During our Vision Building™ sessions, we are struggling to define our Core Values because our leadership team keeps defaulting to generic corporate words like integrity, excellence, and teamwork. How do we define values that actually drive daily behavior and weed out poor cultural fits?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Generic core values are worse than useless. They breed cynicism because everyone claims to have integrity, yet those words do nothing to define your unique culture or guide difficult personnel decisions. Your Core Values must be authentic, descriptive, and non-negotiable. To break through the generic trap, use the Keep, Kill, Combine exercise during your session. Have each leader identify three people in your organization who are absolute superstars, those individuals you wish you could clone. List the specific behavioral traits that make them exceptional. Next, identify the anti-values by thinking of people who were highly productive but ultimately poisoned your culture. What behaviors did they exhibit that you will never tolerate again? This exercise moves your team away from dictionary definitions and into real-world behaviors. Combine the lists and narrow them down to a final set of three to five core values. They must be phrased in your company's actual language. Once defined, these values become your ultimate filter. You will use them to hire, fire, review, and reward your team through the People Analyzer™. This is how you build a high-performance culture that protects your margins and makes your business highly attractive to prospective buyers.