Is there value in values?

Most businesses have values.  Almost every large organisation displays a list of them - on the website, in the office, or in the onboarding deck.

But here’s a question that’s rarely asked: Do these values actually have value?

Look at the words companies lean on again and again: collaboration, integrity, excellence, respect, empathy, creativity, passion.
They aren’t just common, they’re universal.

Studies of corporate value statements show the same language repeated across sectors and geographies. Great in theory, but in practice these terms have become corporate wallpaper: easy to say, hard to operationalise, and often impossible to recall beyond the hiring slide deck.

Research into culture consistently shows that stated values only matter to the extent they shape behaviour.  And too often, they don’t.

When organisations list five, six, or more values, people struggle to remember them, interpret them differently, or ignore them altogether. Reviews of values frameworks reveal high aspiration, but vague guidance on how those values should show up in real, everyday decisions.

In other words, there’s a gap between what organisations say they value and what people actually experience.

That gap matters.

Culture, which profoundly affects performance, trust, retention, innovation and ethics, is shaped far more by what people do than by what’s written on the wall.

Why values struggle

Part of the problem is what we expect values to do.

They’re often asked to:

• represent personal ideals

• describe culture

• guide behaviour

• attract talent

• signal brand identity

That’s a heavy load for a handful of abstract words.

At the same time, organisations are more diverse than ever - spanning generations, geographies and cultures. And each person brings their own personal values to work. Expecting a single imposed set of abstract ideals to resonate equally with everyone is, I believe, increasingly unrealistic.

Values persist not because they work especially well, but because:

• they signal intent to external audiences

• they give HR something to communicate

• they sound like culture, without demanding the harder work culture requires

Values don’t build culture, behaviours do.

Culture isn’t created when someone hits ‘publish’ on a values page.
It’s created through patterns of action.

That’s why:

• A company can claim integrity yet signal something very different when leaders make short-term trade-offs under pressure.

• A business can celebrate collaboration, but reward individual performance, showing people what really matters.

• A company can promote respect, yet tolerate toxic behaviour from high performers, revealing whose behaviour really matters.

We don’t to invest in better values.  We need to elevate the role of behaviours.

Behaviours are observable.  They can be taught, modelled, reinforced and challenged.  They close the gap between what an organisation says it stands for and how it actually operates.

A more grounded approach. Rather than treating behaviours as a separate initiative, they’re far more powerful when embedded directly into the corporate narrative.

When purpose, vision and mission are clear, behaviours shouldn’t sit alongside them as an extra layer.  They should be the expression of them. In this model, traditional organisational values become largely redundant.

Not because values don’t matter, but because once behaviour is explicit, values stop adding clarity.  They don’t guide decisions.  They don’t reduce ambiguity.
And they rarely hold under pressure.

What does hold is alignment between four things:

• Why we exist - the problems we solve

• Who we serve - and the value we create

• Where we are going - the future we’re working towards

• How we behave - what people can reliably expect from us, day to day

When ‘how we behave’ is clear and consistently lived, values stop doing any useful work.

Behaviours aren’t belief statements or cultural aspirations. They’re practical commitments, a social contract that creates cohesion.

They answer a simple question for anyone working with, or within, the organisation:

What will it actually feel like to engage and work with this business?

And importantly, this doesn’t ask people to abandon their personal values. It simply sets clear expectations for how work gets done here.