Your Core Values Aren’t Wall Art: Intentionally Creating Your Culture
There’s a reason culture feels easy when you’re small. As the founder, the company revolves around you. You have a hand in every hire, you’re in all the meetings and ultimately, the decisions all flow through you. Your company is you, and so the culture is also you.
Unfortunately, you don’t scale. You can’t be in every meeting, make every decision and have a hand in every hire if you want to grow. And without intention, your culture will not be maintained as the company expands.
If your values exist only in your head (or even as a bunch of nouns on your website), your culture will change as you grow.
The good news is that, with intentional work, it can and you are never too “small” to do that work (even if you are a solopreneur).
Naming Your Values Is the Beginning, Not the End
Most founders and leaders know they should have core values. So they do the work — they get the team together, they brainstorm, they land on words that feel right. Integrity. Innovation. Excellence. Respect. They put them on the website, in job ads, maybe on a poster in the office and they call it a win. Check the box.
Then they get trapped by working in the businesses and don’t take the next important steps.
What they don’t realize, though, is that identifying your values is step one. The real work is defining them and embedding them, which most organizations never do.
We all have different lenses, backgrounds and opinions on what these words mean which creates inconsistency (not what you are looking for). Your core values need to drive decisions and you do not want varying interpretations.
Take “Excellence” as a value. Sounds clear, right? But one manager might interpret that as — if you’re not putting in extra hours, you’re not being excellent. Meanwhile, the founder’s intention was about delivering an outstanding experience for the client. Same word, but completely different expectations. If no one is clear, then the value doesn’t have the strength it needs as a guiding principle.
This is why defining your values (creating a list of observable behaviours) matters so much. My own values include Serve Others and Prioritize Family, and on the surface those can conflict. If someone needs me, do I show up or do I protect my family time? The answer lives in how I’ve defined Serve Others: I show up when I can genuinely add value and when I have the capacity to do so. Serving others isn’t a blank cheque or obligation at all costs. That definition is what makes the value workable, and gives me the guidelines for how to apply it to decisions without guilt (or a sense of obligation).
Without that clarity, you’re leaving interpretation up to everyone else. And you’ll get too many variations.
Values Have to Be Lived — Not Just Listed
Gino Wickman, in his work on EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System), puts it simply: you hire, fire, reward, recognize, and promote based on your values. You need to incorporate them into your practices to make sure they are lived.
Here’s how this would looks like in practice.
Hiring— your interview process should be testing for values fit, not just skills and experience. Skills can be taught. Values alignment is a lot harder to develop after someone’s already on your team. Hiring someone who is not a values fit creates culture challenges.
Rewarding and recognizing — when you acknowledge someone’s work, connect it back to a value by name. Not just “great job on that project” but “the way you handled that client situation is exactly what we mean by Integrity.” When people see (and hear) core values reflected in these moments, the value become real.
Promoting — your next leaders should be the people who best embody your values, not just your top performers. High performance and low values alignment is a dangerous combination (and unfortunately, one that is often ignored).
Firing — if someone consistently acts against your values and there are no consequences, you’ve made a very loud statement about what your values are actually worth.
Start at the Door
The best place to start living your values is before someone even joins your team. Your hiring process is your first filter.
Most interview questions focus on experience and competencies — which makes sense, but it leaves values fit to chance, or gut feeling (and we often ignore that gut feeling when it nags us). This is how non-culture fit people slip through.
When you build interview questions tied to your values, you create a consistent, repeatable way to assess fit. If one of your values is Accountability, you might ask: Tell me about a time you made a mistake at work. What happened, and what did you do about it? A strong answer owns the mistake, explains what they learned, and shows what changed. A red flag is someone who can’t think of a mistake, or spends the answer explaining why it wasn’t really their fault. When you are listening for examples and non examples of accountability, you listen to their answer through a different lens.
You will be surprised what candidates will tell you if you ask the right questions and then really listen to what they are saying. Often, candidates are trying to give you the “right” answer (the one they’ve practiced) but they haven’t practiced the answer through the lens of your core values (which is good news for you).
When Values Get Ignored
When leadership is inconsistent in how they apply values, culture falls apart. People recognize that they aren’t as important and maybe they don’t apply to everyone.
This often happens with employees who deliver results, but ignore core values. It’s the top salesperson who kills it with closed deals, but they’ve steamrolled your values in the process. Managers often think they can’t possibly lose the employee because the results are too important, but ultimately, the culture takes a hit as colleagues recognize values are just words (and some of them actually leave the organization in search for one that is in alignment with their values).
The damage to trust, engagement, and retention almost always outweighs whatever that person was delivering.
A Quick Gut Check
Take a moment to reflect on these questions:
Can your team tell you what your values mean — in behaviours, not just words? If you asked five people, would you get five different answers?
When did you last make a decision — a hire, a promotion, a tough call — and explicitly connect it back to your values?
If your team is being honest with you, do they see your values in how leadership actually operates day to day?
If any of those made you pause, that’s useful information.
Living your core values (and creating the culture you desire) is not a one off project. It’s ongoing and requires commitment from everyone. Culture is always being created; the question is if you’re the one creating it.
What's Next:
Read these blog posts:
Listen to these Radio Show Episodes:
Learn more about EOS
Sign up for the free Leadership Toolbox
Need help defining your core values or embedding them into how your organization operates? Reach out — I'd love to help.
