What are company values and how to create your own
I go into businesses all the time and ask the person in charge, the founder, the CEO, whoever, “What are your values?” And I cannot tell you how often they can’t answer. Or they go and find the poster. Or they dig out the handbook and read it back to me like it’s news to them too.
It’s rubbish. That poster is almost never your real values. It’s whatever a branding exercise decided you should have five years ago. Your actual values are something else entirely, and most businesses have never once stopped to find them.
What company values actually are
Values are what’s inside: people’s belief systems, what genuinely matters to them. Not what’s laminated on a wall. So I’ve stopped asking people “what are your values?” altogether, because it never gets me anywhere useful. Instead I ask two questions: “What does it feel like to work here?” and “What makes a great team member?”
Whatever comes out of someone’s mouth when you ask those, that’s your values. If they say “a good fit,” don’t let them off the hook. Ask what it is about the fit. That’s where the real answer’s hiding.
And ask unplanned. Don’t tell your team in advance you’re going to do this exercise, because then you get the answer they think you want, not the true one.
Why the gap between what you say and what you do will cost you
Here’s what actually does the damage: saying one thing and living another. A business tells people they care about work-life balance, then expects emails answered at midnight. That gap is exactly where trust goes to die. Nobody has to say it out loud; people just quietly stop believing you.
It’s also usually where hiring goes wrong. Most interviews test one thing: can this person do the job. Then, six months later, someone fails probation and it’s never actually a skills problem. It’s “not a good fit,” “not a team player,” “didn’t communicate well,” things nobody thought to test for, because the interview never went anywhere near values or behaviours in the first place.
How to actually go and find yours
Ask the two questions, unplanned. “What does it feel like to work here?” and “What makes a great team member?” Put them to a handful of your team separately, not just to yourself as the founder. You’ll get a very different, much more honest answer than the one on your website.
Then listen for the patterns, not the polish. You want the words that keep coming up between different people, not the ones that would look good on a slide.
Turn each one into a behaviour, because a word on its own is useless. “Team player” means nothing until you define it, genuinely nothing. I’ve watched a salesperson insist they’re a team player because they carry the whole team’s numbers, while someone else on the same team thinks being a team player means staying late every night to cover everyone else’s slack. Two completely different definitions, both sincerely held, and nobody’s actually wrong because nobody ever told them what it meant. Spell it out. What does good look like, specifically, for this role, in this business?
Test it against something that actually costs you. I had someone on my team once who got hit by a car on her way into work, and nearly lost her leg. Technically she was only entitled to statutory sick pay. We paid her in full for two months and tapered her back in after that, and she’s still with the business five years later. None of that was in any policy. It matched a value I hold about doing the right thing over doing things right, but that value only means something because I was willing to let it cost me something. If your value evaporates the second it’s inconvenient, it was never really a value.
And decide what you won’t tolerate, because that’s the other half of the job. Think about a punnet of strawberries: drop one furry one in there, and given enough time it takes the rest with it. One person who’s a nightmare to work with, who throws their weight around or makes everyone else’s life harder, will cost you your best people first, because they’re the ones with the options to leave. So yes, “don’t be a dick” is a genuinely legitimate company value.
I’ve stopped working with exactly one client this year for exactly that reason.
Once you’ve actually got them, use them for something
Values sitting in a document nobody opens aren’t worth the laminating. Put them in the job advert. Ask about them at interview, properly, alongside the technical questions. Keep referring back to them through the whole probation period, not just at the final review when it’s too late to fix anything.
Because here’s the alternative: you hire a salesperson who smashes every target in probation. Brilliant numbers. But if they’d drive over a teammate to hit that number, is that actually who you want? Getting values right at the start is what tells you the answer to that, not the numbers alone.
Not sure what your team would say if you asked them “what makes a great team member here?” That’s usually where the real work starts. Get in touch if you want help finding out.