describe a time she'd demonstrated it. Her answer: she'd adopted the sick baby of one of her patients, because the mother could no longer care for the child.

That's the kind of example you can't coach someone into giving. And it cuts both ways — letting go of people who don't share, or actively oppose, your organization's core values matters just as much as hiring the ones who do. I'd give competencies and values roughly equal weight in hiring. Keep a "toxic" person on the team because they're technically skilled, and you risk your organization's credibility far more than the skills gap is worth.

Rewards and accountability

None of this holds without a real system of rewards and accountability behind it. When someone embraces your values, say so — celebrate it, even. And when someone's behavior drifts from those values, they need to hear that too, clearly and promptly. There's no shortage of ways to do the first part well: small bonuses in recognition, or something as simple as a personal anniversary call to thank a long-serving employee, on behalf of the organization, for who they've been to it.