Company Values vs Culture: Why Values Don’t Build Culture

By Joe Newsum

For thirty years, company values have been treated as the foundation of organizational culture. Define them. Communicate them. Embed them. Culture follows.

Thirty years in, only 23% of employees strongly agree they can apply their company’s values to their daily work. That is not a failure of effort. Companies have poured enormous energy into this. It is a failure of mechanism.

How Company Values Became the Foundation of Organizational Culture

The values movement made sense when it started. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras argued in Built to Last in 1994 that the most enduring companies were guided by principles that outlasted any leader, any market cycle, any strategic pivot. The idea spread fast. By the late 1990s, values were standard organizational infrastructure.

The aspiration was genuine, and it still is. Values say who we want to be. They give people something to belong to. They tell candidates and customers what an organization stands for. At their best, they settle arguments.

The problem is not the aspiration. The problem is what happened next.

What Thirty Years of Values Programs Have Actually Produced

Thirty years of offsites, launches, training, and posters. Here is what came of it.

Read that first one again, because it is the whole argument in one number. MIT Sloan did not find that companies communicate their values badly. They found that emphasizing a value has no relationship to whether the organization actually lives it. You can put integrity at the top of the list, repeat it for a decade, and your people will rate you exactly where they would have rated you anyway.

So this is not a communication failure. The values are getting communicated. They are landing on a culture that was already there, and the culture is winning.

Can the people in your organization name your values right now?

The Most Common Company Values, And Why None of Them Tell Anyone What to Do

Pull up the core values of any Fortune 500 company. What you will find, almost without exception, is a list of nouns. Patrick Lencioni counted them for Harvard Business Review: 55% of Fortune 100 companies claimed integrity, 49% claimed customer satisfaction, 40% claimed teamwork. Scan the lists today and the same handful of words comes back around. If you want core values examples and how to write them, we cover that here. This page is about why the format falls short.

Not one of these words tells anyone what to do.

Integrity. What does that mean when a sales rep has to tell a customer something they do not want to hear? When a manager decides whether to report a missed number straight or frame it kindly? Integrity is doing the right thing when the wrong thing is easier and nobody would blame you for taking it. That is a fine definition. It still tells nobody what the right thing looks like here, on this decision, this afternoon.

Innovation. What does that mean when an engineer is choosing between the proven solution and the experimental one? When a product manager has to decide whether to kill a feature that is not working? Innovation tells you where you want to end up. It tells you nothing about what to do next.

Respect. What does that mean when someone disagrees with their boss in a room full of people? Now put a commitment next to it: we challenge each other’s ideas directly and treat each other with dignity in doing so. Suddenly everyone in the room knows what respect looks like here, including the person about to disagree. The noun gave them an aspiration. The commitment gave them permission.

Values are nouns. Culture is built through verbs.

Same word. Now it tells you what to do.

Nouns name destinations. Verbs describe actions. Give a thousand people the destination and no shared language for how to get there, and every one of them will fall back on whatever their own history has made normal. That is not a motivation problem. Nobody was ever told what to do.

What would your top five values tell someone to do on a hard Tuesday morning?

The Deeper Problem: Company Values Are Outputs of Culture, Not Inputs

Fix the noun problem and you still have the causality backwards.

Values are what a strong culture produces. They are the output, not the input. Culture decides what an organization actually values. Naming a value does not run that in reverse, which is why you can name one for ten years and change nothing.

Watch how integrity actually gets built. People see a leader take the harder right over the easier wrong. Then they see it again. Then they see it in a quarter where it costs the number. After a few years of that, integrity is simply what happens here, and someone eventually writes the word down. The word did not create the behavior. The behavior earned the word.

Trust works the same way. It is not built by putting trust on a poster. It is built when people can tell each other hard truths and receive them without damage. And leaders who protect harmony over honesty build the appearance of trust, while the culture quietly fills with everything nobody is saying.

Values name a destination. They do not show anyone how to get there.

What Actually Happens After a Values Launch

I have written values for companies. Carefully. Interviews across the organization, a leadership offsite, real argument over individual words, then weeks of work making each one specific enough to be worth believing. I was proud of some of them. I still think a few were good.

And I watched the same thing happen every time.

The launch generates real energy. People feel seen. Some leaders champion it hard. For a while you can hear the difference in meetings.

Then the work comes back. Leaders stop using the language. The values stop showing up in decisions. Nobody abandons anything, they just stop mentioning it, and the organizational culture that was already there absorbs the whole thing and closes over the top of it. One or two values survive in pockets where a leader genuinely believes in them. Rarely more. And the next time somebody schedules a values session, the eye rolls start a little earlier than they did last time.

Not once did I walk away thinking we had picked the wrong words.

Does any of this sound familiar?

So Do Company Values Matter?

Yes, when they are real. If your leaders reach for your values in hard decisions and your people can point at their own week and show you where the values live, you have something most organizations do not. Protect it.

And some companies have solved the problem inside the values format itself, by writing them as actions. Amazon’s leadership principles are mostly verbs: Dive Deep, Disagree and Commit, Invent and Simplify. Those work, and they work much better than a list of nouns. Which is the exception that proves the argument. What is doing the work there is the verb. They are behavioral commitments that happen to be filed under values.

So there is a three-way decision in front of most organizations, and it is worth making on purpose rather than by drift.

Double down. If your values are genuinely lived, protect them and invest in them. Never replace something that is working.

Rewrite them as behavior. Keep the label, turn every noun into an action, the way Amazon did. You lose nothing and you gain language people can use in the moment.

Replace them with commitments. Usually my recommendation. Commitments are built for the job values were never designed to do, and they arrive without three attempts worth of accumulated cynicism attached.

Whichever you choose, the mechanism underneath has to change. Values name the destination. What moves an organization toward it is shared language, behavioral enough that people know what to do when the pressure is on.

That is what the rest of this guide is about, starting with the mechanism. Read next: How Language Creates Culture.