Two ways to define your organisation’s values, and why that is the easy part.
New leadership, a merger, a strategy reset or a survey that says people are unsure what the organisation stands for: the request to “define our values” usually follows one of these.
On this page
Two good routes to a set of values, an exercise for each, and what embedding them takes.
Values and culture are not the same thing
Values are deeply held beliefs about what matters and how to behave. Culture is, in the simplest phrase, how we do things around here. The two meet in behaviour: how people actually live a set of values, day to day, is what creates or reshapes the culture. That is why a values exercise is worth doing, and why it disappoints when it ends at a list of words.
It is also not a scientific exercise. There is no correct set of values for an organisation. The test is whether the leadership believes they will make the organisation successful, and whether people will recognise them and live them every day.
Start by reading the culture you have
Before anyone writes a value, look at what your engagement or culture survey already tells you. You will usually find your culture is clearly visible in it – and that each real strength has a shadow. Naming both gives the values work something concrete to aim at: which strengths to keep, which shadows to deal with.
| Example strength | Its dark side | Question to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Strong team loyalty | “Us and them” between functions; little support across boundaries | Do teams help each other, or only themselves? |
| Focus on delivering the day job | Doing crowds out managing performance; people unsure how they are measured | Do people know what good looks like, and how they are doing? |
| Customer first | Saying yes to everything; workload and well-being suffer | What do we say no to, and who decides? |
| Friendly and informal | Difficult conversations avoided; underperformance tolerated | When did someone last get honest feedback? |
| Fast and entrepreneurial | Inconsistency and rework; new joiners left to work it out | Which few things must always be done the same way? |
Illustrative examples, not survey data.
If you have been through a merger, run the same reading for each heritage organisation. It tells you whether combining the cultures is a blend or a chasm, and that should shape everything that follows.
Two routes
Option A: top-down
The executive team debates, drafts and agrees the core values, then, ideally, tests them with a wider group of senior managers and high-potential people before finalising the wording.
- Typical effort: a facilitated half day to draft, another half day to validate.
- Best when speed matters, after a merger, or when the values must carry a strategic shift.
- Watch for: values that describe the leadership’s aspiration rather than anything staff recognise.
Option B: bottom-up
Volunteers from every function and level draft the values. The executive team validates them, having agreed in advance that its role is limited to final refinements.
- Typical effort: a facilitated half or full day to draft, a half day with the executive to finalise.
- Best when ownership and credibility matter most; it creates a ready-made group of values champions.
- Watch for: an executive team that agrees to the principle and then rewrites the result. That does more damage than not asking.
Exercise for the top-down route: the Aliens
Tell the group that aliens have arrived and want to work in your organisation. In small groups, write the top five tips you would give them to survive and succeed here. Not the official version: the real one. Then ask each group what its list says about the values the organisation actually lives, as opposed to the ones on the wall.
Run it with different functional heads and compare the lists; what is consistent across all of them is your current shared culture, and what differs is where the work is. It is quick, it is usually funny, and it surfaces unwritten rules that a straight discussion of values never reaches. Eight team exercises that get people talking honestly sets out this exercise and World Café step by step, with debrief questions.
Exercise for the bottom-up route: World Café
Set up tables of four to six, each with a host and paper to write on. Each round, every table discusses one question for twenty to thirty minutes; then everyone except the host moves to a new table, and the host briefs the newcomers on what the last group said so that each conversation builds on the one before. It works with very large groups – a couple of hundred people is manageable with good facilitation – and it creates a shared sense that the values are “ours”. Questions that work well, one per round:
- What is our culture like at its best?
- What is it like at its worst?
- Going forward, what do we need to take with us, leave behind, and introduce?
- Given all that, how would we describe our core values?
Embedding: the part that matters
Turn each value into behaviour
For every value, write three or four things it looks like in practice and two or three things it does not. “Integrity” means nothing until someone says what a person with integrity does when a deadline and a standard collide.
Put the values where decisions are made
Recruitment (interview questions that test them – see structured interviewing), onboarding, objectives and appraisal, promotion criteria, recognition schemes and 360 feedback. If a value appears in none of these, it is optional.
Leaders go first, out loud
People watch what leaders do when a value is inconvenient. A leader who explains a decision by reference to the values, especially one that cost something, does more than any launch.
Measure whether they are lived, by team
Add questions to your survey on whether people see the values in how decisions are made and how colleagues behave, and break the results down by team. The gap between teams is where to act; the guide to turning survey results into action covers how.
Keep the list short
A handful of values that people can remember beats a long list nobody can recite. And launch them with conversations in teams about what they mean here, not with posters.
Drawn from great{with}talent’s culture and values work with executive teams, including an organisation combining two cultures after a merger; organisations are anonymised. The World Café method was developed by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs. To read your culture from your own data, see WinningFormula, and why your engagement survey keeps saying the same thing.
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