You know the values are on the wall somewhere. Maybe on the website, maybe on a laminated card someone printed three years ago. Integrity. Excellence. Passion. Teamwork. If you stopped a member of staff in the corridor and asked them to name one, there’d be a pause, then a guess. That pause is the whole problem. Defining company core values is one of those jobs that feels done the moment you’ve written the words, but the words on their own change nothing. What changes behaviour is whether the values actually decide anything when the day gets hard.
I work with established owners across the UK and Ireland, and I’ve lost count of the times someone has shown me a tidy set of values that has never once been used to make a real decision. They’re not lying to themselves on purpose. It’s just that nobody ever built the values into how the business actually runs. So let’s talk about how you do it properly.
The reason is simpler than people think. Values on a poster ask nothing of anyone. They describe how you’d like to feel about yourselves, not what you’ll actually do when it costs you something.
Real values have a price. A genuine value is one you’d honour even when it loses you a sale, slows a project down, or means having an awkward conversation with someone you’ve known for years. If a value never costs you anything, it isn’t a value. It’s a nice sentiment, and everyone can tell the difference, especially your team.
That’s why the generic words fail. “Integrity” sounds unarguable, which is exactly why it’s useless. Nobody in the history of business has stood up and argued for less integrity. A value that no reasonable person would disagree with tells your people nothing about how to behave on a Tuesday afternoon when a customer is being difficult and the deadline is real.
The work of defining company core values isn’t a branding exercise and it doesn’t start with a thesaurus. It starts with looking honestly at how your business already behaves at its best, and being specific enough that the value could plausibly have an opposite.
Here’s a test I use with owners. For each value, ask: could a sensible business choose the opposite and still be respectable? “We answer the customer before we answer the email chain” has an opposite — plenty of firms prioritise internal process first, and that’s a legitimate choice. That makes it a real value. “We care about quality” has no opposite anyone would own, so it’s noise.
A few more that pass the test, so you can feel the difference:
Notice these aren’t inspirational. They’re closer to rules of thumb for behaviour. That’s the point. A value you can actually act on reads more like a decision you’ve already made than a quality you admire.
Owners tend to approach this as if they’re inventing the values from scratch, dreaming up who they’d like to be. That’s backwards. If your business has been going for years, the values already exist in how you behave. Your job is to notice them, not manufacture them.
Think about the people you’ve been proudest to employ, and the ones who never quite fitted no matter how capable they were. What was the difference? It’s rarely skill. It’s usually how they worked. That difference is a value, sitting there in plain sight.
Then think about the decisions you’re quietly proud of. The client you sacked. The corner you refused to cut when nobody would have known. The hire you made against the numbers because they were clearly the right sort. Those choices were driven by something. Name the something, and you’ve found a value that’s genuinely yours, because you’ve already paid for it.
This is where it usually falls down, and it’s the part that matters most. Writing the values is a morning’s work. Making them change how the business runs is the real job, and it’s ongoing.
Values only shape behaviour when they’re wired into the decisions people make without you in the room. That means a handful of unglamorous, concrete things: they show up in how you hire and, harder, in who you’re willing to let go. They come up in reviews, so people are measured on how they work and not just what they produced. They get named out loud when you make a call, so the team hears the value doing actual work — “we’re turning this contract down, and here’s the value that’s driving it.”
The moment that decides everything is the first time a value costs you money and you honour it anyway. Your team is watching for that. If the values fold the instant they’re inconvenient, everyone learns the real rule: the values are for the website, and the actual rule is do whatever keeps the number up. You can’t out-poster that lesson.
Three or four values, honestly held, will do more than ten aspirational ones. A long list is a sign you haven’t decided what actually matters, and nobody can hold ten things in their head while doing their job. If everything’s a priority, nothing is.
And they’re not a “set once and forget” job. A value only stays real if it keeps getting used. That means coming back to it — in your own decisions, in how you run the team, in the quiet check of whether last month’s choices actually matched what you claim to stand for. Left alone, even good values drift back to being decoration. What keeps them alive is the returning to them, on purpose, again and again.
Defining company core values well isn’t about finding better words. It’s about being honest enough to name how you already behave at your best, specific enough that the values could have an opposite, and disciplined enough to honour them when they cost you something. Do that and they’ll start deciding things for you, which is the entire point. Skip it and you’ve got a nicer poster.
The catch is the honouring, and it’s the same catch that trips owners up with most good intentions. It’s not that you don’t know what your values should be. It’s that in the day-to-day, with the pressure on, there’s nothing holding you to them. That steady, week-by-week structure — the thing that turns “we should” into “we did” — is exactly the kind of accountability I help owners build.
A structured accountability partnership turns intention into action — real results in about 30 minutes a week.
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