Why most company values are dead the moment they're hung on a wall

In the hit TV series Ted Lasso, a handwritten sign reading "Believe" hangs in the changing room until it rips and falls, and the team panics. Lasso's response cuts to the heart of a problem every scaling business faces: belief, like values, doesn't happen just because you've hung something up on a wall.

For founders and leaders, that's the uncomfortable truth behind most failed culture initiatives. Values only work if they're lived, tested and held to daily, not laminated and forgotten. We spoke to founders, a chief people officer and an organisational psychologist about what it actually takes to turn values from a slogan into a genuine business advantage.

In this article, we will cover:

• The business case for values and why it shouldn't be the only reason you embrace them
• How "cultural add" is replacing "cultural fit" in values-led hiring
• Why consistency, not charisma, is what actually makes values stick
• The simple test for whether you're actually living your own values

Live values, don’t just laminate them

The incentive for getting this right isn’t just a boosted Glassdoor rating; it’s a positive effect on your bottom line. In research conducted by Harvard Business School professors John Kotter and James Heskett in the early 1990s, a stark difference was found between 12 companies that had a strong focus on culture and values and 20 that did not. Over 11 years, the former saw a 682 per cent growth in revenue, versus 166 per cent growth in the latter.

“We talk about living values, not laminating them,” says Lisa Haycox, CEO of Explore Learning, the largest independent provider of tuition for children across the UK. “Inspire curiosity”, “Create clarity”, “Lead with trust”, “Act boldly” and “Unlock individual potential” form part of the company’s mission statement, or what it calls “Who we are.”

“Sometimes my chief people and operations officer, Yaelle Candolfi, will say, ‘Are we really being as curious as we could be?’ To be at our best for the organisation, this is how we need to show up,” Haycox says. “I think in high-performing teams, if you can get to that kind of level where you’re doing that, then that filters all the way down through the organisation.”

This is a fundamental practice of a values-based organisation: expressing values as behaviours. “The concepts that roam around in our brain, like ‘integrity’, do not mean anything until you interact with them,” says John Amaechi, organisational psychologist, professor of leadership at the University of Exeter Business School and founder of APS Intelligence.

Amaechi’s fix is to make every value testable. “In a sales company, integrity might mean we never mislead our customers, even if we think it will help us profit,” he says. “At the end of every conversation, each person can ask: ‘Did I mislead the customer, yes or no?’ If it was ‘kind of’, it’s a yes.” Turning abstractions into tangible questions like this creates a metric you can hold people to.

Consistency is key

For Olly Culverhouse, founder of Signable, consistency in messaging and actions has been key to building the company’s culture. “If you’re having a bad month and suddenly all the nice cultural stuff gets thrown out the window, then when you’re having a good month it suddenly comes back, people don’t know where they stand,” he says. “Consistency gives trust and stability in what you’re doing to employees.”

Culverhouse argues that companies should protect consistency, even if a handful of employees break trust: “Don’t chastise or blame the majority for the actions of the minority. For example, if you’ve got a policy of unlimited holiday and a couple of people abuse it, understand why it was abused and put in better guardrails or communicate it more. Don’t scrap it and go back to the old way of doing things.”

A focus on purpose is front and centre at Medialab. The agency has been recognised as a Sunday Times Best Place to Work for the past two years and has maintained its position as a Campaign Best Place to Work for seven consecutive years. Catherine Falla, the company’s chief people and culture officer, says that its focus on values is driven by its co-founder, Marcus Orme.

“He is relentless with it,” she says. “If you don’t understand the values, he will make sure you do.” Orme has also empowered Falla to frequently review frameworks and practices to ensure that values are baked in.

Medialab recently updated its roles and responsibilities documents so that values are embedded more explicitly in every job description. The company now splits expectations into “What?” and “How?” – what someone does day-to-day and how they approach that work.

“We’ve literally put down on pen and paper: this is what we mean when we talk about doing the right thing,” says Falla. “We’ve done that for every single job role across the whole business.”

Avoiding personality hires

If values are the test, the first place they bite is recruitment and specifically the word “fit”. At Medialab, the head of talent acquisition and inclusion works to a deliberate principle. “We don’t look for cultural fit, we look for cultural add,” says Falla. “We’ve got a really diverse mix of individuals who don’t look or behave the same in many regards, but they all share the same values.”

Amaechi is sharper still about how “fit” curdles. “If you start thinking, ‘Who can I have a beer with after work? Whose cognitive style would cause me the least challenge? Whose university is most compatible?’ then right there you are creating absolutely unwarranted discrimination,” he says.

His own criterion is narrower and fairer: “If you are ambitious and driven and really want to delight our customers, that is the fit I am interested in.”

For Haycox at Explore Learning, one of the clearest tests of whether values are genuinely lived is who you hire. Explore Learning supports more than 27,000 children every week, and as Haycox puts it, diversity is not simply a “nice to have”: 63 per cent of tutors are from ethnically diverse backgrounds and 80 per cent of the workforce is under 24, she says. The link between representation and business performance is obvious.

“The better we are representing our customer base in our colleagues and the people that we’re supporting, the more successful we will be in understanding what our children and our parents really need from us,” she says.

A recent study of UK- and US-listed firms from The London School of Economics and Political Science and Citi found that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) was associated with stronger long-term market performance and innovation. A 2025 survey conducted by Engage for Success and Nottingham Trent University also found much higher engagement in UK organisations that embed people-focused issues into decision-making.

Amaechi cautions, though, that business success should not be the sole reason that leaders embed DEI practices within their companies. “The business case is true,” he points out. “But if that is why you are embracing fairness and equity for your colleagues and for the recruitment procedure, that is not values-based leadership.”

The reward of listening

Having clear organisational values can create a safe environment to discuss challenging topics, such as race and gender inequality. During lockdown, Medialab created an open forum called Together We Stand, when Black Lives Matter protests and the murder of Sarah Everard left many employees feeling personally affected.

“We just allowed a safe open space for people to talk and learn from each other,” says Falla. When the forum launched, one senior Black colleague also led a session called Awkward Questions, allowing people to submit anonymous questions about race and language.

How can you test if you are living the values you purport to? Amaechi has one solution: “If a stranger shadowed you for a week, would they say you operated in a way that was aligned with your values and the behaviours that should flow from them?”

He admits he recently failed his own test. Frustrated in a hot, muggy meeting room, he let his irritation show.

Reflecting upon his behaviour, he later apologised to the person who ran the meeting. He thinks that values can quietly leak away in small ways, and ones we can all be guilty of. “Poor timekeeping – showing up late and meetings that run long – tells everybody in the room how unimportant they are,” Amaechi says.

So, by all means, hang a sign on the wall. But, as a fictional football coach once put it, belief doesn’t happen afterwards. To truly earn a return on “core values”, leaders need to live them when no one else is watching. Only then will they build businesses that carry on living these values long after they’ve left the room.

What can leaders learn?

Make every value testable, not just memorable. Amaechi's approach, turning abstractions like "integrity" into a yes-or-no question staff can ask themselves, gives founders a practical model for making values operational rather than decorative.

Values need to survive a bad month. Culverhouse's point that culture "gets thrown out the window" under pressure, only to reappear later, is exactly what erodes staff trust. Founders should treat consistency as the real test of whether values are genuine.

Test yourself as rigorously as you test your team. Amaechi's "stranger shadowing you for a week" question is a useful gut check for leaders who assume their own behaviour is beyond scrutiny.