Company values that change decisions (with examples)
A value nobody has ever paid a price for is a preference. The test is whether it has changed a decision that cost something.
Company values are the short list of behaviours an organisation is willing to pay a price for. They work when they settle a real choice — who is hired, who is promoted, which piece of work is refused — and they are decoration when they only appear on a wall. The test is not whether people can recite them; it is whether anyone can name a decision that went the more expensive way because of one.
Most companies have values they can recite and cannot use. They were chosen carefully, they are true of the founders, and they have never once settled an argument. That is not a communication failure. It is a design failure: the values were written as adjectives, and adjectives cannot be applied to a decision.
The work is turning each one into something a manager can point at when a real choice is in front of them. It starts by separating the three statements companies usually blur into one paragraph.
Mission, vision and values: what each one decides
Mission, vision and values are not three drafts of the same sentence. Each answers a different question, each is used by different people, and each fails in its own recognisable way.
| Element | The question it answers | What a usable sentence looks like | The common mistake |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mission | Why do we exist, and for whom? | We give small operators the back office they cannot afford to build themselves | Written so broadly that no customer, product or market is excluded by it |
| Vision | What is true in a few years if this works? | In five years, a company of our size runs this function without a dedicated team | Confused with a revenue target, so it expires the moment the plan is revised |
| Values | How do we choose when two good options conflict? | We move a date rather than ship something we would have to apologise for | Written as adjectives, so no decision can ever be tested against them |
| Behaviours | What does a person here actually do? | You raise a disagreement in the meeting where the decision is being made | Left implicit, so each manager applies a private interpretation of the value |
Mission and vision set direction, and a company can survive a mediocre version of either. Values are different. They are used every week, by people who were never in the room with the founders, and a vague version of them is actively expensive: it leaves each manager to decide privately what this company means by quality, or candour, or ownership. Values are the part of organisational culture that is written down and can therefore be argued with.
The test company values have to pass
Take any value on your wall and ask two questions. First: can I describe what someone doing this well actually did, in a specific situation? Second: has this value ever caused us to make the more expensive choice?
A value that has never cost anything has not been tested. It may still be true, but nobody in the company has evidence for it, and evidence is what people act on. "We value quality" is unfalsifiable until the day you slip a deadline for it, and then everybody knows what it means.
A value nobody has ever paid a price for is a preference. People can tell the difference, and they calibrate to the decisions rather than to the poster.
Write behaviours, not adjectives
The translation layer between a value and a decision is a small set of observable behaviours: things you could see someone do, or fail to do, and agree on afterwards.
| Value | Unusable version | Observable behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | We take ownership of our work | When something in your scope goes wrong, you say so before you are asked, with what you are doing about it |
| Directness | We communicate openly and honestly | You raise a disagreement in the meeting where the decision is being made, not afterwards |
| Craft | We care deeply about quality | You will move a date to avoid shipping something you would have to apologise for |
Write each behaviour twice: what it looks like when it is happening, and what it looks like when it is not. The second half is the one that does the work, because it is what a manager needs in the conversation they have been avoiding.
Examples of values translated into behaviour
Six more, in the form that makes a value usable. These are generic patterns rather than any company statement, and the third column is the one that matters: a value that cannot name a decision it changes is still an adjective with better formatting.
| Value | Observable behaviour | The decision it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Customer closeness | You have spoken to a customer about the problem before you commit to building for it | A roadmap item with no customer conversation behind it is not scheduled, however confident the room is |
| Speed on reversible calls | You take a decision you could undo, and tell people afterwards rather than asking first | A manager who escalated a reversible decision is corrected for it, not thanked for being careful |
| Fairness | You apply the same standard to the person you like and the person you find difficult | A strong performer with a pattern of dismissive behaviour goes through the same process as anyone else |
| Follow-through | When you cannot meet a commitment you renegotiate it before the date, not after it | A team that keeps missing dates loses scope rather than quietly borrowing time from the next quarter |
| Frugality | You justify a recurring cost the way you would justify a hire | A renewal is cancelled even though cancelling it is more work than signing it again |
| Saying when you were wrong | You describe your own mistake in the forum where it had consequences | A review names what was decided and by whom, and nobody is punished for the naming |
These are patterns, not a menu. Six values that describe your company are worth more than sixteen borrowed from companies whose constraints you do not share, and the exercise is only finished when someone in the leadership team can point at a decision each one has already changed.
Wire the behaviours into decisions
This is where culture work usually stops and where it starts mattering. A behaviour that appears nowhere except in an onboarding deck will be gone within a year. A behaviour that appears in the assessment a manager has to complete will not.
There are four places to connect them, in rough order of leverage:
- Promotion. The clearest signal a company sends. If someone is promoted whose behaviour contradicts a stated value, that value is now understood to be optional. This is the decision people watch most closely and discuss most privately.
- Performance assessment. Behaviours sit alongside outcomes in the performance framework, with the same evidence standard. If they cannot be evidenced, they should not be in the framework.
- Hiring. Each behaviour gets a question and a way of scoring the answer. Otherwise "culture fit" becomes a word for whether the interviewer enjoyed the conversation.
- Recognition. What gets mentioned publicly teaches faster than what gets written in a policy, and it costs nothing.
Name the tensions
Real values conflict. Speed and craft conflict. Directness and kindness conflict. Autonomy and consistency conflict. A values statement that pretends otherwise is not describing a culture, it is describing a wish, and people learn to distrust it the first time they have to choose.
The useful move is to state the tension and say how you resolve it. "We prefer speed, except where a mistake would reach a customer" is a sentence a manager can act on at four in the afternoon. "We value both speed and quality" is not.
What this looks like when it has worked
You know the translation has landed when the values start appearing in ordinary sentences without ceremony: in a hiring debrief, in a promotion discussion, in someone declining a piece of work. Nobody quotes them. They are just the shape of the argument.
You also know it when a value gets removed. A company that has genuinely examined its values usually finds one it does not act on, and deleting it is more honest than keeping it. Five values you enforce beat eight you admire.
This is the substance of Culture & Values work: not a new statement, but the connection between the statement you already have and the decisions you already make.
Co-founder — People & Management
Ana Reis
Builds the People foundations of growing companies — and stays with them until they work day to day.
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