Every company has values. Even the scrappy startup that hasn't thought about branding yet, even the two-person operation still working out of a spare room. Nobody sits down on day one and drafts a values statement, but the values are already there, quietly shaping who gets hired, what gets forgiven, and what gets celebrated at the Friday standup.
Most organisations never notice this. The values that do get written down usually end up framed in the lobby and nowhere else — a values statement as wallpaper, not as a working document. Very few companies actually hold people to the standards they've named.
That gap is why values get such a bad reputation. To a lot of people they sound like fluff: nice words, no teeth. Tanya Schecter, who runs leadership training at the HTI Institute, has a useful fix for this. She suggests grouping values into clusters, each with one lead value that carries the others. So integrity, for instance, might sit alongside transparency and honesty — one word doing the work of three, because it's easier to remember and easier to check yourself against.
The values only start earning their keep once someone can say what they actually mean in practice. Integrity is the word on the wall; transparency is what it looks like on a Tuesday afternoon when a client asks a hard question and doesn't get a dodge. That translation step — turning a noun into a behaviour — is the whole job.
So how do you do that translation? You put it into words that describe an action, not an aspiration. If people feel genuinely good about how their team handled something, that feeling is usually values doing their job. Sometimes you find a value from the outside in — a customer keeps mentioning the same thing you're unusually good at, and that becomes something worth naming and protecting.
And when values are absent, or misaligned, people feel it in the body before they can name it in a meeting. Individuals get a low hum of unease. Clients notice something's off even when they can't say what. Eventually it shows up in the numbers, because it always does.
Finding the values that are already there
Small organisations tend to run on instinct. Nobody's consciously "doing values" — they're just hiring people they like and making decisions that feel right. Then the company grows, and someone, usually in a moment of mild panic, says the sentence: "we need to actually think about our values."
When that moment arrives, resist the urge to have one person write it in an afternoon. The values that stick are the ones the whole team helped surface — everyone contributing their sense of what actually makes this place different from the one down the road. That process can take an afternoon or it can take months. There's no correct pace, only the pace that produces something people recognise as true.
When someone doesn't fit
Here's the uncomfortable part: values aren't self-executing. They have to be claimed, actively, by each person on the team. There needs to be real overlap between what a person cares about and what the company stands for — not perfect overlap, but enough that the person can do their best work without a low-grade internal conflict running in the background.
Sometimes, honestly, the overlap just isn't there. That's not a failure of the hiring process or a character flaw in the employee. It's simply information. Naming that clearly and early — for the person's sake as much as the company's — beats pretending it isn't happening.
Culture shapes values more than most leaders admit
If your team spans countries, this gets more complicated, because personal values are never entirely personal — they're threaded through with the culture a person grew up in. Political scientists Christian Welzel and Ronald Inglehart mined the World Values Survey and found that cross-cultural variation clusters around two main axes: traditional versus rational values, and survival versus self-expression values. Worth understanding both, especially if you're leading across borders.
Traditional values
Cultures high in traditional values centre family, the parent-child bond, religious observance, and deference to authority. They tend to reject divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide, and they run high on patriotism and national pride.
Rational values
Rational, or secular, values sit at the opposite pole. Authority, family structure, and religion carry much less weight, sometimes none. These societies lean toward atheism, question authority more readily, and hold far less judgment around divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide.
Survival values
Where survival values dominate, physical and economic security come before almost everything else. These cultures tend to score lower on trust and tolerance and higher on an ethnocentric, us-first outlook — understandably, when security itself has felt uncertain.
Self-expression values
At the other end sit self-expression values: environmental protection, tolerance toward foreigners and the LGBTQI+ community, gender equality, and a real appetite for having a say in political and economic decisions.
Put those two axes together and you get four possible cultural profiles:
| Traditional and survival values | Traditional and self-expression values |
| Rational and survival values | Rational and self-expression values |
The WVS data throws up a genuine puzzle here: some lower-income countries in Latin America and elsewhere land in the traditional-and-self-expression quadrant, which seems to contradict Maslow's hierarchy — self-expression is supposed to sit near the top, above security. The likely resolution is that Maslow was describing an individual's needs, not a culture's, and the two don't always move in lockstep. Worth remembering next time a values framework feels a little too tidy.
Yes, this is genuine work
Whenever corporate values come up, someone in the room says it out loud: this is a lot of work. Do we have the time? How do we even structure this? Fair questions, and the honest answer is yes, it costs time and money up front. But the people who've done this properly will tell you it pays for itself. Employees who genuinely embody the values are faster to train, because half of "fit" is already solved before day one — which quietly saves the company real money down the line.
The beer-and-burger test
O2Brands, a group of home-services companies, has a deceptively simple screening question: would you have a beer and a burger with this candidate? If the answer's no, they ask why — and the "why" is where the actual signal lives.
It's the same logic behind asking candidates about strengths and weaknesses in an interview. You're not collecting a list — you're checking whether the strength is one your company actually needs, and whether the weakness is survivable. A food-service business interviewing someone whose stated weakness is poor communication and low personability isn't looking at a minor gap. That's likely a dealbreaker, however strong the resume looks otherwise.
Companies that actually live it
Tanya Schecter points to Starbucks and Patagonia as companies that hold their values even when it costs them money — maybe especially when it costs them money. That's the real test, and it's also what shapes who they hire.
Starbucks leads with friendliness. Walk into most locations and you can feel the deliberate warmth — it's baked into the physical space and into how staff are trained to treat customers, not left to chance.
Patagonia's values run through sustainability, integrity, environmental protection, and equity, and you can trace all four straight into the product: clothing built to be recycled, repaired, and worn for years rather than replaced. The company partners with grassroots and community organisations on regenerative work — restoring water, air, and land — and treats environmental harm and social injustice as connected problems rather than separate causes. It's also trying, deliberately, to shift the centre of gravity away from short-term growth and toward long-term wellbeing, and to create more equity for communities that don't usually get the benefit of the doubt.
Even Patagonia's marketing carries the values through — its models look like people you'd pass on the street, not a casting call. For more examples of this kind of consistency, see our piece on core values in action.
Holding people to the values you've named
Values can't just live on the wall. Give them a pulse. Managers can run informal shout-outs whenever someone visibly demonstrates a value — not a formal ceremony, just a moment of "that, right there, is what we mean." Build values into annual reviews and promotion decisions, so the incentive structure actually matches the language. And tell stories around them — Starbucks runs an entire Stories section covering its mission, values, and the news that flows from them.
Watch for the gap between claimed and demonstrated values, because it's common and it's revealing. Someone insists they value teamwork, then spends every meeting angling for individual credit. The fix isn't a lecture — it's making the value visible often enough that the mismatch becomes obvious to the person themselves. Don't wait for a problem to bring values up. Make them a weekly habit, not a crisis-response tool.
One practical structure: a short recurring meeting where the team examines one value at a time, rotating weekly, so over a quarter you've actually worked through the whole set rather than mentioning them once in an onboarding deck.
Where overlap has to happen
Every person on the team carries their own private hierarchy of values. The company has its own. Each team, in turn, develops something like its own subculture. None of these will map onto each other perfectly, and that's fine — but some real overlap has to exist, or the friction becomes constant. Conflicts are normal, not a sign of failure. If the company holds integrity as central but the sales team is chasing wins at any cost, the resolution isn't to strip either value out — it's to find the synthesis. "Winning through the lens of integrity," say, where putting the customer first becomes the actual definition of a win.
Which brings us back to where we started: every company has values, whether or not anyone's bothered to write them down. Left unspoken, they still shape everything — just without anyone steering.
The tells of misalignment
A few signs tend to show up together when values have drifted from practice: information that's hard to access, deadlines that move more often than they're hit, meetings that leave people unsure what just happened.
In a misaligned organisation, people genuinely don't know where to find the data they need to make a decision — not because it's hidden on purpose, but because nobody owns making it findable.
Watch deadlines across departments. When they're missed or quietly pushed more often than they're met, that's rarely just a scheduling problem. It's usually values friction wearing a scheduling disguise.
And the meeting most of us have sat through: you walk out unable to say what it was actually for. Or worse, you leave confident you and your colleague agree on the plan, only to discover afterward that you each walked away with a completely different version of it.
What misalignment actually costs
Change is a constant in any organisation, and it's stressful even in the best circumstances. Without a clear set of values, or a mission that gives people something to navigate by, that stress curdles into real turbulence — disruption, confusion, decisions made twice because nobody trusted the first one. Eventually it shows up on the bottom line, because it always does.
Hiring and keeping people gets harder
When an organisation hasn't worked out what it actually believes, recruiting and retention both start to stall, often without anyone connecting the two.
It's genuinely harder to attract the right people when you can't articulate who you are — the organisation doesn't know who it's looking for, and that shows in interviews. It's equally hard to inspire the people already there. Employees who can't locate the meaning in their work tend to disengage quietly, well before they start job-hunting, and a missing values framework removes the very thing that would have kept them anchored. Conversely, a company that can genuinely offer meaning becomes a far more attractive place to build a career.
Accountability gets fuzzy
When values and mission don't line up, people stop knowing exactly what's expected of them, because there's no shared framework to check their own behaviour against. Teams struggle to row in the same direction, and leaders find it hard to operate as a single unit rather than a collection of separate agendas.
The payoff
Real alignment doesn't just feel better — it makes an organisation faster at getting where it's trying to go. Values act as a kind of internal compass, giving leaders and teams a consistent way to make the dozens of small daily decisions that never make it into a strategy document.
Organisations that are struggling with alignment also tend to struggle with customer satisfaction, and the two are more tightly linked than most leaders assume. High-alignment organisations reported strong customer satisfaction 96% of the time, according to research on values alignment and team performance — while roughly a third of low-alignment organisations reported the opposite. That's not a coincidence. It's what happens when the people closest to the customer actually know what they stand for.
Sources
- https://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp?CMSID=Findings#:~:text=Survival%20values%20place%20emphasis%20on,levels%20of%20trust%20and%20tolerance.
- https://peoplemanagingpeople.com/media/organizational-values-tanya-schecter/
- https://beehivepr.biz/purpose-mission-and-values-misalignment-risks/
- https://lucid.co/blog/warning-signs-and-risks-of-poor-organizational-alignment
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