Our values shape our behavior, whether we realize it or not. I don't think that's an exaggeration. A business, or an individual for that matter, that behaves out of step with its own values will feel dissatisfied at best — and at worst, it simply fails to do the thing it set out to do.
That dissatisfaction has a name: cognitive dissonance. It shows up when personal and professional values pull in different directions, and honestly, most workplace distress I've encountered traces back to exactly this. Learn to understand your core values, and how to actually apply them in the moment, and clarity follows. So does a lot less distress.
There's a whole market of companies and platforms built to help with this — building a values-based culture at work, at home, in the community. Some offer digital tools. Some offer training programs. Many offer both.
The key, as with most things worth doing, is choosing a partner with a proven track record and a real ability to understand your needs and your context. Below is a guide to ten of the best.
Values Institute
- Service: App, training program, coaching, live workshops, online course
- Who is it for: Organizations, individuals
- Location: Global
Description: The Values Institute was created to help people define and align their values so they can live and work with kindness and respect. The training options on offer:
- A live training session, delivered in person
- A live training session, delivered via webinar
- Online training delivered via their Learning Platform
What makes them unique
The Values Institute has built a full-scale training program designed to help clients identify their values and then, crucially, learn to put them into practice inside their organizations. Values-based decision-making is the goal — not values as a poster on the wall.
What sets them apart is the evidence behind it. A study showed that participants able to affirm and act in alignment with their values had markedly lower somatic responses to stress than a control group. That's not a small thing — it's the difference between values as decoration and values as something your nervous system actually registers.
Find them at https://values.institute/ (right here!)
Traind'Up
- Service: App, training program
- Who is it for: Companies, individuals
- Location: England, Scotland
Description: This organization prides itself on providing a broad range of vocational training and education services across the UK, training learners with an eye on where industry is actually heading.
Traind'Up is recognized as a leading values training service. They aim for excellence in tuition, a genuine shot at competing in the world labor market, and a learning environment that's positive and worth showing up to.
The platform offers its community — and the wider industry — strong skills training to make learners competitive and grow their capabilities. The environment encourages leadership, a global outlook, and high achievement.
What makes them unique
Train'd Up has adopted its own set of values to guide day-to-day work and future direction: excellence, integrity, care and respect, and excellence again (their emphasis, not a typo I'm introducing). The platform operates honestly, ethically, and reliably, and aims to go above and beyond what its community expects.
They've built an environment that genuinely acknowledges people's differences and individuality. That's helped them carve out a real point of difference from other training providers.
Find them at https://www.traindup.org/
ValuES
- Service: Training Program
- Who is it for: Individuals
- Location: International, project partners in Germany
Description: ValuES is a global project supporting partners abroad to recognize and integrate ecosystem services into policy-making, project planning, and implementation. They do this by developing training courses and tools, offering technical advice, and facilitating decision-making and planning processes. They also promote knowledge-sharing through regional workshops and global discussion forums.
What makes them unique
Their insight into ecosystem services management is what sets them apart. We learn from ValuES that the material benefits we draw from ecosystems are called "provisioning services" — food, water, and the like. People trade these in markets, but consumers in rural areas often depend on them directly for their livelihoods. ValuES draws attention to the intrinsic value of these services, which sits above and beyond whatever price the market assigns them. Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine and similar conflicts elsewhere, I'd say the importance of intrinsic values is hard to overstate.
Find them at https://valuestraining.com/
Skills Training UK
- Service: Training program, assessment, online course
- Who is it for: Companies, individuals, schools
- Location: UK
Description: This platform supports people in reaching professional success by improving motivation and confidence and building knowledge and skills. On the employer side, they help build efficient, successful, productive, and resilient businesses.
Founded in 1992, the company has spent decades at the forefront of employment skills and values training — creating traineeships and apprenticeships, and continually developing new, higher-level courses to meet employers' changing needs across industries.
What makes them unique
This one impresses on expertise alone. Employers trust their approach because of the trainers' depth of subject and industry knowledge. Skills Training UK has a track record of practical, engaging, values-based courses that actually meet the needs of both employers and employees. They're known, too, for flexibility — from blended learning to fully customized training content and delivery.
Skills Training UK also takes pride in being a high-performance team in its own right, supporting and training its staff to keep raising the bar.
Find them at https://www.skillstraininguk.com/
Values Coach
- Service: Training program
- Who is it for: Companies
- Location: US
Description: Values Coach is a US-based service providing training to improve values-based life and leadership skills for medical facilities, healthcare organizations, and health systems. It helps people discover and act on their personal values as a critical step toward building an ownership culture.
Their programs are built on The Twelve Core Action Values — universal, and not bound by time. They start with Authenticity and end with Leadership. These are the values healthcare directors and managers want to see show up in their workplaces, and each one has four cornerstones that turn it into something you can actually act on.
What makes them unique
The Twelve Core Action Values course is Values Coach's flagship program on values-based leadership and life skills. It forms the basis of their Certified Values Coach training — a core piece of values-based initiatives for state agencies, hospitals, and corporations alike.
Find them at https://valuescoach.com/
Values Training
- Service: Training program
- Who is it for: Companies, individuals
- Location: US (Phoenix, Arizona)
Description: This platform exists to help people and organizations act in alignment with positive values — and the emphasis really is on action, not discussion.
The training focuses on the person's own value, validating them in a way that builds confidence and self-esteem and helps them reach their full potential.
Their stated mission is to teach skills that develop behavior to increase productivity, both at home and at work. The premise: human capital is an organization's greatest asset, and it needs to be treated that way. From there, Values Training's evaluations, developmental processes, and behavior-change approaches help staff discover their fullest potential.
What makes them unique
The organization focuses on changing behavior through targeted activities — a structured process paired with timed repetition to build new skills and habits. Programs consist of an initial seminar, follow-up sessions, and creative work to reinforce learning. They offer a basic communication structure through a smooth, systematic process that strengthens a client-focused environment, along with a standard language, a common message, and a structured approach to activities, actions, and communication. The training is tailored around the client's own values and mission.
Find them at https://valuestraining.com/
Personal Values
- Service: Assessment
- Who is it for: Individuals
- Location: not specified; an online contact form is accessible
Description: This platform was built to offer a simple, efficient way to establish and organize personal values. It's a decent fit for recruitment processes, personal trainers, and more.
The organization maintains a list of 62 personal values, developed and refined over several years as the backbone of its values assessment. They paid particular attention to getting personal values as accurate as possible while keeping the language easy to interpret.
The programs also offer guidance on strengths and potential risks, and there's a free online test to rank your values, prioritize them, and find the ones closest to who you are.
What makes them unique
The free online test is genuinely useful, though I wouldn't call it easy. It gives you two values and asks which matters more — stability versus accountability, say. It's hard to choose, precisely because the two are connected and overlap in ways that resist a clean answer.
Find them at https://personalvalu.es/
Barrett Values Centre
- Service: Training program, assessment
- Who is it for: Organizations
- Location: Offices in the US and the UK
Description: Founded in 1997, Barrett's stated mission is to help organizations reach their goals by empowering employees to perform at their best.
Their starting point is that every culture is unique. They claim to help companies build resilient, authentic, values-based cultures by making sure the whole team actually shares the values in question.
What makes them unique
The Barrett Model draws on Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, identifying seven levels of human motivation. Basic survival needs sit at the bottom; self-actualization sits at the top.
Barrett's programs carry two decades of experience across thousands of organizations, and that track record shows. They offer a genuinely useful map for grasping the values of an organization's leaders, employees, and stakeholders — and, beyond that, a way to build more productive, supportive relationships between them, with firmer alignment of goals and purpose across the whole organization.
There's one more thing that sets Barrett Values Centre apart: their assessments are built on founder Richard Barrett's "Seven Levels of Consciousness" model, which guides organizations in comparing their current culture against their leaders' personal values and the culture they actually want to build.
Find them at https://www.valuescentre.com/
Integrity Consulting Services
- Service: Training program, assessment, online course
- Who is it for: Companies, individuals
- Location: Canada
Description: Integrity Consulting Services began as a family initiative more than two decades ago. Its founders, a married couple, have traveled the world helping thousands of companies and individuals build values-based thinking into their development and learning strategies, through a mix of leadership training and coaching.
What makes them unique
They founded the practice because it had become obvious that values-based decision-making was a real weakness in people's personal and professional lives. That observation led to a distinctive two-day course, plus a train-the-trainer program offered exclusively to companies wanting to raise value awareness at every level.
Clients also learn to apply core corporate values to everyday decisions. Their customized training has now reached more than 10,000 leaders globally — which is not a small number.
Find them at https://integrityconsulting.ca/
Zoe Talent Solutions
- Service: Online Course
- Who is it for: Companies, individuals
- Location: Head office in Dubai, branch in London
Description: Zoe Talent provides consulting and training solutions aimed at empowering organizations through their people — tailored to whatever excellence looks like for that particular business.
Their stated mission is to help clients with performance-optimizing talent management strategies. The values training program covers the essence of values-based leadership: what a leader's role should actually be, the key traits of effective leaders, and where the value-add really shows up.
Course targets
- Grow the bottom-line
- Internalize the strategic vision of the company
- Create an entrepreneurial environment
- Mutual respect
- Behaviors that help overcome challenges
- Employee engagement
- Improved productivity
- Employee empowerment
- Improved organizational efficiency
- Stimulate innovation and creativity
- Sustainable growth
- Strong Culture
- More trust leading to more business opportunities
- Improved retention
What makes them unique
Zoe Talent has a specific approach they call "Do-review-learn-apply." They lean on group discussions and roleplay to challenge rigid thought processes and actually get people to the learning targets, rather than just talking around them.
In these group discussions, each participant brings their own perspective — and that, in turn, challenges everyone else's preconceived notions until the group arrives at something closer to the right mindset.
Find them at https://zoetalentsolutions.com/
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