Why High-Performing Teams Run on Values

I've been talking about values for a long time. Recently, in a workshop, I found myself making a point I keep coming back to: the organizations that operate in genuinely critical situations — elite sports teams, the military, emergency crews — don't treat values as a nice-to-have. They use them as anchors. As a shared language. As a way to make fast, aligned decisions when everything is on the line.

That's not sentiment. There's a mechanism underneath it, and it starts in the brain.

Your brain is a prediction machine

Here's the short version of a big idea from neuroscience. Your brain isn't a passive camera taking in the world. It's a prediction machine. Moment to moment, it takes input from outside you and from inside you — a process called interoception — and cross-references it against your entire database of experience. Part of that database is what neuroscientists call your priors: your deeply held expectations, and, right at the core, your values. What matters most to you.

When a decision arrives, your brain has to weight all of that and commit to a response. The clearer you are about your values and your purpose, the easier it is for the brain to do what's called precision-weighting — to cut through the noise and move in the direction most likely to be aligned with where you, or your team, actually want to go.

That's the whole game. Clear values reduce ambiguity. And in a high-pressure situation, ambiguity is expensive.

I think about it in terms of energy leaks. When the pressure is on, what you want is to plug the leaks — to stop wasting energy on things that don't move you forward. And one of the fastest ways to leak energy is indecision. The team that has to stop and debate what it stands for, every time a hard choice appears, is bleeding energy it can't afford. The team that already knows moves.

The problem is, most of us are running on noise

We live in a VUCA world — volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous — and people are increasingly disconnected from what matters most. Disconnected, at times, from any stable sense of reality at all.

Isn't it strange that for many of us, the reality on our phone now feels as real as day-to-day life — sometimes more so? We crave the device and the little hits of dopamine it delivers, a temporary relief from discomfort. Meanwhile families feel disconnected (if that's the leak you're trying to plug, start with your relationship's values), and, more and more, nobody seems to know what to believe.

I spoke to the psychologist and author Fiona Murden about this on the FLAME with Brad Hook podcast. Her word for what's happening is that we're losing identity coherence — a stable, internal sense of who we are. She pointed to a striking figure: something like 65% of US university students now show signs of identity incoherence. And when your foundation is unstable, disruption doesn't just knock you sideways — it can send you off course entirely.

What stuck with me most was her take on skills. Organizations everywhere are suddenly hungry for "human skills" — judgment, adaptability, decision-making. Good. But as Fiona put it, you can't just plaster those on top: "It's like building a house without any foundations." Build skills on an incoherent identity and, in her words, "they're not going to withstand pressure."

That foundation — for a person or a team — is values. Not the laminated poster in the corridor that everyone rolls their eyes at. An ingrained operating system that actually drives behavior.

What the All Blacks understood

The clearest example I know of a team living this is the New Zealand All Blacks.

In 2004, the most successful team in the history of professional sport hit rock bottom. They were losing, the culture had rotted, and at one low point some of the players were found drunk in a hotel. Instead of buying better players, the coaching group — Graham Henry, Wayne Smith and mental-skills coach Gilbert Enoka — rebuilt the team around a single idea: better people make better All Blacks.

Character before talent. They installed what became famous as the "no dickheads" policy — not a war on individuality, but a refusal to keep anyone whose selfishness poisoned the collective, no matter how gifted. As James Kerr documents in his book Legacy, they built in rituals to keep ego in check: senior players literally sweep the sheds — the changing room — after every test, because no one is too big to do the small things. Every player is a steward, handed the jersey with one instruction: leave it in a better place than you found it.

And they were willing to make the hard calls. Superstar who won't live the values? You're out — including for off-field behavior that breaks the team's standards. That willingness is the whole point. It's what makes the values real rather than decorative.

The logic runs in a chain, and it's worth memorizing:

Values drive behavior. Behavior creates culture. Culture ripples out into everything you do — and everything you don't.

Under Henry, from that 2004 low, the All Blacks won around 85% of their matches over the next seven years. The values weren't a poster. They were the engine.

What values actually give a team

Strip it back and here's what shared, lived values do for any team under pressure — a sports side, a military unit, a startup, a surgical team:

• They enable autonomous decisions. When everyone knows the standard, people can act without stopping to ask permission. The value makes the call.
• They build trust. We know where each other are coming from, so we stop second-guessing motives and start collaborating.
• They raise performance. Google's multi-year study of its own teams, Project Aristotle, found the biggest differentiator wasn't talent or IQ — it was psychological safety, the sense that it's safe to speak up and take a risk. Shared values are how you build it.
• They create a shared reality. We come from different backgrounds and see the world differently, but inside this team we agree on what matters most. That common ground is what militaries have leaned on for centuries (their core values are a useful study in themselves).

How to build it in your own team

You don't need a haka to do this. A few moves that make values operational rather than ornamental:

1. Write behaviors, not nouns. "Integrity" on a wall means nothing. "We say the hard thing to each other's faces, not behind their backs" is a value you can actually be held to. Here's how to align a team around values that stick.
2. Make the hard call at least once. The first time you let real talent go because they broke the values, everyone learns the values are real. Until then, they're a suggestion.
3. Use them as a decision filter. When a tough choice appears, ask out loud: which option best fits what we say we stand for? That single question is precision-weighting for a team — it plugs the indecision leak.

If you want a shortcut into it, the Values App now lets a team surface and compare each member's core values, so you can see your shared ground and your differences before you write anything on a wall. (Running a session? This walks through a values workshop.)

The anchor

We're living through a period where the ground keeps moving — technologically, socially, personally. That's exactly when a clear set of values earns its keep. For an individual, it's identity coherence: knowing who you are when everything around you is in flux. For a team, it's the same thing scaled up — a shared anchor that lets people decide fast, trust each other, and pull in the same direction when it counts.

The best teams in the world figured this out a long time ago. They don't hang their values on the wall. They run on them.