Values on the wall mean nothing. Here's what actually makes them real

Plenty of companies can recite their values. Far fewer could tell you their leaders live by them. Lisa Haycox, chief executive of Explore Learning, has a phrase for the difference: “We talk about living them, not laminating them the whole time. I can’t bear the fuzzy graphics on the wall that mean nothing.”

It is a distinction she has had two decades to think about. Haycox joined Explore Learning, the largest independent provider of children’s tuition in the UK, as an entry-level tutor and worked her way up to chief operating officer before succeeding founder Bill Mills as chief executive in 2025. The company specialises in maths and English and supports more than 25,000 children.

Building a workforce that mirrors its customers

Her journey is not unusual at the company. Around 30 per cent of its managers started in entry-level roles, a pathway Haycox sees as central to building a diverse business rather than simply hiring one. Today, around 80 per cent of its workforce is under 24 and 63 per cent of its tutors come from ethnically diverse backgrounds.

The business became far more deliberate about this coming out of the pandemic, Haycox says, around the time the wider corporate world was waking up to the same idea.

“It became so obvious the business benefits that diversity really brings in terms of not a ‘nice to have,’ it's an absolutely essential for growing a successful business,” she says. The logic, for a company teaching children, is that its people should reflect the families it serves.

“The better we are at 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,” Haycox says. In practice, that has meant recruiting from different talent pools, building internal community networks and running sessions called “Me in My Shoes”, where colleagues share their own journeys so others can picture themselves progressing.

What Haycox is wary of is the same work curdling into a numbers exercise: “We have lots of things we have KPIs and OKRs for. I think you can be really aligned as a leadership team about what you’re trying to achieve. Yes, we’ll look at how the metrics shift with that, but I think that has to be an ‘and’ as opposed to the primary focus.”

The fulcrum of success of any efforts ultimately sits with the actions of the leadership team, who ultimately need to be bought in and know it’s not just a tick-box exercise. Haycox recommends being really clear on the starting point, then asking what the key levers are that your team feels you can address and change. Such as the talent pool you’re recruiting from. What efforts are being made to make intentional changes a success? But most importantly, you need to role model them.

“As a leader, I show up at those things,” says Haycox. “I want to hear from the different communities how it feels to be a part of Explore. I attend our regular network sessions to hear from network leads what they are seeing and hearing.

“I think you’ve got to be willing to do that work as a leader in order to really shift the dial. Otherwise, if you’re just sitting in a room looking at a report, in my experience, it won’t move in the same way.”

Making it safe to be curious

Early on, she found the main barrier was not resistance but nervousness. Some people were worried about asking the wrong question or saying the wrong thing. Her answer draws on one of Explore’s leadership behaviours.

“One of our leadership behaviours is ‘Be Curious’,” Haycox says. “Sometimes in an organisation like ours – where you’re being really ambitious about the goals – you’ve got to have the space for these conversations. Particularly if there’s that sense of being a bit uncomfortable about things.

“Also saying, ‘maybe that wasn’t quite the thing to say. How will you change the way you say that or do something differently the next time?’ There are huge parallels because that is exactly the way that I would teach a six-year-old who was learning their maths.”

Those behaviours sit alongside the company’s wider framework, which it calls “Who We Are” rather than its values. It’s a set of phrases including “we make it happen”, “we’re all in it together” and “we care”, plus behaviours such as “Be Bold”. What stops any of it from becoming wallpaper, she says, is leadership.

“Ultimately, as a leader, you have to just live it and you have to show it,” says Haycox. “People are looking at you in every moment. Whether that’s you doing a company-wide presentation or whether you’re popping into one of your stores or sites, they’re reading what you’re doing. As a CEO, creating a leadership team and having leaders who live that is very important.”

Turning values into daily practice

That visibility is reinforced by a shared language. Haycox and her leadership team use the behaviours to hold one another to account and, she stresses, it only works on a foundation of trust.

“Sometimes my chief people and operations officer [Yaelle Candolfi] will say, ‘Time out. Are we being as curious as we could be?’,” Haycox says. “It’s built in and feels very safe and doesn’t feel like we’re telling each other off. To be at our best for the organisation, this is how we need to show up. I think in high-performing teams, if you can get to that kind of level where you’re doing that, then that filters the way down through the organisation.”

For Haycox, none of this is separate from the business. The way Explore Learning treats its colleagues, she argues, has to mirror the way it serves its customers. It’s the same curiosity, the same permission to get things wrong and learn, that it sells to children as “fearless learning”. Get that parallel right, and the values stop being words on a wall. The test, as ever, is whether anyone is living them.

What can leaders learn?

Live your values, don’t laminate them. People read what leaders do in every interaction, not what is framed on the wall. If the exec team does not visibly live the values every day, no one below them will either.

Don’t reduce culture to a KPI. Metrics have their place, but the moment values or inclusion become a box to tick in a report, the intent drains out of them. Treat measurement as an “and”, not the goal.

Build a shared language for accountability. A common vocabulary, such as Explore Learning’s “Be Curious” and “Be Bold”, lets people hold each other to account in the moment without it feeling like a reprimand. It only works on a foundation of real trust.

Make curiosity safer than caution. People stay quiet when they fear getting it wrong. Treat a clumsy question as a chance to learn, the way you would with a child and the difficult conversations start to open up.