Walk into almost any growing company and you will find the values somewhere on display. On the wall by the lifts. On the back of the lanyard. On slide three of the induction deck. Words like integrity, passion, excellence and teamwork, printed nicely and laminated so they last.
Now ask a few people what those values mean for how they work on a Tuesday afternoon. Watch them hesitate. Most can name one or two. Very few can tell you what they do differently because of them.
That gap between the wall and the working day is the laminated values problem. It grows with the company.
Why values stop working as you grow
When a company is 20 people, nobody needs the values written down. Everyone can see how the founders behave, and the culture spreads by example.
Somewhere between 50 and 500 people that stops being enough. New starters arrive faster than anyone can show them how things are done. Managers get promoted who never worked closely with the founders. The values become the only description of the culture most people ever get.
At that point a word like "integrity" has a lot of work to do, and it cannot do it. Everyone agrees with it. Everyone reads it slightly differently.
A manager cannot coach it. A recruiter cannot test for it. And a new starter cannot use it to work out whether to raise a problem in a meeting or quietly fix it themselves.
A value is a word. A behaviour is something you can see.
The fix is to translate each value into a small number of behaviours. Things a person can be seen doing, or failing to do, in a specific situation.
Values inspire the people who already believe them. Behaviours guide the people who have just arrived and have no other way of knowing how things are done here.
That translation earns its keep twice over.
You can recruit for a behaviour. A well-designed interview question tests whether someone shares your standards before you hire them.
And you can manage a behaviour. A manager can coach "share bad news within 24 hours". Nobody has ever managed to coach "integrity".
Company values examples, turned into behaviours
Here are some common values alongside what they look like written as behaviours. Use them as a starting point and rewrite them in your own words. The version your people write themselves will always land better than a borrowed one.
One team: We share bad news within 24 hours, upwards first.
Customer obsessed: Every leader spends time with a real customer every month.
Trust: We challenge the idea in the room, and back the decision outside it.
Humble: Leaders say "I got that wrong" out loud, in front of their teams.
Curious: We ask one more question before offering an answer in a meeting.
Reliable: If we cannot hit a deadline, we say so as soon as we know, with a new date.
Frank: We give feedback to the person directly, within the week, before we mention it to anyone else.
Ownership: Whoever spots a problem owns it until they have handed it to someone who agrees to take it.
What this looks like in real companies
Our founder Terry Russell supported Trevor Mather when he took over as CEO of Auto Trader. The work was to develop his executive team ahead of the company's 2015 stock market listing.
Most of it was about identity. Who are we as a business? What do we stand for? How will we be for each other, our customers and our stakeholders? And therefore, how will we lead together?
The team committed to five words they could hold each other to through the listing and beyond: Determined, Curious, Humble, Reliable and Inspirational. Trevor was particularly keen that humility was in there. The value only meant something because the leadership team agreed how they would live it with each other first.
At Just Eat, Terry coached the then CEO, Dave, as the business grew from a scrappy start-up into a company heading for a stock market listing. The early culture ran on Dave's infectious energy and a proudly irreverent spirit.
As the business expanded internationally, Dave took the part of his leadership that mattered most to him and turned it into a value: frankness. Then he set about embedding it across the organisation.
Just as importantly, he changed his own behaviour to match the company Just Eat was becoming. Months after their coaching had finished, Terry walked past Dave's glass office and found him sitting quietly with his eyes closed. His PA explained that he now built reflection time into every week. Everyone in that office could see it, which did more for the culture than any poster could.
Both stories share the same lesson. The values worked because the people at the top agreed what they looked like in practice, and then visibly lived them.
How to turn a value into a behaviour
1. Start with real moments. Ask your team to describe a time recently when someone did something that made them proud to work here. Then a time when something happened that felt wrong. The behaviours you want are hiding in those stories.
2. Write each behaviour so an outsider could spot it. If a visitor sat in your meetings for a week, could they tell whether people were doing it? If not, it needs to be more specific.
3. Keep the set small. Five or six values with two or three behaviours each is plenty. Any more and nobody will remember them.
4. Write them with the people who will live them. A set handed down from a leadership away-day arrives already dead. Co-created behaviours are the ones people defend.
5. Let the leaders go first. The fastest way to show a behaviour matters is for the most senior people to be seen doing it, and to be held to it when they slip.
6. Build them into the moments that matter. Hiring, onboarding, one-to-ones, promotions and performance conversations are where behaviours either become real or quietly disappear.
Take the values off the wall
There is nothing wrong with putting your values on the wall. The problem starts when the wall is the only place they live.
The companies that keep their culture as they grow are the ones where anybody, from the newest starter to the chair, can tell you what the values look like on a normal working day. And can point to someone who did it this week.
If you are growing somewhere between 50 and 500 people and want to go further, our free handbook, Culture at 50 vs. Culture at 500, covers where culture starts to strain as you scale and what the companies that keep theirs do differently.
