The Value of Values – Part 1
Written by Camille Rabier, Consultant at 21st Century, this article forms part of a three-part series exploring the role of values in shaping organisational culture, how they create coherence, and how misalignment can gradually erode it. This first piece focuses on values as the foundation of culture.
The reward function is often treated as a primary lever for talent attraction, retention, and performance, but culture may be equally, and sometimes more, influential in shaping these outcomes.
While remuneration may attract, it does not define how people grow, the fulfilment they derive from work, or whether their experience sustains their engagement. Over time, employees observe and come to understand how an organisation really operates: what behaviours are rewarded, what compromises are accepted, and whether its values hold under pressure. Values do not shape organisations because they are stated, but because they are lived. Too often, there is a gap between what organisations say they value and what they actually do.
Walk into almost any corporate lobby and you will find the familiar list: “collaboration, integrity, excellence, honesty, innovation, trust”. Values, however, are not meant to decorate walls; they are meant to guide decisions internally. They are the invisible rules that shape culture and behaviour when leadership is not in the room.
Their true purpose and weight become apparent when decisions involve competing priorities: when convenience, profit, speed or personal interest compete with what the organisation claims to stand for.
If a value never requires sacrifice, it is not functioning as intended; it has become corporate wallpaper.
Permission to Play Values
One of the most common mistakes organisations make when setting values is confusing baseline expectations with strategic values. Borrowing from Patrick Lencioni’s distinction between baseline and strategic values, many of the values listed in corporate statements are not differentiating values at all, but what might be called Permission to Play values: the bare minimum required to function as humans in society and, therefore, in any professional environment. Integrity, honesty, or respect, for example, fall into that category.
If an organisation must actively remind employees not to lie, it may have not only a hiring problem, but also a leadership, control, or incentive problem. Honesty, in that sense, is not a strategic value but a prerequisite.
True strategic values do something different. They define how an organisation intends to be different and win. They guide difficult decisions, differentiate the organisation from its competitors and shape the behaviours that are consistently reinforced. These values are felt and need not be written on the wall to be understood and enacted.
The Opposite Test
To determine whether a value is truly strategic, apply the opposite test. If the opposite could be pursued as a legitimate strategy by another organisation, the value passes the test and is likely to be strategic:
For example:
- Honesty → Fails.
Dishonesty would not represent a sustainable strategy for any organisation. Honesty is therefore a baseline requirement, not a differentiating strategic value. - Speed → Passes.
An organisation may choose speed as a strategic value, prioritising rapid execution even when it increases the risk of mistakes. Another organisation could choose to prioritise precision instead, placing accuracy ahead of speed. Both possible opposites of speed pass the test because they represent legitimate strategies.
When an organisation has truly strategic values, they reduce ambiguity about how decisions should be made and align decision-making across leadership, management, and employees, both in daily operations and under pressure.
The True Cost of Values
The true measure of a value is not in its sentiment, but in its cost. A value becomes real the moment a leader accepts a trade-off to enact it. If living by a value never creates financial, strategic, or reputational tension, then it is not a value, but simply a preference.
Real values reveal themselves when the easier option is available but consciously rejected. When choosing the value comes at no cost, it is not a test of principle; it is just convenience.
Cultural Hygiene
Like any organisational system, values require ongoing maintenance and supervision.
- Firstly, when organisations declare too many values, employees struggle to prioritise them in real situations. A smaller set of clearly defined core principles – often no more than three or four – can improve decision-making and strengthen cultural coherence.
- Secondly, in practice, values can occasionally conflict (for example, speed versus quality). As such, when organisations clarify which value takes precedence, employees will act with confidence rather than hesitation in such situations.
- Finally, organisations tend to accumulate symbolic values over time: those that exist in language (or intention), but not in behaviour. Periodically reviewing and removing these is a sign of cultural maturity and is essential to keeping the remaining values genuinely operational, credible, and strategic.
The Real Role of Values
Most organisations do not struggle with values because they choose the wrong words. They struggle because they misunderstand what values are meant to do.
Effective organisational values should be:
- Inward facing: they operate as internal decision frameworks rather than marketing messages for clients. They are designed to guide behaviour inside the organisation, not signal virtue externally.
- Strategic: they should encourage behaviours that contribute directly to organisational success and differentiate how the organisation competes. They clarify how the organisation chooses to win, especially when trade-offs are required.
- Operational: they must be clear enough to guide real decisions and behaviours, rather than remaining abstract ideals. Employees should be able to apply them in everyday situations without needing interpretation or translation.
- Reinforced through real consequences: values become credible only when they are embedded in processes such as hiring, promotions, recognition, and incentives. When leadership decisions consistently reinforce them, values shift from statements to actual systems. Without reinforcement, values remain aspirational rather than actionable.
- Felt: true values are not just stated; they are experienced daily. They shape how work feels, how decisions are made and how people interact within the organisation, often in different ways depending on context. Employees recognise them not by what is written, but by what consistently happens.
- Consistent in principle, contextual in application: they align decision-making without standardising behaviour, enabling consistent application across different contexts. They provide a shared logic for decisions, while allowing flexibility in how those decisions are expressed.
When values are functioning effectively, they provide a consistent framework for decision-making across the organisation and create clarity in how decisions are made.
Strong values do not seek to create uniform behaviour; they create consistency in decision-making.
People may express the same value differently and still be fully aligned, because alignment sits in the decision, not the expression. Values anchor decisions, not personalities.
This consistency reduces ambiguity, strengthens coordination across teams, and allows the organisation to operate as a coherent system, even as behaviours vary across contexts.
Conclusion
When strategic values are consistently reinforced internally, they encourage behaviours associated with strong organisational citizenship: discretionary effort, collaboration, and the willingness to go beyond formal role requirements. Employees contribute not simply because they are required to, but because they understand how decisions are made, feel aligned with the organisation’s direction and experience a coherent culture.
This alignment can support stronger performance because employees feel they can contribute to and influence the organisation itself. Values move beyond corporate wallpaper to become something lived: visible in actions, embedded in decisions, and felt in the day-to-day experience of work. It is something you sense when you arrive, and something that stays with you when you leave.
However, when misalignment between stated values and lived behaviours emerges, consistency in decision-making begins to erode and culture begins to fragment. This fragmentation does not happen all at once. It emerges gradually as values lose their clarity and consistency across the organisation.
