Team Values: How to Find, Align and Live Them

Every team has values. The two-person startup working out of a spare room has them. So does the department that has never held a values workshop. Nobody wrote them down, but they are already deciding who gets hired, what gets forgiven and what gets celebrated on a Friday afternoon.

Team values are the shared priorities that guide how a group decides, behaves and treats one another. The only open question is whether your team steers by them on purpose.

I have run values sessions with teams for years, and the pattern is consistent. Values written by a marketing department or a leadership offsite are bold and quotable, and they often miss what matters most to the people doing the work. Alignment does not come from employees nodding along to something they were handed. It comes from people using the values, in small decisions as much as big ones.

This guide covers the whole path: what team values are, how to find yours, how to write them so people can act on them, and how to keep them alive after the workshop ends.

What team values are, and what they are not

There is no shortage of tools for sizing up the people you work with. Engagement surveys, StrengthsFinder, DISC, MBTI, the Enneagram. Each is useful. Each one, on its own, misses the thing that drives a person.

Say I run a behavioral-style assessment. I learn that Kate, our project coordinator, is logical, analytical and risk-averse. Cam, our designer, is creative, visionary and allergic to structure. Kate thinks Cam is careless. Cam thinks Kate is a bottleneck. Knowing their styles helps them collaborate a little better.

It does not tell us what they care about. Now imagine we learn that Kate and Cam share the same top value: Family. Their second matches too: Fitness. Only the third splits them. Kate leans toward Safety, Cam toward Freedom.

That changes the conversation. A leader who knows this can unite the two of them around what they already share, while managing the tension between Kate's need for safety and Cam's need for freedom. Behavioral style tells you how someone operates. Values tell you why they would get out of bed for it. It is the same reason you can be close friends with someone whose personality looks nothing like yours.

Why team values matter

Skill explains why a team can perform. Values explain why it keeps performing when things get hard.

Look at what holds a high-performing team together: shared goals, clear roles, open communication, agreed rules for how the group operates, trust, and the ability to resolve conflict before it hardens into resentment. Most of that list is relational, not technical.

Google's internal research, known as Project Aristotle, identified psychological safety as the single most important factor in team effectiveness. In practice that means people can raise a half-formed idea, or admit they don't know something, without bracing for the consequences.

Shared values are how a team gets there. They give people a framework for deciding without calling a meeting every time something new comes up. People can act independently and still trust that their choices fit what the group cares about.

Knowing what each person values also gives a leader a direct line to motivation. Picture a football team down by a point at halftime. If one player values legacy, I tell him to go and do something people will remember. If another values family, I remind him who he is playing for. If a third values accomplishment, I frame the next half as his chance to live out a dream. Same speech, three deliveries, because three different things move these three people.

For the brain science behind all of this, including how the All Blacks rebuilt a broken team on the same principle, read The Neuroscience of Team Values.

Step 1: Find the values that are already there

When a leadership team sits down to set values, it is tempting to reach for words that sound sharp on a careers page. The trouble is that most workplaces are not especially dynamic day to day. Walk the floor of an average business and you will find people doing specialist, often repetitive, sometimes exhausting work. The gap between the poster and that reality is where misalignment starts.

So here is a blunt piece of advice. If your company does not treat staff with respect, do not put Respect on the wall. There is nothing wrong, in principle, with a company that says Profit comes first. You will at least attract people who are comfortable with that arrangement.

The way to avoid values that do not match your team is to run a discovery process that includes everyone. There are three simple ways to do it.

1. Ask. Walk around and ask people what matters to them at work.
2. Circle. Hand out a list of values and ask people to circle the ones that fit.
3. Assess. Have everyone take a values assessment, then look at what the group shares. The Values App does this for teams at no cost: one shared link, individual results stay private, and you see the team's ten most shared values as results come in. You can start your team free or see a sample team report.

It is striking which values rise to the top once you do this properly. In one client engagement, Harmony emerged as one of the strongest shared values. No agency guessing from the outside would have landed on it. The organization had been through fast growth and real disruption, and people were craving order and stability. That gave leadership concrete questions to work with. How do we create harmony in the office, including for people working remotely? What would harmony look like from our customers' side of the table?

Sourcing values from the bottom up does not oblige you to keep every value that surfaces. Survey a traditional investment bank and you might get back Success, Power and Courage. If leadership has committed to long-term sustainability, the work is to blend aspirational values, where the organization is trying to go, with intrinsic values, who its people are right now.

Whatever you land on, the values should be co-created, not issued.

Step 2: Read the mix

The ecosystems that survive the longest storms are the most biodiverse ones. Teams work the same way. A team stocked with one type of value is brittle in exactly the conditions where a mixed team holds, and can even grow from disruption.

Values cluster into five broad pulls, which sit on the values pyramid.

• Survival keeps the group grounded. These are the people who ask what happens if this goes wrong.
• Belonging holds relationships together and turns individuals into a team.
• Growth chases knowledge and challenge, and pushes an idea past good enough.
• Impact keeps its eyes on the horizon and moves first when the moment calls for it.
• Fulfillment keeps asking what any of this is for.

Take away that diversity and a single value starts to warp the team's judgment.

When this dominates	What tends to happen
Survival	Growth stalls, because everything looks like a risk not worth taking
Belonging	No one says the hard thing that needs saying
Growth	The team never sits still long enough to consolidate a win
Impact	The drive for status crowds out collaboration
Fulfillment	The team gets so attached to meaning that it stops shipping

The best organizational value sets draw from more than one category. Airbnb's stated values include "Be a Host," "Embrace the Adventure" and "Champion the Mission." Read through these five pulls, that is Belonging, Growth and Fulfillment, though that is my lens and not Airbnb's own labeling. Dell mixes "Direct Relationships" with "Global Citizenship" and "Winning." Atlassian holds "Open company, no bullshit" alongside "Build with heart and balance" and "Play, as a team." None of them picked one value and rode it. They built in tension on purpose.

Calm is what lets a team use its full range. A team under constant low-grade alarm defaults to its most defensive value, whatever that is for each person. I think of a team working through a brutal deadline. The survival-minded were fixated on the timeline slipping. The belonging-minded were trying to keep the peace. The growth-minded kept pitching new approaches. The impact-driven wanted bold targets. The fulfillment-driven worried the project was losing its point. Nobody was wrong. The leader's job was to open a conversation where all five concerns could be said out loud.

If your team spans countries

Personal values are never entirely personal. They carry the culture a person grew up in. Political scientists Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, working with the World Values Survey, found that cultures vary along two main axes: traditional versus secular-rational values, and survival versus self-expression values. A team spread across borders will hold differences on both. Expect that, and ask before you assume.

Step 3: Write them as actions

Look at how many organizations phrase their values: Bold. Innovate. Perform. Punchy words, and almost impossible to apply. Am I supposed to be bold? Is boldness something we do collectively, so I am off the hook? What does bold mean if I am not customer-facing, or if I am an introvert by temperament? Within seconds of reading the poster, a large share of the workforce has been excluded.

A value becomes usable when it describes a shared direction and carries one short sentence about the action you want to see. For example: "Boldness: we trust each other to take calculated risks."

The test is simple. A leader should be able to ask the team, plainly, did we act with boldness in that situation? If the answer is no, you have a nameable misalignment and a place to improve. If the answer is yes and the outcome was still bad, that is a different and much healthier conversation.

It is fine to fail when you have acted in alignment. It is not fine to succeed by accident, off-values. That distinction, more than anything else, builds trust inside a team.

Tanya Schecter, who runs leadership training at the HTI Institute, suggests grouping values into clusters, each with one lead value that carries the others. Integrity might sit alongside transparency and honesty. One word does the work of three, because it is easier to remember and easier to check yourself against.

Values in action: a story about Tom

Here is a version of something that happened with a client of mine, with details changed for confidentiality. Tom is preparing a proposal for a customer project 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 is relying on a government grant. If Tom will not move on price, the customer goes elsewhere.

Tom's manager had set the higher figure as the floor. The company does not do late-night emails, and Tom would never phone his boss at that hour. He also knows the company badly needs the cash flow. He has to decide alone.

One of the company's core values is Boldness. Tom decides to forgo his own commission and send a quote he is confident the customer will accept. He copies his boss on the email so there is no ambiguity about what he has done. In the morning he calls and walks him through the reasoning.

The manager rewarded the boldness and paid Tom his commission anyway. The lesson was never about the discount. The company valued the calculated risk Tom took, and said so out loud, in a way everyone on the team heard about.

Step 4: Make them a daily habit

Before you can align a team to a set of values, ask whether people's baseline needs are being met. Underneath all our individual differences sits a layer of survival values, and in the modern world these are tied closely to income. When someone's livelihood feels threatened, the nervous system responds the way it always has: fight, flight or freeze. You will see hostility, fear and procrastination. That is a natural response, not a character flaw.

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."

So start with the foundation. Are people treated fairly? Do leaders offer enough transparency to earn trust? Your values should be trustworthy and reliable, even when the world around you isn't.

Then narrow things down to your top five values, or better, your top three. Fewer is stronger.

Eight ways to make values a habit, not a poster

1. Attach a short sentence describing the action you want to see.
2. Ask leaders to translate each value for their own team. An accounting team might ask how it can be bolder, specifically, in what it does.
3. Check in weekly, and look for real examples of the values showing up in actual decisions.
4. Have teams create something physical together. One group I worked with made a painting for each value. A shared online board works too.
5. Give teams a simple way to rate their own alignment, week by week.
6. Put the values in email signatures, so they are seen dozens of times a day.
7. Look for Value Ambassadors, the people already demonstrating strong alignment, and appoint them as guardians of the values.
8. When you weigh a decision, use the values as the language of the discussion. "Can we boldly decline that project so we can focus on what matters most right now?"

One structure works well in practice: a short recurring meeting where the team examines one value at a time, rotating weekly. Over a quarter you will have worked through the whole set, instead of mentioning them once in an onboarding deck. A values workshop is the best way to begin.

The goal is for the team to know the values so well that their everyday decisions are already tuned to them, without anyone consulting the poster.

Step 5: Hold people to them

Values are not self-executing. Each person on the team has to claim them.

Managers can run informal shout-outs whenever someone visibly demonstrates a value. No ceremony is needed, only a moment of "that, right there, is what we mean." Build the values into annual reviews and promotion decisions, so the incentives match the language. And tell stories around them.

Watch for the gap between claimed and demonstrated values. Someone insists they value teamwork, then spends every meeting angling for individual credit. A lecture will not fix that. Making the value visible often enough will, because the mismatch becomes obvious to the person themselves.

Every person carries a private hierarchy of values. The company has its own, and each team develops something like a subculture. These will never map onto each other perfectly, and they do not need to. Some real overlap has to exist. When two values collide, look for the synthesis. If the company holds integrity as central but the sales team is chasing wins at any cost, the answer might be "winning through the lens of integrity," where putting the customer first becomes the definition of a win.

Sometimes the overlap is simply not there. That is information, not a failure of hiring or a flaw in the employee. Naming it clearly and early serves the person as much as the company.

Hiring is where this gets practical. O2E Brands, the home-services group founded by Brian Scudamore, uses what it calls the Beer Test: would you enjoy grabbing a beer with this candidate? If the answer is no, they ask why, and the why is where the signal lives.

Signs your team's values have drifted

Even a team that looks fine from the outside can be struggling. These patterns tend to show up together.

• Rushed decisions. The team decides too fast, skipping both the gut-check and the analysis.
• Communication that has gone quiet. Lines that used to be open become rare, formal or one-directional.
• Conflict that never gets resolved. Grudges accumulate, and nobody wants to be the one to bring it up.
• Deadlines that move more often than they are met. This is rarely only a scheduling problem.
• Meetings nobody can summarize. You leave sure that you and a colleague agree, then find you each took away a different plan.
• Information that is hard to find. Nobody hid it. Nobody owns making it findable.
• Roles that were never defined. People are unsure what they are responsible for, so they cannot fully commit.
• Goals nobody can articulate. If people cannot say what the team is trying to achieve, do not expect much commitment to achieving it.

The cost shows up in hiring first. It is hard to attract the right people when you cannot say who you are, and employees who cannot find the meaning in their work tend to disengage well before they start job-hunting.

Teams that run on values

Three teams with almost nothing in common show how much work shared values can do.

The Apollo 11 team put a man on the moon. Technical brilliance was part of it. So were years of grinding work in service of one goal everyone believed in.

Wikipedia is a stranger case: volunteer editors, writers and translators with no paycheck binding them together, who keep an enormous free encyclopedia accurate and current. What holds that globally distributed team together is a shared value, that information should be free and accessible.

Sea Shepherd protects marine wildlife, and the work is dangerous. The organization's board of directors serves without salary or compensation. Strip away every conventional reason to show up, and what is left is values.

None of these three were the most resourced team in their field. They were the most aligned.

Companies can do the same. Schecter points to Starbucks and Patagonia as companies that hold their values even when it costs them money. Starbucks leads with friendliness, built into the physical space and into how staff are trained. Patagonia's values run through sustainability, integrity, environmental protection and equity, and you can trace them into the product: clothing built to be repaired and worn for years. For more, see our piece on core values in action.

Values change, and that is fine

Aligning a team to shared values means accepting that each person's own values may differ from the group's. That is values diversity, and it deserves respect. It also helps to understand value plasticity, the fact that people change. Think about someone's values before and after their first child.

Involve people in creating the values and they will be invested in bringing them to life. Given enough time, the values stop being a statement and become "how we do things around here." When that day arrives, it is probably time to revisit them. A startup might value disruption early on, shift toward stability as it matures, and eventually toward something like philanthropy.

The whole path is built from small decisions, and small decisions are driven by values. Enough aligned decisions, made by enough people, and you get something that looks like transformation.

If you want to see what your own team shares, start your team free. It takes each person about three minutes, and the shared picture builds as results come in.