My Thoughts

Why Your Company's Values Are Just Words (And How to Make Them Actually Mean Something)

The other day, a client asked me to help them "operationalise their values framework for maximum cultural impact." I nearly choked on my flat white. After 18 years in workplace training, I've developed a finely-tuned bullshit detector, and that sentence registered somewhere between "synergistic solutions" and "best practice paradigms" on the scale.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: your company values are probably meaningless wallpaper. Worse than meaningless, actually – they're actively damaging your culture because everyone can see the gap between what's on your boardroom wall and what happens in your Slack channels.

The Great Values Charade

I was working with a tech startup in Melbourne last year – let's call them InnovateTech (because they all sound the same). Their values were plastered everywhere: "Innovation, Integrity, Collaboration, Excellence." Standard corporate bingo card stuff. During my first week there, I watched their "collaborative" leadership team spend three hours arguing about who should pay for the office coffee pods while their "innovative" developers worked 70-hour weeks to fix a system they'd been told not to upgrade for budget reasons.

The CEO kept referencing their "excellence" value while the customer service team was using a CRM system from 2015 that crashed twice daily. But hey, at least the values looked great on their website.

Most Australian companies treat values like they treat OH&S posters – stick 'em up, tick the box, job done. But values aren't decorations. They're decision-making frameworks. And if your team can't use them to resolve a conflict or choose between two options, they're useless.

The Real Problem (It's Not What You Think)

The issue isn't that companies have the wrong values. "Integrity" and "respect" are fine aspirations. The problem is that nobody knows what these words actually mean in practice. What does "innovation" look like when you're arguing about the stationery budget? How do you demonstrate "excellence" during a product recall?

I've seen companies spend $50,000 on values workshops (usually involving coloured sticky notes and team-building exercises that would make a kindergarten teacher cringe) only to have their first real test be: "Do we tell our biggest client about this delivery delay, or hope they don't notice?"

That's when you find out what your values really are.

Here's a controversial opinion: most companies would be better off with one clear, actionable value than five vague ones. At least everyone would understand what's expected.

The Australian Way: Practical Values That Actually Work

Some of the best workplace cultures I've encountered weren't in Silicon Valley or fancy consulting firms. They were in Australian family businesses where the values weren't written down anywhere but everyone knew exactly what they stood for.

Take my mate Dave's plumbing business in Brisbane. No mission statement. No vision board. But ask any of his team what matters most and they'll tell you: "Fix it right the first time, even if it costs us." That's their value. It drives every decision from which suppliers they use to how they train apprentices.

Or consider how Bunnings built their culture around "helping customers complete their projects successfully." Simple. Clear. Actionable. When a team member sees a confused customer staring at power tools, they know exactly what to do – and it's not "upsell them to the premium model."

Compare that to most corporate values statements, which read like they were written by a committee of management consultants who've never actually run a business. "We embrace transformational excellence through collaborative innovation." What the hell does that even mean?

Making Values Actually Valuable

If you're serious about making your values more than wall art, here's how to fix them:

Start with real decisions. Gather your leadership team and identify the five biggest dilemmas your company faced last year. Not the easy ones – the tough choices where reasonable people disagreed. Those situations reveal what you actually value when the chips are down.

Make them specific. Instead of "customer focus," try "we spend whatever it takes to fix customer problems within 24 hours." Instead of "innovation," try "we allocate 10% of every project budget to trying something new." Specificity forces accountability.

Test them weekly. Every leadership meeting should include one question: "What decisions this week tested our values, and how did we respond?" If the answer is "none," your values are too abstract to be useful.

I worked with a Perth-based mining services company who replaced their seven corporate values with three practical principles: "Safety isn't negotiable," "We keep our promises," and "Problems get escalated, not hidden." Their employee engagement scores jumped 30% in six months because suddenly everyone knew exactly what was expected.

The safety value meant projects stopped immediately if anyone raised concerns – no questions asked. The promises value meant if they quoted two weeks, they delivered in two weeks, even if it meant working weekends. The escalation value meant bad news travelled up fast, which actually reduced the amount of bad news because problems got solved quickly.

Simple. Clear. Non-negotiable.

The Values Workshop That Actually Works

Here's how to run a values session that doesn't make everyone want to update their LinkedIn profiles:

Skip the external facilitator with the motivational posters. Get your team together and ask three questions:

What's a decision we made this year that we're proud of, and why?
What's a decision we made that felt wrong, even if it worked out financially?
When our competitors do something that makes us say "we'd never do that," what are they doing?

The answers reveal your actual values – the ones you live by, not the ones you think you should have. Those are worth putting on the wall.

When Values Become Weapons

Here's where it gets tricky. Some companies weaponise values, using them to justify unpopular decisions or shut down dissent. "Well, our value of excellence means we can't accept that proposal." That's not values-based leadership; that's manipulation with a corporate vocabulary.

Good values create clarity, not confusion. They should help your team make decisions when you're not in the room, not give management a trump card for every argument.

I once watched a CEO invoke their "family values" to justify below-market salaries while taking a 40% bonus. That's not values-based leadership – that's hypocrisy with a mission statement.

Values work when they constrain leadership as much as they guide employees. The best leaders I know regularly make decisions that cost them money because their values demanded it.

The Bottom Line (Because Everything Has One)

Your company values are probably fine. The problem is that nobody knows what they mean in practice, so they default to meaningless corporate speak that everyone ignores.

Fix this by making your values specific, testable, and uncomfortable. Good values should occasionally force you to make decisions you don't want to make. If your values never create internal conflict, they're not specific enough to be useful.

And please, for the love of all that's holy, stop hiring consultants to run values workshops with icebreaker games. Just get your leadership team in a room, order pizza, and have an honest conversation about what you actually stand for.

Your team will thank you. Your customers will notice. And you might even discover that living your values is more profitable than just posting them.

The best companies I work with don't talk about their values much. They just live them. Every day. In every decision.

That's when words become culture. And culture, my friends, is the only sustainable competitive advantage you've got.

Looking to align your team development with your actual company values? I've found that emotional intelligence training for managers and effective communication skills training help bridge the gap between what we say we value and how we actually behave. Because you can't live your values if your people don't know how to have the difficult conversations that make values real.