Changing company values from words on the wall to strategic results
- Feb 24
- 5 min read
Most people can recite their organisation’s values at the drop of a hat. But not so many people would argue that their company values are consistently lived. Values matter because they’re supposed to answer a fundamental question: What really matters here? Not in theory, not in the brand narrative, but in the everyday choices people make – particularly when priorities start to compete, and pressure rises.
At their best, values are decision-making shortcuts. They provide clarity in ambiguity. They align thousands of small behaviours and interactions without the need for constant supervision. Over time, those behaviours shape a culture that drives results.
At Culture Impact, we say that culture is the patterns of behaviour that are encouraged, discouraged, or tolerated by people and systems over time. But it is values that sit behind all of that, which guide choices and behaviour. Because if you truly value something, you will behave in ways that protect and promote it. Regardless of what you say you care about, your behaviour gives away the truth, and people are always watching and interpreting.
Even if you do care about all your company values, there are times when a decision needs to be made, and it can only be made based on one. Which one do you choose? These moments – the small, apparently insignificant everyday actions and the major organisational decisions - send a powerful message to people. “This is what we value the most.” This is why people don’t believe stated values, and why they may roll their eyes when a new values initiative is introduced. They’ve seen it before, but people – particularly senior leaders – didn’t back the stated values up with their lived behaviour.
Let’s take a few all-too-common examples...
If a company espouses the value “respect” but leaders interrupt, dismiss, or blame, then the value they’re ‘living’ is something very different. It might be hierarchy, ego, saving face, speed over curiosity, or power, for example.
If the company adopts “collaboration” but rewards individual heroics, the real value might be competition, prestige, winning, personal brand, or autonomy. Someone is setting the tone for this, and your systems and processes might further reinforce it. For as long as that’s true, real collaboration remains a pipe dream.
The problem with these kinds of scenarios is that people see the contradiction and make up their minds about what leaders really value. The contradictory behaviour totally undermines the intended value and makes it far less likely that others will try to model it themselves.
The rest of the organisation will follow what leaders role-model, reward, and tolerate, not what they put on the walls. That’s why behaviour must be aligned to values - they make explicit what you expect leaders to embody, thereby providing a behavioural standard that others begin to follow. These behaviours drive the quality of relationships (within the organisation and beyond it), and they ultimately lead to the results you get.
Without the coherence that consistently lived values create, culture becomes accidental, a side-effect of leaders’ personalities, rather than a shared principle of how we operate to get the outcomes we want to see. And values are sneered at, instead of being proudly at the core of everything your people stand for.
How to embed values in your culture
Values only become ‘real’ when they are translated into systems and habits. Until then, sadly, they are just nice words that may well appeal to people, but which are unlikely to drive performance in the way they’re supposed to. What practical steps can you take to embed them? Here are some ideas:
Define behaviours, not just words: Back up your abstract nouns (“Integrity”) with observable actions (“Shares bad news early and transparently”). If people can’t easily recognise “I’m living this when…”, “I’m not living this when…”, then it’s hard for your people to live the values consistently, despite best intentions. Make it easy for them.
Integrate values into performance management: Assess not just what results are delivered, but how they are delivered. Promotion decisions that have been made, factoring in how people go about their business, behaviourally, send a powerful signal about what senior leadership and the organisation care about and want more of.
Tell stories that reinforce values: Stories of leaders making tough calls aligned to values are cultural accelerants and another powerful ‘symbol’ that reinforces the guiding principles you want people to follow. How will you act at critical, pivotal moments? What will you show is top of your values hierarchy when you have a tough call to make? Remember – people are watching at these times more than ever.
Align incentives and consequences: Nothing erodes credibility faster than high performers or people with power being excused for value violations. Consistency and predictability of reward, as well as what is encouraged, what is discouraged, and what will not be tolerated, are critical. Any deviation invites trouble and undermines all your other efforts.
Model visibly at the top: Senior leaders must “walk their talk” in moments of trade-off. Values become believable when they cost something. It’s easy to make tough choices when the consequences are felt by others. But when the person making the choice can be seen to have to sacrifice something, people sit up and take notice.
How specific values shape culture and performance
If you look at the way any company describes its culture, it will typically fall into one of four categories, or ‘Focus Areas’ as we call them in the Culture Impact Framework: Performance, Customer, Agility, or Engagement. Actually, these are all routes to the same end - high performance. The question is, what is the means to the end?
If you want to focus on building a high-achievement, high-performance culture, different values and, hence, different behaviours will help create that culture. For example, values such as Excellence, Accountability, and Ownership, when lived consistently, will promote a culture where leaders set clear standards and expectations, give candid feedback, and take responsibility for outcomes. Live these behaviours, and they will raise performance norms across the organisation.
If you want your culture to drive performance through a focus on your customers and delivering excellence for them, values like Service, Empathy, or Partnership often help. Why? Because they guide behaviours such as actively seeking customer feedback (and acting on it), ensuring people design decisions around client impact, and genuinely empowering frontline teams to resolve issues. Over time, this builds trust, loyalty, and sustainable growth.
Do you think that agility, change, and innovation will be a competitive advantage for you? Values such as Curiosity, Courage, and Learning could help you by driving behaviours like encouraging experimentation, treating failure as data, and senior leaders inviting challenge to their ideas and listening with curiosity. These behaviours create psychological safety and trust, which are essential for experimentation and bringing new ideas.
Finally, if you think that by building a culture around high levels of employee engagement, you’ll achieve outstanding results, you should work on togetherness and a sense of ‘we’ - values like Collaboration, Respect, and Inclusion will serve you well. They shape behaviours such as inviting diverse perspectives, sharing credit, and addressing conflict constructively. These behaviours build belonging and collective ownership, which are critical drivers of engagement.
Building values for success
Ultimately, values are powerful cultural levers that tell people what you care about and how to act when trade-offs arise. They shape what gets noticed, rewarded, and corrected. They define the kind of organisation you are becoming. The real test of your values is not whether employees can list them, it’s whether they can see them, consistently, in the behaviour of their leaders.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson is supposed to have said, "Your actions speak so loudly I can't hear what you're saying". Line up your actions and your words, and your people will follow.
Discover how we can help your leaders role model your organisational values to accelerate your success.
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