Friday Forward - Say & Do (#474)
Company values should help leaders align what they say with what they do
Over the past year, I’ve helped several organizations refine or overhaul their organizational core values. Leaders at these companies felt their values needed to be more compelling and actionable in order to drive a healthy, high-performing culture.
This is hardly unusual. Many companies invest time—and branding consultant fees—crafting aspirational values that look good on paper but never are lived in the organization. For example, consider a company that claims to value transparency but discourages honest feedback, or a firm that champions innovation while punishing risk-taking. Employees notice when leaders plaster values on their office walls or company websites but ignore those values in practice—and they quickly become disheartened and disengaged.
The gap between what an organization says and what it does is where values live or die. True values aren’t aspirational; they are behavioral. They don’t just describe what a company hopes to be; they define the non-negotiable principles that shape decision-making at every level.
One of the most extremes example of a say/do gap was Enron. Before its collapse, Enron proudly listed its core values as:
Integrity | Communication | Respect | Excellence
But in reality, Enron’s true operating values were concepts like:
Win At All Costs | Just Make Money | Rules Don’t Apply | Take Outsized Risks
Enron is an extreme case, but many organizations fall into this same trap of choosing values that sound good but don’t reflect actual behavior. That disconnect inevitably leads to growing cynicism, fading trust, and erosion of leadership’s credibility.
This is why any core values work I do with companies starts with an investigation into that say/do gap between a company’s stated values and the reality of its culture. In each case, I interview several employees—40 in the past year—at various levels of the company, asking probing questions about what’s truly valued, rather than what’s merely stated
For example, I always ask two questions:
Which current core value do you believe is most important?
Which current value does no one actually follow or care about?
Every time I asked these questions in interviews, clear patterns emerge that hint at how the company’s values need to change.
Some companies need to revise their stated values to reflect the reality their employees experience—the values need to honestly describe the culture, rather than reflecting an aspirational vision of that culture. Other organizations have strong values in principle but fail to uphold them through leadership modeling and operationalization.
If an organization gets to the point where it clearly communicates values and consistently upholds them, those principles become the cornerstone of a healthy culture, high performance, and psychological safety. If they don’t, those values are empty slogans that may do more harm than good.
For values to shape culture, leaders must ensure those principles are reinforced daily in company operations. That includes:
Hiring: Using behavior-based interview questions to confirm values alignment.
Performance Evaluation: Making values a key part of assessing team performance.
Recognition: Celebrating employees who embody values through promotions, awards, and informal praise.
Accountability: Holding employees—including leadership—responsible when they violate values.
Decision-making: Using values as a guide for business priorities and strategy.
When organizations do what they say, their values become second nature. Their employees don’t need to check a website or a slide deck to know the company’s values—they experience them regularly and can speak passionately about them.
An example of this core values integration comes from the anti-Enron: Southwest Airlines. Southwest has defined its culture by its values, hiring people who live those principles authentically and rewarding those who demonstrate them in their work.
One well-known example involves a Southwest passenger named Peggy Uhle. Peggy was sitting on a plane waiting to take off, when she received devastating news that her son was in a coma. Before she could even process what to do next, Southwest employees had already pulled her off the plane, rebooked her on the next direct flight home, refunded her ticket, and even packed her a lunch—all without Peggy asking.
Southwest didn’t have a policy for handling such a tragic situation. Southwest’s team simply followed the company’s clear, consistently upheld values, including “Wow our customers” and “Servant’s heart”—and knew instinctively what to do. That’s the power of values alignment in an organization.
Culture isn’t built on what a company says it values—it’s built on what it consistently does. When words and actions don’t align, leaders have two choices: change the words, or hold each other accountable for changing the actions.
Quote of The Week
"You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do." - Carl Jung
Have a great weekend!
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Thanks to you. After reading your Elevate book, I redefined my core values. One of them is “Teach by example”, which I described as say what you do, do what you say. Behave congruently.
Let the Doings do the speaking .
Living the values will drive the Doings .