Core values of winning teams: a value only counts once it has cost you something

Most leadership teams I meet already have values. They are on the website, in the induction deck and sometimes on the wall by the lifts. Ask the executive team to name them without looking and you usually get three out of five, a pause, and a joke. Ask when a value last cost the company something and the room goes quiet.

That silence is the problem this article is about. The values were chosen carefully, with good intent, in an offsite that felt productive. Then nothing was attached to them. They never decided a hire, never blocked a promotion, never moved a budget line. So the people in the building drew their own conclusion about what the company really values, and they drew it from the decisions, not the poster.

My position is simple. A core value is a trade-off the team will still make when it is expensive. Until a value shows up in who gets hired, who gets promoted and where the money goes, it is decoration. And decoration is not harmless, because a value that is printed but not paid for teaches people that leadership says things it does not mean.

This is the first of three deeper pieces under Building winning teams. The chapter sets out the whole argument. Here I want to go further into one question: what does it take to turn a value from a word into operating code?

Why most value statements do no work

The evidence on published values is uncomfortable reading for anyone who has sat through a values workshop.

When economists Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales looked at company websites, they found that 85% of S&P 500 companies had a section on corporate culture. Innovation was advertised by 80% of them, integrity and respect by 70%. When they tried to link how often and how prominently those values were stated to short- and long-term performance, they found no significant correlation. Their reading was that advertised values are easy to claim, so everybody claims them. What did predict stronger performance was something else: whether employees perceived top managers as trustworthy and ethical. The value that mattered was the one people saw leaders practise.

MIT Sloan Management Review reached a similar place from a different angle. Donald Sull and colleagues reviewed 689 large, mainly US organisations and found that 562 of them, 82%, published official values. Integrity was listed by 65%, collaboration by 53%, customer focus by 48% and respect by 35%. They then compared those official values with how employees described their company in more than 1.2 million Glassdoor reviews. They found no correlation between the values a company emphasised and how well employees said it lived up to them. Four of the nine values, including collaboration and customer orientation, were negatively correlated. Fewer than a quarter of the statements explained how the values helped the company succeed.

And the people expected to live the values often cannot tell you what the company stands for. Gallup has found that only 41% of employees strongly agree that they know what their company stands for and what makes it different from competitors.

None of this says values are pointless. It says that publishing them is not the same as holding them. The gap between the two is where cynicism grows, and cynicism is expensive. It is the quiet reason good people stop raising problems, stop believing the strategy and start saving their best effort for their next employer.

Four kinds of value, and why confusing them hurts

The most useful distinction I know comes from Patrick Lencioni’s 2002 article in Harvard Business Review. He separated values into four types: core, aspirational, permission-to-play and accidental. He also noted that 80% of the Fortune 100 already published their values at the time, many of which, in his view, stood for very little.

Most value lists I see mix all four together. That is why they feel flat. Sorting them is usually the first useful hour of work with a leadership team.

Type	What it is	Typical example	What to do with it
Core	Already true here, defended when it hurts	We kill our own favourite project if it fails the customer	Hire, promote and fund against it
Aspirational	Needed for the strategy, not yet true	Speed of decision in a company that has always been careful	Name it as a goal, with an owner and a date
Permission-to-play	The minimum anyone would expect	Honesty, legal compliance, basic respect	Put it in the code of conduct, not the value list
Accidental	Grew on its own, good or bad	Everyone here went to the same three universities	Notice it, and decide whether to keep it

The damage usually comes from two confusions. The first is printing an aspiration as if it were already core. People can see the gap on day one, and from then on they read the whole list as marketing. The second is listing permission-to-play values as if they were distinctive. Integrity matters enormously, but if your standard of integrity is the same as everyone else’s, writing it on the wall tells nobody how your company makes decisions differently.

From word to price: the value ladder

The focus area this article sits under puts it plainly: values live when they cost something, so each value has to be attached to explicit behaviours, promotion criteria and budget decisions. Culture should work like operating code, not wallpaper.

I think of that as a ladder with four rungs.

1. The word. Customer first. Ownership. Candour. This is where most companies stop.
2. The behaviour. What someone actually does in a normal working week when they hold this value. We put the downside on the table before the recommendation. A miss has an owner and a date within a week.
3. The decision rule. Where the value decides something people care about. We will not promote someone who meets the number by burning their team. Any project that fails the user test loses its budget at the next review, whoever sponsored it.
4. The price. A real example, in the last year, of the team paying for the value. A deal walked away from. A strong performer not promoted. A launch delayed in public.

The test is the fourth rung. If nobody at the table can name a price paid in the last twelve months, the value is not core yet. It may be aspirational, which is fine, but it should be labelled as such.

The practical behaviour that follows from this is small and repeatable. In the next promotion discussion, before anyone talks about the candidate’s numbers, ask which of the core values this person has demonstrated when it was inconvenient. In the next budget review, ask which line item exists because of a value, and which would be cut if the value were only a word. Do it every time, and the building will start to notice which values are real.

This connects closely to the people work in the previous chapter. A value that is not used in hiring and exit decisions will be quietly overruled by the people you keep. My piece on players versus pretenders is about exactly that: who raises the standard when you are not in the room.

Arguments

The case for

The case for costly values is that people learn culture from decisions, not documents. The NBER work and the MIT Sloan study point the same way: the published list predicts very little, while what employees see leaders actually do predicts a great deal. A short list of values attached to hiring, promotion and money gives people a reliable way to predict what leadership will do under pressure. That predictability is what lets a senior team delegate without losing the standard, because the people two levels down can work out the right answer on their own.

There is also a speed argument. A team that has agreed in advance which trade-offs it will make does not reopen the argument every time the trade-off appears. Values written as decision rules are a way of making some hard decisions once.

The case against

The strongest objection is that values cannot be engineered at all. Culture, on this view, is what happens between people. Turning values into promotion criteria and budget rules makes them bureaucratic and invites people to perform the value for the review rather than hold it. I take that seriously. I have seen value scorecards that produced exactly that kind of theatre.

A second objection is that a value which costs money is a luxury. In a tight year, the argument goes, the business has to come first. Sometimes the opposite is true: a company in genuine survival mode may have to suspend something it believes in, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

A third is that the research is about large companies and published statements. It does not prove that a well-run values process would fail. That is fair. The studies show a gap between saying and doing; they do not show the gap cannot be closed.

Where I stand

I hold the position, with conditions. Values do need to be attached to decisions, but to very few decisions, made in the open, by the people at the top. The point is not a scoring system. It is that the executive team visibly pays for the values first. If a value has to be suspended in a crisis, say so out loud, with a date to restore it. That is a value being honoured, not abandoned.

In my 7-step coaching process, this work starts in step one, Vision, where we link the leader’s personal values with where the organisation is going. It comes back in step six, Impact, where new norms are embedded in the operating model, and step seven, Results, where the practices are codified so they survive the next wave of hiring. If you want the team to do this work together rather than through the CEO alone, that is what executive team coaching is for.

Try this

Run this with your executive team in a single 90-minute session. You need the current value list and the last year’s promotion, exit and budget decisions.

1. Sort. Put each published value into one of Lencioni’s four types. Be honest. Most teams find one or two genuine core values.
2. Name the price. For each value you have called core, ask someone other than the CEO to name a decision in the last year where it cost the company something. No example, no core status.
3. Write the rule. For each surviving core value, write one decision rule in a single sentence that starts with we will or we will not.
4. Attach it. Agree where each rule will be used: hiring, promotion, exit or budget. Name an owner for each.
5. Review in ninety days. Bring the list back and ask the same question. When did this cost us something?

Questions to sit with afterwards:

• Which of our values would a new hire be able to work out from our decisions alone?
• Which value would we drop first if the next quarter went badly?
• Is there a value we hold but have never written down?
• Who at this table has paid personally for one of our values, and did anyone notice?
• Which of our values is really an aspiration, and are we willing to say so?

Where to go next

Values only matter if the people holding them can stand the load, which is why the next piece in this chapter is about attitude and what it can and cannot carry. The third, on how to build high-performance teams, covers the operating rhythm that keeps a standard alive once it is agreed. If trust in leadership is the gap the research keeps pointing to, the piece on how to create loyalty in your organisation is the natural follow-on, because loyalty is mostly the long-run result of values that held when they were tested.

Sport taught me early that a team’s real values show up in selection, not speeches. I write about that translation on the elite sport to boardroom page. If you want to put your own value list through the ladder with someone who will ask where it cost you, book a 30-minute strategy call.