Most organisations have values.
They’re usually written somewhere prominent. The website. The office wall. The induction slide deck.
Integrity. Respect. Collaboration. Excellence.
If you read enough of them, you start to notice something slightly amusing. Almost every organisation seems to pick roughly the same ones.
If every company believes in the same values, why do they behave so differently?
The answer, of course, is that values aren’t really tested when things are going smoothly. The real test comes when behaviour collides with them.
When someone senior behaves in a way that clearly contradicts what’s written on the wall. Or when a difficult decision needs to be made and the values suddenly feel inconvenient.
Those are the moments everyone in the organisation quietly watches. Because what happens next tells you something important. Not what the values say. But what they actually mean.
Why do organisations have values at all?
At their best, they’re supposed to act as a kind of decision filter. When the rulebook runs out, values are meant to guide behaviour. How do we treat people? How do we make difficult decisions? What behaviour will we tolerate, and what will we challenge?
In theory, they reduce ambiguity. They help people make consistent decisions even when nobody senior is watching.
That’s the ideal version. And occasionally you see organisations where it genuinely works.
But more often, something slightly different happens. Values become language. Well-intentioned language. But they drift into the category of things organisations say about themselves, rather than things that genuinely constrain behaviour.
Partly because the words themselves are safe. Nobody objects to integrity or respect or excellence. You’re unlikely to see a company choose values like “occasional chaos” or “reasonable levels of internal politics.” Although in fairness, that might be closer to reality.
The real test
The wording isn’t where it gets interesting. It’s what happens when someone important violates them.
Someone delivers excellent results. Commercially valuable. Technically brilliant. But behaviourally, not quite aligned.
Now the organisation has a decision to make. Do the values apply here? Or are they more aspirational guidance?
People watch these moments very carefully. Because they reveal something deeper than the values themselves. They reveal the incentives. What leadership is actually prepared to enforce. And what they’re prepared to quietly overlook.
This usually isn’t hypocrisy. It’s trade-offs. Revenue. Deadlines. Shareholders. Customers. Values sit inside that system. And occasionally they collide with it.
Sometimes it’s not even that clear-cut. People interpret the same word differently. “Respect” means psychological safety to one person and direct honesty to another. Both believe they’re living the value. Both experience the situation very differently. And when leadership makes a call that exposes that ambiguity, it can feel like betrayal. Even when nobody’s changed the rules.
Where the culture actually lives
In HR you tend to see these moments quite clearly. The exact point where the stated values meet the incentives of the organisation. And those moments are rarely simple.
Because values are easy to agree with in principle. Living them usually involves a cost. Challenging a high performer. Making an unpopular call. Saying no to behaviour that delivers results but damages the culture.
Employees rarely expect organisations to be perfect. People are generally quite realistic about how messy work can be. What they care about is consistency. If the organisation says something matters, does it still matter when the situation gets difficult? And if a compromise is made, is it acknowledged honestly? Or does the language stay the same while the behaviour quietly changes?
That’s usually where cynicism begins. Not because people expect perfection. But because they notice the gap.
What values are really for
Not marketing. Not posters on the wall.
At their best, values serve as a cultural boundary. They tell people: this is how we behave here. And just as importantly: this is behaviour we’re not comfortable with.
For that to work, leadership has to be willing to enforce those boundaries occasionally. Even when it’s inconvenient. Even when there’s a cost. Because the moment values become optional, people notice. And once people stop believing them, it’s very hard to rebuild that credibility.
In the end, organisations don’t really live their values. Leaders do. And everyone else watches what happens when those values meet reality.
If there’s a gap between what your organisation says it stands for and how it actually behaves, that’s usually a leadership and culture problem, not a comms problem. I can help you work out what’s really going on and what to do about it.