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Whitepaper · Oct 2025 · 18 pages

Why half your employees can't name your values

A practitioner's framework for writing purpose, vision and values that hold under pressure, drawn from work inside real leadership teams.

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Summary

One company we worked with had “Everyone deserves a voice” on the wall of its foyer. Inside, bullying was common and people kept quiet in meetings. The CEO knew the value wasn’t lived, and so did everyone else. The gap between the culture on the wall and the culture in the building was costing them revenue, and it is the most common culture problem we see in senior teams.

This whitepaper sets out the framework we use to close that gap. The research on why it matters is consistent: organisations with a clear, lived purpose innovate more and keep their people longer. Yet most employees can’t recall their own company’s values. In one US poll, 47% of workers didn’t know or weren’t sure what their employer’s core values were (Eagle Hill Consulting, 2016).

What's inside

A simple test for whether a value is core or aspirational: would you let your best performer go for breaching it?
Three exercises for finding your organisation’s real purpose, including Collins and Porras’s “random corporate serial killer”.
Why most employees can’t recall their company’s values, and how to write values people use when making decisions.
How Atlassian built its values into everyday work, and how Enron’s published values did nothing to stop its collapse.
A diagnostic for comparing the culture you have with the culture your strategy needs.

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