Walk into almost any office, real or virtual, and you'll find the same five words dressed up in a nice font. Integrity. Innovation. Excellence. Teamwork. Ask ten people in that company what those words mean for how they actually do their job, and you'll get ten different answers, most of them a shrug.
That's the problem with core values. It's not that they don't matter. It's that most companies treat them as decoration rather than as a decision-making tool: a poster, not a policy.
Worth flagging upfront: a lot of what ranks for “core values” online is about personal core values, working out your own life philosophy. This isn't that. This is about company core values, the operating kind that are supposed to guide how a business makes decisions, especially the hard ones.
This guide covers what core values actually are, why the standard approach to writing them fails so often, and what it takes to make them something people use, not just recite.
What are core values?
Core values are the small set of beliefs that shape how a company makes decisions, especially the hard ones. They're different from a mission statement, which describes what you do, and a vision statement, which describes where you're headed. Values describe how you get there: what you're willing to trade off, and what you're not.
Question it answersTime horizonMissionWhat do we do?TodayVisionWhere are we headed?Long-termValuesHow do we get there?Every decision, always
So when people ask what are core values for, the honest answer is: they're a filter for decisions under pressure, not a personality description for the careers page.
A value only counts as a core value if it survives contact with a cost. If “customer focus” is on your wall but you ship a feature you know will annoy customers because it hits a quarterly revenue target anyway, that's not a core value. That's a slogan. Real values show up precisely when there's something to lose by following them.
Why most companies get core values wrong
A few patterns show up again and again in companies whose values never make it off the wall.
Too many values. Once a list goes past four or five, nobody can hold it in their head, let alone use it to make a call under pressure. A list of nine values is really a list of zero.
Generic words. Integrity, excellence, and teamwork could describe literally any organisation on earth, including the ones with terrible cultures. Generic words don't tell anyone what to actually do differently.
No consequence attached. Take a company whose value is “customer obsession”. If the support team can't get a fix out any faster than three business days no matter how loud the customer is, and nobody senior has ever changed that, “customer obsession” isn't a value there. It's a word. If nobody has ever been hired, promoted, or let go because of how they scored against a value, the value isn't operating. It's aspirational at best.
Leadership exempts itself. Values that only apply to individual contributors and never to the executive team get noticed fast, and they get ignored just as fast.
Set once, checked never. Values written at a founding offsite and never revisited as the company scales tend to calcify into things nobody actually believes any more.
How to define values that actually mean something
Writing values that hold up takes a different process to the brainstorm-and-vote exercise most companies default to.
- Look backward before you look forward. Find three to five decisions the company is genuinely proud of, then work out what principle made each one right. Values you reverse-engineer from real behaviour are far more durable than ones you invent from scratch.
- Write behaviours, not adjectives. “Default to transparency” tells someone what to actually do. “Integrity” does not.
- Pressure-test each candidate. Would this cost us a deal, a friend, or a quarter, and would we still hold the line? For example, if “we default to transparency” is a candidate, ask whether the company would still publish salary bands in a year when the numbers look bad. If the honest answer is “well, maybe not that year”, it's not a value yet. It's a hope.
- Cut ruthlessly, to three or five. If everything is a priority, nothing is, and a value nobody can remember can't guide anything.
- Ask the team, but don't outsource the decision. Input makes values feel shared. A committee vote makes them generic. Leadership should gather the input and still own the final call.
Core values in practice
Here's what the difference between a decorative value and an operational one actually looks like in wording.
Decorative valueOperational valueIntegrityDefault to transparency: salaries, roadmap, and mistakes are visible internally by defaultExcellenceShip or say why: every project either ships on the agreed date or has a public reason it didn'tTeamworkDisagree loudly, commit fully: debate hard in the room, then execute without relitigating once a call is madeInnovationCustomer time beats internal time: a live customer call always outranks an internal status meeting
Notice the pattern: every operational value tells you what to do on a Tuesday afternoon when two good options conflict. Every decorative one just sounds nice in a deck.
A useful test for any value you're drafting: could you write the opposite of it as a defensible position? “We ship fast” only works as a value if “we ship carefully and slowly” would also be a reasonable stance for a company to take. If the opposite of your value is something no sane business would ever choose, you haven't found a value. You've found something everyone already agrees with, which makes it useless as a filter.
If you want a longer list of real company examples across different industries and stages, we've put together a separate roundup: company core values examples. This piece is about the mechanics of getting values right; that one is about seeing them in the wild.
Do your values need to change as you grow?
Not usually in wording, but often in emphasis. A five-person startup's real value might be “move fast and fix it live”, because there's no other option. At fifty people, the same instinct without any brakes starts breaking things that matter, like customer trust or compliance. The words on the wall can stay the same. What changes is which one gets emphasised in a given quarter, and what “living” that value looks like at the new size. Revisit the emphasis, if not the wording, at each major stage change: first hire in a new function, first layer of management, first time a mistake actually costs you a customer.
Making values stick: the operational layer
Values fail for the same reason strategies fail: there's no cadence to check whether real decisions are actually matching what's on the wall. Writing the words is the easy ten per cent. The other ninety is operational: a recurring habit that surfaces the moment a decision contradicts a value, before it becomes a pattern nobody wants to name.
[Editor: insert diagram-core-values-operating-loop.png here, provided separately, showing the core values → OKRs → weekly check-in → decision loop]
This is exactly the gap that StratOps exists to close. If StratOps owns the operating rhythm that connects strategy to weekly execution, it's a natural, unglamorous place to also own the values check: does this quarter's goals reward the behaviour the company says it values, or just the number on the scoreboard?
Objectives and key results are one of the few tools built for exactly this kind of check. When you write a key result inside an OKR framework, you can ask directly whether hitting it requires compromising a value or reinforces it. An OKR process that never asks that question is just a KPI dashboard with better branding.
In practice that's a short, recurring question in the same rhythm as a normal goal check-in: not “how are we tracking against target”, but “did this week's decisions match what we said we'd do when nobody was watching”. Most teams have somewhere to answer the first question. Almost none have somewhere to answer the second.
Tools like Tability help make this a weekly habit rather than an annual offsite exercise: a shared place to track goals, run check-ins, and see, in writing, whether the initiatives people are actually running match the values the company claims to have.
Common mistakes to avoid
Most of the failure modes above show up together, not alone. Watch for: values lists longer than five, wording generic enough to fit any company, zero connection to hiring or performance decisions, an executive team that quietly exempts itself, and values that haven't been revisited since the company was a third of its current size.
Go back to that poster on the wall. The five words aren't the problem. The fact that nobody's checked whether this quarter's decisions actually matched them is.
Core values only become real once they're tested against an actual decision, on a cadence, in public. If you're building that cadence, whether it's your company's first set of values or its third rewrite, sign up and see for yourself or book 30 minutes with us and we'll help you figure out what this looks like for your team.
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