Setting Clear Organizational Values

Helping your team identify their core values is essential for building a strong, cohesive, and aligned group. Here's how I've done it based on my experience: 1. Open Discussions: Start by having open and honest conversations with your team. Ask questions like: "What matters most to us as a team?" and "What principles should guide our actions?" 2. List Common Themes: Encourage your team to share their thoughts and ideas. As they speak, jot down common themes or recurring words that come up. This helps identify potential core values. 3. Prioritize Values: Once you have a list, ask your team to prioritize the values they believe are most important. You can use a voting system or a ranking exercise to do this. 4. Discuss Scenarios: To make values more tangible, discuss real-life scenarios where these values come into play. For example, if "Integrity" is a potential value, talk about situations that require ethical decisions. 5. Craft Statements: Work together to craft clear and concise statements for each core value. These statements should describe what the value means to your team. 6. Feedback and Refinement: Share the draft core values with your team for feedback. Be open to refining and clarifying the statements based on their input. 7. Finalize and Communicate: Once everyone is on the same page, finalize your team's core values. Make sure they are easy to understand and remember. Communicate them to the entire team. 8. Incorporate into Daily Work: Integrate these core values into your team's daily work. Discuss how they can guide decision-making and behavior. 9. Lead by Example: As a leader, embody these core values in your actions. Your behavior sets the tone for the team. 10. Regularly Revisit: Core values may evolve over time. Schedule periodic check-ins to ensure they still resonate with your team's identity and objectives. 11. Celebrate Values in Action: Recognize and celebrate when team members exemplify these core values. It reinforces their importance. 12. Address Misalignment: If conflicts arise or behavior doesn't align with your core values, address it promptly and use the values as a guide for resolution. Identifying core values is a collaborative process that requires ongoing commitment. By involving your team and consistently integrating these values into your work, you'll foster a culture that reflects your shared beliefs and principles. This can lead to better teamwork, decision-making, and overall team satisfaction.

Culture is everything 🙏🏾 When leaders accept or overlook poor behaviour, they implicitly endorse those actions, potentially eroding the organisation’s values and morale. To build a thriving culture, leaders must actively shape it by refusing to tolerate behaviour that contradicts their values and expectations.
 The best leaders: 
 1. Define and Communicate Core Values: * Articulate Expectations: Clearly define and communicate the organisation’s core values and behavioural expectations. Make these values central to every aspect of the organisation’s operations and culture. * Embed Values in Policies: Integrate these values into your policies, procedures, and performance metrics to ensure they are reflected in daily operations. 
 2. Model the Behaviour You Expect: * Lead by Example: Demonstrate the behaviour you want to see in others. Your actions should reflect the organisation’s values, from how you interact with employees to how you handle challenges. 3. Address Poor Behaviour Promptly: * Act Quickly: Confront and address inappropriate behaviour as soon as it occurs. Delays in addressing issues can lead to a culture of tolerance for misconduct. * Apply Consistent Consequences: Ensure that consequences for poor behaviour are fair, consistent, and aligned with organisational values. This reinforces that there are clear boundaries and expectations.
 4. Foster a Culture of Accountability: * Encourage Self-Regulation: Promote an environment where everyone is encouraged to hold themselves and others accountable for their actions. * Provide Support: Offer resources and support for employees to understand and align with organisational values, helping them navigate challenges and uphold standards.
 5. Seek and Act on Feedback: * Encourage Open Communication: Create channels for employees to provide feedback on behaviour and organisational culture without fear of reprisal. * Respond Constructively: Act on feedback to address and rectify issues. This shows that you value employee input and are committed to maintaining a positive culture.
 6. Celebrate Positive Behaviour: * Recognise and Reward: Acknowledge and reward employees who exemplify the organisation’s values. Celebrating positive behaviour reinforces the desired culture and motivates others to follow suit. * Share Success Stories: Highlight examples of how upholding values has led to positive outcomes, reinforcing the connection between behaviour and organisational success.
 7. Invest in Leadership Development: * Provide Training: Offer training and development opportunities for leaders at all levels to enhance their skills in managing behaviour and fostering a positive culture. 8. Promote Inclusivity and Respect: * Build a Diverse Environment: Create a culture that respects and values diversity. Inclusivity strengthens the organisational fabric and fosters a more collaborative and supportive work environment.

No exercise provokes more cynicism and eye-rolling than the articulation of company values.   The usual experience goes like this: We do a brainstorming exercise. We do a narrowing exercise. We land on the things we always land on (Integrity! Fun! One team! Customer excellence!). We put them up on the wall. We write a press release about it.   And nothing changes.   There’s an even worse option: The boss writes the values. Hands them down from on high. Puts them up on the wall.   And nothing changes.   Is it any wonder we’re cynical? Any wonder that, while 80% of employers think they're values-aligned with employees, only 53% of employees think they are?   Here's Truth #1: Values are meaningless. What matters is behaviour. And the equation is simple: if your values match your behaviour, you build trust; if they don’t, you lose trust.   Here's Truth #2: The only way to align values with behaviour is to embed them into the systems, processes, and infrastructure of the organisation.   What does that look like? 4 steps: 1. Articulate the behaviours associated with each value. What does it look like in practice? What are go/no-go behaviours? What’s an example of a time we got this right? When we got it wrong? How can you tell if someone is delivering according to the expectations set by this value? 2. Build them into your systems. Use them in recruitment, in induction, in performance reviews, in bonus calculations. Set up rituals: reminders at the beginning of meetings, monthly discussions on where adhering to the values gets tricky. Don’t just leave them on the wall; bring them to life every day. 3. Hold yourself to account, relentlessly. Every time a manager says, “We value transparency!” and then talks behind people’s backs, the message gets reinforced that you’re not serious about this stuff. 4. Be a hard-ass about it — to the degree that someone’s consistent disregard for the values and their associated behaviours should be cause for dismissal. "But, Kaila, that’s way too harsh! I can’t require people to behave according to our values!"   OK, then why do you have them?    If people cannot be held to account for behaving according to the values, the values are meaningless.   If you only judge people on output, they learn that their behaviour doesn’t matter — the values are meaningless.   But if you have translated your values into clear behaviours, ensured they are built into the rituals, systems, and infrastructure of the organisation, modelled them relentlessly yourself as a leader, held others to account… There is no ambiguity. The message becomes clear:   This is a place where we behave in alignment with what we say is important to us.   This is a place where we don’t just care about what we produce; we care about how we show up.   This is a place where we have taken meaningless values and turned them into something meaningful.   And nobody would roll their eyes at THAT.

For core values to work your team needs to read them and say "that's me". Core values should be clear, detailed, actionable, and something that the whole team feels they were involved in. Here’s how to write good core values while involving your team in the process. 1. Look at What’s Already Working Your values are already showing up in how you hire, communicate, solve problems, and what kind of behavior gets rewarded. Ask your leaders and team: - Who are our top performers? What makes them great? - Who are our best teammates? Why do we love working with them? - What kinds of decisions do we consistently feel are right? - What are we unwilling to do, even if it helps us hit our goals? 2. Choose What to Keep, Amplify, or Change Startups evolve fast. Some early values will no longer fit or you might need to introduce new ones to support where you’re headed. Use this moment to decide: - What values do we want to keep scale as we grow? - What do we need to unlearn or move away from? - What kind of team do we want to become? - What do prospective hires, partners, or investors expect from us? 3. Write Clear, Simple, Actionable Statements Your values should pass three tests: 1. Anyone on the team can understand them, use them, and remember them 2. They guide daily decisions 3. You’d be willing to fire someone who consistently breaks them Write values that sound like how you actually talk. You want these statements to be something you could hear in a meeting. Some examples of core value statements from Proletariat: - “Understand Why” - “Decide Fast and Iterate” - “Take Responsibility” 4. Follow Each Statement With a Detailed Paragraph A core value statement is important because it is easy to remember but it is often not enough. Here is an example from Proletariat’s core values: Decide Fast and Iterate Good decisions are hard, but fast decisions are good. Quickly agree and commit to a well-reasoned direction, even without consensus. The tradeoff is worth it. Act, gather feedback, measure against expectations, and adjust accordingly. It’s okay to be wrong, work to learn from it quickly. Nothing’s sacred and we should always question the status quo. 5. Iterate with the Team Share a draft with your team. Give everyone a chance to read, digest, and comment on how the values make them feel. Ask the following: - Do you identify with these values? - Is there a value or behavior missing? - Are any of these values confusing or ambiguous? You’re not looking for consensus, but you want buy-in and belief. If your team feels the values are fake or forced upon them, they won’t stick. 6. Evaluate Regularly At Proletariat we would review our values once a year but also after any major strategic shift. Send a survey to your leadership team and ask: 1. Do we embody [this core value] as a leadership team? 2. Do we embody [this core value] across the entire team? 3. Should we keep [this core value]?

Only 23% of U.S. employees believe they can apply their organization's values to their work. Even worse? Only 15% believe their leaders uphold company values. Here's what their leaders are missing (and how to fix it): The problem isn't the values themselves. It's the dangerous misalignment between: • What leaders say • What leaders do • What gets rewarded • What happens day-to-day This creates what I call a "culture crisis" - where your words and actions tell two different stories. Trust goes out the window. Engagement plummets. Innovation dies. Results suffer. And the data proves it: • Companies with strong cultures see 4x higher revenue growth over 10 years • They achieve 3.8x higher employee engagement • They're 1.5x more likely to retain top talent But here's what most leaders miss: You can't just send a mass email or put posters up announcing your company values... You must shape it with thousands of tiny decisions made every single day. I see it all too often: • You tell your team that "innovation" is a value - but punish failure • You preach "collaboration" but your processes force competition Your employees WILL pick up on these inconsistencies and it will push them towards greener pastures. Here's what actually works: 1. Systems Alignment (Create Clarity) Your processes must reflect your values. Create clear decision-making frameworks that empower teams to act on values daily. 2. Walk the Talk (Build Alignment) When faced with tough decisions, openly explain how your values guided your choice. 3. Psychological Safety (Generate Movement) Build trust by celebrating when people speak up, admitting your own mistakes, and showing vulnerability first. 4. Consistent Action (Sustain Results) Make values part of your daily conversations. Recognize and reward behaviors that exemplify your values - not just results. The leaders who keep their values alive and well all share one thing: They understand that culture isn't what you say - it's what you consistently DO when no one's watching. And this isn't just theory... These are the exact principles I've used to help transform cultures at some of the world's largest companies. Not sure where to start? Save the infographic below to identify the top 5 culture killers and how to fix them. Want more on becoming the leader everyone wants to work for? Join the 12,500+ leaders who get our weekly email newsletter: https://lnkd.in/en9vxeNk

I’ve written here before about generic corporate values like Integrity, Respect, and Excellence. They state positive virtues, not distinct values. And because nobody would ever argue with them, they don’t drive decision-making or culture. They don’t, as Jim Collins might say, “have teeth.”   In the current issue of Harvard Business Review, INSEAD's Erin Meyer proposes a test for crafting better values: consider dilemmas.   Here is her example: Say you’re managing a small team of marketers. You know there’s a 60 percent chance that the team will be reshuffled in four months due to a reorg. Do you tell them now or do you wait until you know whether it’s going to happen?   Meyer says that when she presents this scenario to managers, just under half say they would share the information, while just over half say they would wait. Both are reasonable decisions.   But if the manager belongs to an organization with sharp values and a unique culture, the answer could be a lot clearer, and much likelier to reinforce the ethos the CEO and leadership team has built. If one of the values is Radical Transparency, for example, that’s your answer for you. You tell them about the possible reorg. If, on the other hand, you’ve established Relentless Focus as a value, you probably don’t want to share something that, while still only a possibility, is likely to distract the marketers from their current goals.   Deliberately thinking through such dilemmas—and sharing the most instructive ones with your team—is an excellent way to bring your company’s core values to life. Remember that a dilemma is most enlightening when either side is supportable.

We want to build a strong, positive organisational culture, based on values. Leaders often set out abstract absolute positives as organisational values (integrity, respect, trust etc) but these don't drive the day-to-day decision-making (& therefore the behaviour) of the people at work. Therefore, they have no impact on the actual culture. Erin Meyer has undertaken research on organisational culture for two decades & suggests six actions for making values-based culture come alive: 1) Build your culture based on real-world dilemmas: identify the tough dilemmas that people routinely face and clearly state how they should be resolved, in line with the stated values. 2) Move your culture from abstraction to action: “dilemma-test” your values to determine if they are actionable enough to be useful in real decision-making situations. 3) Paint your culture in full colour: articulate your desired culture using concrete, colourful images to get the values to stick. 4) Recruit people whose values fit: “bad” behaviour is contagious. 5) Let culture drive strategy: identify your strategic objective & use dilemmas so people understand what decisions they should be making to move the organisation in the right direction. 6) Don’t be a “values” purist: Identify dilemmas in which your stated values do not apply. https://lnkd.in/gv2c2dGB Graphic by Julian Stodd

Let’s talk about values—not the kind that hang neatly on a plaque in the break room, but the kind that show up daily in how your organization operates. Think about it: Performance might get someone through the door, but values determine if they belong in the long run. If someone on your team isn’t living the values you stand for, what message does that send to everyone else? Your organization’s values aren’t just words; they’re reflected in your policies, programs, and priorities. They show up in how you allocate resources, what you choose to reward, and how your people behave when no one’s watching. It’s the difference between a team that thrives and one that falters. So, take a moment and ask yourself:   - What does your organization value?  - How do you know? What tangible evidence proves it? - Do you have people who are out of sync with those values? If so, what’s your plan to address it? Values are the foundation of trust and alignment within an organization. They guide decisions in moments of uncertainty and shape the culture that attracts, retains, and inspires top talent. If your stated values don’t align with your actions, you risk eroding trust, both internally and externally. Ensuring your organization lives its values isn’t just about accountability—it’s about creating a culture that others want to emulate and a legacy that endures. What kind of culture are you building today, and what will it say about your leadership tomorrow? Make it a great day! Patrick #values #leadership #leader

"We have all these values on paper, but they don’t seem to show up in our daily work. It feels like they’re just words." Have you heard this before? Perhaps said it yourself? In my experience, the issue isn't that the organization lacks values—it is that those values aren’t reflected in behaviors or decisions. It's key to examine where the disconnect is. For one of my clients: 💡 Integrity was a core value, but teams felt pressure to meet deadlines at any cost, even if it meant sacrificing quality. 💡 Collaboration was listed, but meetings were siloed, with little input from cross-functional teams. 💡 Transparency was celebrated, but critical decisions were made behind closed doors, leaving employees feeling excluded. Once we identified these gaps, the leadership team committed to change: 1️⃣ They aligned rewards and recognition with the values, celebrating behaviors like speaking up and prioritizing quality. 2️⃣ They overhauled meeting structures to encourage cross-team collaboration. 3️⃣ Leaders began modeling transparency by openly sharing their decision-making process and inviting input. Over time, the culture began to shift. Employees noticed the difference—not because of what was written on a poster, but because they saw leaders and peers living the values in their day-to-day work. Trust grew, collaboration flourished, and alignment across teams improved. Culture isn’t built in mission statements—it’s brought to life through actions and choices. #OrgCulture #CultureChange #WorkplaceCulture #Leadership #OrgValues ------------ ☕ Curious to dive deeper? Let’s connect over a coffee chat. https://lnkd.in/gGJjcffw

One of the most common root issues I see as to why companies degrade is a lack of core values. Without a clear set of guiding principles, decisions become inconsistent, leadership wavers, and company culture forms on its own—often in ways that harm the business. When I took over operations at a family entertainment company, I quickly realized that every location was run differently. There was no cohesion, no alignment, and no common standard for success. That had to change. I introduced 10 core values, including accountability, innovation, transparency, and profitable sales growth. But simply stating them wasn’t enough. Core values are worthless unless we embody them. So, I made sure they became part of how we operated every single day. We wove them into hiring decisions, ensuring that new team members aligned with our vision. We reinforced them in meetings, not just as slogans but as a way of working. We put them on the walls, but more importantly, we modeled them in leadership. When a problem arose, we asked: “What’s the right decision based on our core values?” When team members excelled, we recognized them for embodying those values. When tough calls had to be made, they were made through the lens of what we stood for. That’s how you build a strong company—with a culture that consistently reflects what you believe in. Because without core values, you’re risking your guests’ trust, which takes years to build and seconds to lose. What are your companies core values and how do you practice them?