Most company values end up on the wall and nowhere else.
You’ve probably seen them. Laminated posters in the office, a slide in the onboarding deck, something mentioned at the Christmas party. They sound right: integrity, collaboration, innovation. But when a difficult decision comes down, or a talented person leaves, or a manager bends the rules because it’s convenient, those values don’t seem to matter much.
The frustrating part is that values actually do matter. They shape culture. They influence who stays and who leaves. They determine how decisions get made when there’s no one in the room to watch. But most companies get them wrong, and most founders don’t realise it until the problem is already there.
The Dangerous Middle
Here’s something I’ve noticed across years of working with growing businesses: culture management is hardest right where you are now, probably somewhere between 20 and 50 people.
When you’re five people, culture isn’t something you build. You manage it directly. You’re in the room. You know how people work, what matters to them, what the unspoken rules are. Culture is just what happens when you’re together.
When you’re 500 people, culture is a system. You’ve got processes, training, formal performance reviews, documented policies. Culture happens through structure.
But at 20 to 50 people, you’re in the dangerous middle. You’re past the point where you can manage culture by presence alone, but you haven’t built the systems yet. Without values that actually work, culture starts to drift without anyone noticing. New people interpret things differently. Some managers hire their own version of the team. Standards slip.
This is when values become critical. Not as a poster, but as a decision-making tool.
The Difference Between Lived Values and Wallpaper
A lived value is specific enough that it actually changes how you behave. It’s distinctive enough that a competitor couldn’t claim it. It’s honest enough to admit what you’re not.
Here’s an example. A fintech company I worked with had “integrity” as a core value. Fair enough. But that’s on about 10,000 company websites. When I asked what it meant, different leaders said different things. To one person it meant legal compliance. To another it meant always telling clients the truth even if it hurt. To a third it meant paying people fairly.
They rewrote it: “We tell clients hard things they need to hear, even when it costs us a deal.” That’s specific. You can actually use that to make a decision. If you’re tempted to oversell a feature to close a sale, that value tells you no.
The best values I’ve seen have this texture to them. They’re rooted in experience, not platitude. They’re things the founder genuinely cares about, not things that sound good.
Why Imposed Values Fall Flat
Most founders worry that if they don’t set the values themselves, they’ll get some horrible corporate nonsense. So they sit alone, write some values, and announce them. Then they’re disappointed when no one actually lives them.
The problem isn’t that the founder should have less control. The problem is that values written in isolation don’t feel real to other people.
This doesn’t mean doing it by committee. That’s usually worse. Fifty people debating values usually produces bland consensus that means nothing. What actually works is involvement without abdicating.
You set the direction. You’re clear about what matters to you. But you also have real conversations with people who actually do the work about what those values look like in practice. A founder who cares about “speed” should ask the ops person what that feels like on the ground. Should ask the engineer whether it means shipping fast or failing fast or learning fast. These conversations do two things. They make the value more grounded and true. And they make it feel like people had a voice.
The founder still decides. But they decide from a place of understanding.
Where Values Show Up
Once you’ve got values that actually work, they need to appear everywhere. Not on a poster. In the system.
Hiring is the first place. Most companies don’t have a values interview stage. They should. Not a weird question designed to trick someone. Just a genuine conversation about how they work, what they care about, how they handle a conflict. Does this person’s way of operating align with what you’re trying to build?
This filters better than a technical screen, honestly. Bad hire on culture is worse than a bad hire on skills. Skills are easier to train.
Performance reviews are the second place. Instead of generic competency grading, use values-based feedback. “You showed collaboration when you unblocked the product team without waiting for permission.” “You didn’t push back when you disagreed with the decision, and that’s not how we work. We need you to voice it.” Make the values concrete and behavioural.
And then the everyday: the decisions about whether someone works from home, whether you push back on a difficult client, whether you defend someone who made a good-faith mistake. Those moments are where values actually get tested.
The Leadership Test
Here’s where most companies fail completely: values applied to junior staff but not to senior leadership.
If a founder is willing to dodge a difficult conversation but they’ve written “directness” as a value, everyone’s watching. If a manager plays politics but collaboration is supposedly core, the team knows it. Nothing kills a value faster than seeing the person at the top ignore it when it’s inconvenient.
This is the part that’s actually hard. Values are only real if you’re willing to live them when it costs something.
The Warning Signs
If you’ve been growing for a while, here’s what culture drift looks like. Good people start leaving. You lose someone solid and think it was about salary. But when you talk to them, it’s often about culture. They don’t feel like their values fit anymore.
New hires don’t make it through probation. You’re hiring the right skills but something feels off. There’s a mismatch between who you are and who you’re bringing in.
There’s a gap between what leaders say and what actually happens. Widening. You say you want collaboration but you reward individual achievement. You say you value learning but you don’t protect time for it.
When this starts showing up, that’s the moment to do something about it.
The Data
This isn’t just theory. Deloitte found that 94% of executives and 88% of employees think a distinct workplace culture is important to business success. McKinsey found that companies with strong cultures have roughly three times the total returns to shareholders compared to weak-culture peers. These aren’t small effects.
The research is pretty clear: companies where people can articulate what the business actually values, where they see that those values are lived, and where they feel aligned to them, are just better businesses. People stay longer. They move faster. Decision-making is cleaner. There’s less politics.
Moving Forward
If you’ve grown past 10 people and you feel like culture is drifting, it’s worth a proper conversation about what actually matters. Not a weekend offsite with post-it notes. A real conversation with the people who live in the business about what you’re trying to build and how you’re going to stay aligned as you grow.
This is the kind of thing that’s worth getting right early rather than fixing later when the damage is already done.
If you’d like to talk through what this might look like for your business, I’m happy to have a conversation. I’ve spent two decades watching culture happen across small startups and big global teams, and I’ve got some ideas about how to make it stick.
Get in touch. Let’s talk about the values that actually matter for where you’re going.
