How to align a team to a common set of values

Company values can live two very different lives. In one, they're a few abstract words on a poster in a corridor, admired occasionally, acted on rarely. In the other, they're an active process, something a team actually does together, day after day. Same words, entirely different organization.

Corporate values dreamed up by a marketing team, a handful of senior leaders, or an outside agency are often bold and quotable. What they frequently miss is what's actually most important to the people doing the work. And that's the real trap here: values-alignment isn't employees nodding along to something they've been handed. It happens when people actively use the values, in the small decisions as much as the big ones.

Why your values need to be verbs, not nouns

Look at how many organizations phrase their values: Bold. Innovate. Perform. Punchy words. Almost impossible to apply. Am I supposed to be bold? Is boldness something we do collectively, so I'm off the hook individually? What does bold even mean if I'm not customer-facing, or if I'm simply not a bold person by temperament? Within seconds of reading the poster, you've quietly excluded a large share of your own workforce.

Now compare that with an active phrasing of the same idea: Boldness. Innovation. Performance. Subtle shift, but it changes everything. I might be an introvert, yet I can still see how, as an organization, we're choosing to behave with boldness. That value might even nudge the introvert among us to stretch into something new, not because they're being told to become someone else, but because the value describes a shared direction rather than a personality requirement.

This is what makes values actionable rather than decorative. A leader should be able to ask their team, plainly: did we act with boldness in that situation? If the answer is no, you have a real, nameable misalignment, and a place to improve. If the answer is yes and the outcome was still bad, that's a different and much healthier conversation, because you were aligned in how you behaved even when the result disappointed you. It's fine to fail when you've acted in alignment. It is not fine to succeed by accident, off-values. That distinction, more than anything else, is what builds trust inside a team.

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Values in action: a story about Tom

Here's an illustrative version of something similar to what happened with a client I worked with. Tom is putting together a proposal for a customer project somewhere in the $130,000 to $150,000 range. At 9pm, the customer calls: he needs the proposal by 6am, and he can only stretch to the lower end of that range because he's relying on a government grant. If Tom won't move on price, the customer goes elsewhere. Tom's company doesn't do late-night emails as a rule, and he'd never dream of phoning his boss at that hour to ask permission. His manager had set the higher figure as the floor. But Tom also knows the company badly needs the cashflow. He has to decide, alone, right now.

One of the company's core values is Boldness. Tom decides to forgo his own commission and send a quote he's confident the customer will accept, copying his boss on the email so there's no ambiguity about what he's done. Bold, and transparent about it. In the morning he calls his boss and walks him through the reasoning: "I knew how important a project this size would be for our cash flow, so I acted boldly and I'm offering to forgo my commission to meet the customer's number. I've told him payment is required before we start work. That secures the deal within two weeks."

This is based on a real situation I encountered with a client, details changed here for confidentiality. In that case, the manager's response was to reward the employee's boldness rather than penalise the lost margin, paying Tom his commission anyway. The lesson wasn't really about the discount. It was that the company valued the calculated risk Tom took, and said so, out loud, in a way everyone on the team heard about.

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Why values need to come from the bottom up

It's tempting, when a leadership team sits down to set values, to reach for words that sound dynamic and sharp on a careers page. Everyone in the room can picture the website copy, the kind of candidate it'll attract. The trouble is that most workplaces aren't especially dynamic or edgy day to day. Walk the floor of an average business and you'll find people doing specialist, often repetitive, sometimes exhausting work. And plenty of organizations, if we're honest, value profit above everything else, which means employees get treated as a resource to be extracted from rather than a group of people with their own priorities. That gap, between the poster and the reality, is exactly where misalignment starts.

So here's a blunt piece of advice: if your company doesn't actually treat staff with respect, don't put Respect on the wall. If people are being managed as a commodity, own that plainly, and you'll at least attract candidates who are fine with that arrangement. There's nothing wrong, in principle, with a company that says Profit or Shareholder Value comes first. Part of doing this work well is respecting that different organizations, and different people within them, hold genuinely different things as most important. We call that values diversity, and pretending it away doesn't make it go away.

The way to avoid setting values that don't match your actual team is to run a genuine discovery process, one that includes everyone, not just the leadership offsite. Sometimes this is as simple as walking around and asking people what matters to them. Sometimes it's handing out lists of values and asking people to circle the ones that resonate. You can also use something like the Values App to surface the values a group actually holds in common, quickly and at scale.

It's genuinely striking, once you do this properly, which values rise to the top. In one anonymised client engagement, Harmony emerged as one of the strongest shared values, the kind of finding an external agency or marketing department, guessing from the outside, would be unlikely to land on, let alone write on a wall.

Once you've found a value like that, shared by a meaningful slice of the team, the real work is figuring out what it means for them. In this case, the organization had been through a period of fast growth and real disruption, and what people were craving was some sense of order and stability, harmony both individually and as a group. We may never achieve total harmony, of course. But there's a lot within our control: how we behave toward each other, how we run our processes, how we protect some equilibrium in the system. Biologists have a word for this, homeostasis, the body's constant, quiet work of staying in balance. Leaders can build on a discovery like this directly, asking questions such as "how do we create harmony in the office, including for people working remotely?" or "what would harmony look like from our customers' side of the table?"

Finding a value like this can genuinely reshape a growing organization. It gives leadership something concrete to build culture around, rather than a slogan borrowed from somewhere else.

Sourcing values from the bottom up doesn't mean you're obliged to keep every value that surfaces. Some will reflect nostalgia, or an old way of seeing things that no longer serves the organization. Picture surveying staff at a traditional investment bank: you might well get back Success, Power, and Courage. But if leadership has committed to balancing short-term wins with long-term sustainability, is there a way to reconcile the two? Almost always, yes. The trick is to blend aspirational values, where the organization is trying to go, with intrinsic values, who its people actually are right now.

The important thing, whatever you land on, is that the values were co-created rather than issued.

Making the values felt, not just stated

Values are small compasses that quietly steer behavior. Each of us has built our own set over the course of a life, shaped by upbringing, culture, the events we've lived through, the situation we find ourselves in today.

Underneath all that individual variation, though, there's a layer of baseline survival values we all share, and in the modern world these are usually tied closely to income. When someone's livelihood feels threatened, their nervous system responds the way it always has: fight, flight, or freeze. It's not so different from being told a bear is loose in the neighborhood. The body doesn't distinguish neatly between a financial threat and a physical one.

When people's livelihoods feel genuinely at risk, you'll see hostility, fear, and procrastination take hold, and that's not a character flaw, it's a completely natural response. People value their own survival above almost everything else. It's part of why we find suicide so devastating: someone has stopped valuing their own survival, and has acted to end, rather than sustain, the processes that keep them alive. Addiction works in a related, if less final, way, a set of repetitive behaviors that quietly undermine wellbeing even as they promise relief. These are genuinely hard, human problems. But naming a person's values, or noticing where they seem to be missing, can be a real point of leverage for someone in distress.

Johann Hari, in his book Lost Connections, puts it about as well as anyone: "You aren't a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you've been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things."

Before you can align a team to a set of values, then, you need to ask whether their baseline needs are even being met. Are people treated fairly? Do leaders offer enough transparency to earn trust? Even in genuinely unstable times, collaboration is still possible if trust is intact. Your values should be trustworthy and reliable, even when the world around you isn't.

Once that foundation is secure, it's time to invite the group to actually live the values you've, ideally, built together. This is the moment to narrow things down, to your top five values, or better, your top three. Fewer is stronger. A short sentence under each one can make it more concrete and usable, but resist the urge to over-explain. Aim for minimalism.

Take the earlier example, where a company settled on Boldness as a core value. How do you turn a single word into something people actually live?

Eight ways to make values a daily habit, not a poster

1. Attach a short sentence describing the action you want to see: "Boldness — we trust each other to take calculated risks."
2. Ask leaders to translate each value for their own team. An accounting team might ask, "how can we be bolder, specifically, in what we do?" Keep this co-creation going long after the initial values statement is signed off.
3. Check in weekly, and look for real examples of the values showing up in actual decisions, not hypotheticals.
4. Have teams create something physical together, a painting for each value, say (we've seen this done beautifully by one group we worked with), or a shared online values board using a tool like Miro.
5. Give teams a simple way to rate their own alignment week by week. Our Values App is built for exactly this.
6. Put the values in email signatures, so they're seen, quietly, dozens of times a day.
7. Look for Value Ambassadors, the people already demonstrating strong alignment, and formally appoint them as guardians of the values, change agents who model them for everyone else.
8. When you're weighing a decision or a challenge, use the values themselves as the language of the discussion: "can we boldly decline that project so we can focus on what matters most right now?"

The goal is for the team to know the values so well that their everyday decision-making compass is already tuned to them, without anyone needing to consult the poster. That's what purposeful action looks like.

Values change, and that's fine

Aligning a team to a shared set of values means accepting, from the outset, that each person's individual values may differ from the group's. That's values diversity, and it's not a problem to be solved so much as a reality to be respected. Our lives take different paths, and that deserves some humility. It's also worth understanding value plasticity, the fact that people genuinely change. Think about someone's values before and after their first child. Often almost unrecognisable.

Involve people in creating the values in the first place, and they'll be invested in bringing them to life afterward. Then scatter reminders everywhere, in conversation, in the tools people use, in meetings, and yes, even on that poster in the corridor, as long as it's backed by the real thing.

Given enough time, the values stop being a statement and simply become "how we do things around here." And when that day arrives, it's worth noticing that it's probably time to revisit them, because organizational values shift just as personal ones do. A startup might value disruption early on, then shift toward stability as it matures, and eventually toward something like philanthropy once it's established. The whole journey is built from small decisions, and small decisions are driven by values. Enough aligned decisions, made by enough people, and you get something that actually looks like transformation.