A thriving culture is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’. It influences how people make decisions, how leaders behave, how teams work together and ultimately how effectively an organisation performs.

We talk a lot about strategy, structure and processes when we think about organisational performance. But even the best strategy will struggle if the culture around it works against what the organisation is trying to achieve.

One way to understand culture is by looking at the values that are alive within an organisation.

Values exist in every system, whether an individual, a team or a company. Most organisations also have a set of official company values. They appear on websites, office walls, induction materials and annual reports.

But there is another set of values that matters just as much: the values that are actually lived every day.

These are revealed in what gets rewarded, what gets tolerated, how decisions are made, how leaders behave under pressure and what people learn they need to do to succeed.

Sometimes the stated and lived values are closely aligned.
Often, they are not.

Values Make Culture Visible

Culture can feel intangible. People know when a culture feels healthy or unhealthy, but it can be harder to explain exactly what is driving that experience.

Looking at values gives us a language for making some of those invisible dynamics visible.

An organisation may say it values collaboration, for example, while its people experience competition between functions and leaders who protect information. It may value accountability while difficult decisions are repeatedly pushed upwards. It may talk about innovation while mistakes are punished and people quickly learn that taking a risk is not worth it.

The issue in these examples is not that the organisation has chosen the wrong values. It is that there is a gap between aspiration and experience.

That gap is where culture work begins.

In our culture transformation work, we use values-based diagnostics, including the Barrett Values Centre methodology, to understand both the culture people currently experience and the culture they believe the organisation needs in order to perform at its best.

This gives leaders something much more useful than a general conversation about whether the culture is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It starts to identify the patterns that are helping the organisation and those that may be getting in the way.

Values Give Culture Change Direction

Understanding the current culture is only the beginning.

The next question is: What do we want to be different?

This is where organisational values can become particularly powerful.

Good values create a shared reference point for the way an organisation wants people to behave. They give leaders and employees a way of asking:

• Is this how we want to operate?

• Does this decision reflect what we say matters here?

• Are our behaviours reinforcing the culture we are trying to create?

Values can therefore act as a compass. But a compass is only useful if you actually use it.

Simply defining a new set of values will not change the culture.

From Values to Behaviour

The real work begins when we translate values into behaviour.

If you say that Trust matters, what does trust actually look like between a manager and their team? If you value Courage, what behaviour do you expect when someone disagrees with a senior leader? If Collaboration is important, what does that mean when two departments have competing priorities?

Without this level of clarity, values remain open to interpretation. Almost everyone can agree that trust, respect or accountability are good things. The challenge is agreeing on what they actually require from people when situations become difficult.

And, as with individual values, the real test is rarely on the easy days.

Culture is revealed under pressure.

What happens when targets are missed? When a client complains? When a senior leader makes a mistake? When resources are stretched? When somebody challenges the status quo?

Those moments tell people far more about what an organisation truly values than anything written on the wall.

Values Have to Enter the System

If values are going to support culture change, they also need to move beyond individual behaviour. They need to become part of the way the organisation operates.

Recruitment, promotion, performance conversations, leadership expectations, recognition and decision-making all send signals about what really matters.

An organisation that says it values collaboration but consistently promotes individual high performers who damage the teams around them is sending a very clear cultural message. An organisation that talks about well-being but celebrates people for answering emails at midnight is doing the same.

People pay attention to what the organisation rewards and reinforces, not simply what it says.

The strongest organisations therefore don’t just know their values. Their values become part of how they manage and lead.

Over time, this creates greater alignment. People have more clarity about what is expected of them. Decisions become easier because there is a shared framework for making them. Leaders are held accountable not only for what they deliver, but also for how they deliver it.

Culture Change Takes Time

None of this is quick work.

Changing organisational culture, particularly in a large organisation, is slow and deliberate. You are trying to shift deeply established patterns of behaviour, assumptions and ways of working that may have developed over many years.

A new values campaign will not do that. Neither will a launch event, a leadership workshop or a beautifully produced set of posters.

Those things can support the process. They cannot replace it.

Meaningful culture change requires consistency: leaders modelling the behaviours, systems reinforcing them and teams repeatedly having conversations about what the values mean in practice.

The aim is not to create an organisation where everybody behaves perfectly in line with the values all of the time. It is to create one where the values increasingly influence what happens when choices need to be made.

And perhaps that is the most useful test of whether your values are really shaping your culture.

If you removed the values from your website tomorrow, would your people still be able to tell what they are from the way the organisation operates?

And when the pressure rises, what values would they say are really being lived?