Most company values hang on walls and live nowhere else.
Walk into any business and you’ll find them framed in the lobby: Integrity. Innovation. Excellence. These words sound important and mean nothing. Employees ignore them. Leaders reference them in speeches but abandon them in decisions. The values exist as decorative language that everyone knows to recite and nobody uses to make choices.
The gap between stated values and operational reality creates cynicism throughout organizations. People notice when leaders talk about transparency but hold information tightly. They observe when companies claim customer focus while prioritizing internal convenience. Values that function as aspirational poetry rather than decision-making criteria actively damage culture.
Coming up, we’ll examine why most company values fail to influence behavior, introduce a four-part implementation framework that transforms values into operational tools, and show you how to hire, fire, train, and reward using values as your primary filter.
Why Traditional Company Values Fail
The typical process for creating company values produces generic statements that could apply to any organization. Leadership teams gather for a retreat, brainstorm qualities they admire, and emerge with a list: integrity, teamwork, innovation, customer focus, accountability.
Nothing here differentiates your company from competitors. Nothing here helps someone make a difficult decision. Nothing here tells an employee what matters more when two values conflict.
John Michael Fery, founder and president of Bluebird Express Car Wash, spent years learning this lesson. His company operates with over 100 employees across multiple locations, and he discovered that having values meant nothing without a system to operationalize them.
In a recent conversation on the Deliberate Leaders podcast, he explained the transformation:
We have had company values for probably five, six years. But it’s taken us a long time to implement, to get to a point where now I would say we’re almost totally living up to hiring, firing, training, and rewarding based off of those values. That was a big shift for us, and it’s totally changed how we operate.
The breakthrough came when Fery stopped treating values as aspirational statements and started treating them as operational criteria. Values only matter when they determine who you hire, who you fire, how you train, and what you reward. Everything else remains decorative.
The Four Values That Drive Bluebird Express
Before we examine the implementation framework, consider what makes Bluebird’s values different from typical corporate statements.
Their four core values are:
- Pursue Excellence
- Serve with Humility
- Be Accountable
- Deliver Smiles
Notice what these values do. They describe behaviors, not abstract qualities. You can observe someone pursuing excellence or serving with humility. You can measure accountability and track smile delivery.
Fery defines “Pursue Excellence” specifically: 1% better than yesterday. This definition transforms a vague aspiration into something measurable. Did you improve today compared to yesterday? The answer is yes or no.
The values also reflect the company’s specific culture and priorities. “Deliver Smiles” makes sense for a car wash business focused on customer experience. It wouldn’t work for a litigation firm or a manufacturing plant. Your values should be distinctive enough that they wouldn’t apply universally to all businesses.
Most importantly, these values give people language to make decisions. When facing a choice, employees can ask: Does this option pursue excellence? Does it serve with humility? Does it demonstrate accountability? Will it deliver smiles? The values function as filters for judgment.
The Implementation Framework: Hire, Fire, Train, Reward
Having clear values solves nothing unless you embed them into every people decision. The framework has four parts, and each part matters equally.
1. Hire Using Values
Traditional hiring focuses primarily on skills and experience. Can this person do the job? Have they done similar work before? Do they have the necessary qualifications?
Values-based hiring adds a second filter that often matters more than technical skills. You can teach someone how to operate equipment or use software. You cannot easily teach someone to value excellence, practice humility, or take accountability.
During interviews, design questions that reveal whether candidates naturally align with your values:
- For “Pursue Excellence”: Ask them to describe a time they improved a process or skill, even when nobody required them to do so. Listen for intrinsic motivation toward improvement.
- For “Serve with Humility”: Ask about a time they were wrong or made a mistake. Listen for whether they blame circumstances and other people, or whether they take responsibility and describe what they learned.
- For “Be Accountable”: Ask them to walk through a project that didn’t go as planned. Listen for ownership versus victim language.
- For “Deliver Smiles”: Ask how they handle frustrated or upset customers. Listen for whether they view difficult interactions as problems to minimize or opportunities to create positive experiences.
The goal involves identifying people who already operate according to your values before you hire them. Alignment matters more than perfection. Someone who values excellence but defines it differently than you do can learn your definition. Someone who doesn’t value excellence at all will resist your culture.
2. Fire Using Values
This component makes most leaders uncomfortable, yet it determines whether your values actually mean anything.
Values violations must carry consequences, including termination when serious enough. If someone consistently acts against your stated values and keeps their job, you’ve communicated that the values are optional suggestions.
Fery emphasizes this point clearly:
If you can identify and state and be vocal about, hey, these are the values I will hire, fire, train, and reward by, then that’s when I think you can live up to being called a leader.
Firing someone for values misalignment looks different than firing for performance issues. Performance problems often stem from unclear expectations, insufficient training, or poor job fit. Values problems stem from fundamental misalignment in what matters.
Someone who consistently blames others rather than taking accountability damages team culture. Someone who resists feedback because they believe they already know everything contradicts humility. Someone who does the minimum required work violates the pursuit of excellence.
The standard you walk past becomes the standard you accept. When you tolerate values violations, you signal to everyone else that the values don’t actually govern decisions. High performers who do align with values become demoralized watching others violate them without consequences.
The decision becomes clearer when you frame it properly. Keeping someone who violates values saves you the short-term pain of a difficult conversation and a hiring process. It costs you the long-term health of your culture and the engagement of everyone who does live according to your values.
3. Train Using Values
Most training programs focus exclusively on technical skills. New employees learn systems, processes, procedures, and tools. They might receive a brief overview of company values during onboarding, then never hear about them again.
Effective training integrates values into every lesson. When teaching someone how to handle customer complaints, you don’t just explain the process. You connect the process to your values: we handle complaints this way because we value accountability and delivering smiles.
When training someone on quality standards, you explain that the standards reflect your commitment to pursuing excellence. When teaching collaboration protocols, you frame them around serving with humility and recognizing that others have valuable perspectives.
This approach accomplishes two things simultaneously. People learn the technical requirements of their role while internalizing the values that drive those requirements. The values stop being abstract statements and become the reasoning behind daily decisions.
Training should also include explicit instruction on what each value means in practice. Don’t assume people understand “pursue excellence” the same way you do. Define it. Give examples. Share stories of employees who exemplified the value. Discuss what it looks like when someone violates it.
Fery developed an entire leadership development course built around the shortcomings he observed in himself and others. The course doesn’t just teach management techniques. It teaches how to lead according to Bluebird’s specific values.
4. Reward Using Values
The final component determines whether people believe you actually care about values or just talk about them.
What you recognize and reward tells people what actually matters. If you praise and promote based solely on results while ignoring how those results were achieved, you’ve communicated that values are secondary to outcomes.
Someone who hits their numbers by treating colleagues poorly shouldn’t receive the same recognition as someone who hits their numbers while serving with humility and helping others succeed. Someone who meets deadlines through individual heroics shouldn’t receive the same praise as someone who meets deadlines by building accountable teams.
When you see someone living your values, name it specifically. Don’t just say “good job on that project.” Say “I noticed how you took full accountability when the timeline shifted and proactively solved the problem. That’s exactly what we mean by being accountable.”
This specific recognition accomplishes several goals:
- It reinforces the behavior in the person you’re praising
- It teaches everyone else what living the value looks like
- It demonstrates that you notice and care about values alignment
- It creates positive pressure for others to operate the same way
Formal recognition programs should explicitly incorporate values. If you have an employee of the month, the criteria should center on values demonstration. If you give bonuses or promotions, values alignment should factor into the decision as heavily as performance metrics.
Some leaders worry this approach will penalize high performers who deliver results. The concern misunderstands the framework. You’re not choosing between values and performance. You’re insisting on both. The people who can deliver exceptional results while embodying your values become your model employees and future leaders.
Making Values Decisions When Values Conflict
The most difficult leadership moments happen when values conflict with each other or with short-term business needs.
You value accountability, but holding someone accountable might hurt their feelings, which conflicts with your value of delivering smiles. You value excellence, but pursuing the excellent solution will miss the deadline. You value humility, but competitive situations require confident assertion.
Your values should form a hierarchy that helps you navigate these conflicts. Which value matters most when they clash? This prioritization makes your values actionable rather than decorative.
At Bluebird, the hierarchy appears in the order they list values. Pursue excellence comes first. When excellence conflicts with other priorities, excellence wins. This doesn’t mean the other values matter less. It means they have a clear decision framework when facing tradeoffs.
This clarity prevents the paralysis that comes from treating all values as equally important all the time. In reality, different situations call for emphasizing different values. The person working with a frustrated customer should prioritize delivering smiles. The person training new employees should emphasize accountability.
Your job as a leader involves helping people understand which value should guide decisions in specific contexts. This requires ongoing conversation, not just a statement of values on the wall.
The Transformation Takes Years
Fery’s timeline reveals an important truth about implementing values: the process takes longer than most leaders expect.
Bluebird had stated values for five or six years before reaching the point where they were genuinely hiring, firing, training, and rewarding based on those values. The gap between declaration and implementation stretches across years because you’re changing organizational muscle memory.
Early attempts at values-based decisions feel awkward and uncertain. You’re not sure if someone’s behavior truly violates a value or just differs from your style. You worry about seeming rigid or dogmatic. You question whether values should really influence a hiring decision when the candidate has perfect technical qualifications.
These doubts reflect the transition from treating values as aspirational to treating them as operational. The discomfort signals that you’re doing something different and meaningful.
The transformation accelerates as you accumulate examples and build shared language. Each time you make a hiring decision based on values alignment, you reinforce the pattern. Each time you recognize someone for living a value, you teach others what it looks like. Each time you address a values violation, you demonstrate that the standards apply universally.
Eventually, the values become embedded in how people think and make decisions without conscious effort. New employees absorb them through stories, observations, and direct experience. The culture begins to self-regulate as people hold each other accountable to shared standards.
Fery describes the impact:
We found that when we really focus on value alignment, we start to see much greater success, much better engagement. People genuinely enjoy what they’re doing and the people around them so much more.
This outcome makes the investment worthwhile. Companies with strong values alignment experience lower turnover, higher engagement, better collaboration, and more consistent decision-making across the organization.
Starting the Values Journey
If your company has decorative values that don’t drive decisions, or no articulated values at all, the path forward begins with honest assessment.
Gather your leadership team and examine the patterns in your best employees. What qualities do they share? What behaviors do you wish everyone exhibited? What principles guide your own decision-making when facing difficult choices?
The values you choose should reflect who you actually are at your best, not who you wish you were. Authenticity matters more than aspiration. If you’re a scrappy, fast-moving company, don’t choose “thoughtful deliberation” as a value just because it sounds mature. Choose values that describe how you actually want to operate.
Once you have draft values, test them against recent decisions:
- Would these values have helped us make that hiring choice differently?
- Do these values explain why we succeeded with that client?
- Would these values have prevented that conflict between departments?
If the values don’t illuminate past decisions or guide future ones, keep refining them until they do.
Then comes the harder work: building the systems to hire, fire, train, and reward based on those values. This process happens incrementally. Start with one component, typically hiring, and build competence before adding the others.
Create interview questions that assess values alignment. Train your hiring managers to recognize what values-aligned candidates sound like. Review hiring decisions through a values lens. As this becomes natural, add values criteria to training programs, then recognition systems, then performance management.
The goal is not perfection. The goal is consistent movement toward greater alignment between stated values and operational reality. Every decision made through a values filter strengthens the culture you’re building.
The Competitive Advantage of Clear Values
Most companies compete on price, features, service quality, or market position. These advantages are all external and relatively easy for competitors to copy or overcome.
Companies with genuine values alignment compete on culture, which is nearly impossible to replicate. Competitors can copy your pricing strategy in a week and your product features in a quarter. They cannot copy the way your people think, decide, and work together.
This advantage compounds over time. As your culture strengthens, you attract people who naturally align with your values and repel those who don’t. Your hiring process becomes more efficient because values misalignment surfaces quickly. Your retention improves because people working in values-aligned cultures report higher satisfaction and engagement.
The business outcomes follow from the cultural foundation. Teams that share values collaborate more effectively because they approach problems with similar mental models. Decision-making accelerates because people don’t need constant approval when they understand the values that should guide their choices. Quality improves because people take pride in work that reflects shared standards of excellence.
Fery’s experience demonstrates this progression. Bluebird grew from a startup to over 100 employees across multiple locations while maintaining culture through values-based people decisions. The growth was possible precisely because the values created consistency and clarity across expanding operations.
Your values become the operating system that allows your company to scale without losing coherence. As the organization grows, the values provide continuity and shared identity that prevent the fragmentation that often accompanies expansion.
Moving Forward
Creating company values that actually drive behavior requires years of consistent effort. The work involves uncomfortable conversations, difficult decisions, and persistent attention to alignment between words and actions.
The alternative is values that exist only on office walls and corporate websites. These decorative values cost relatively little to create and produce exactly nothing of value. They might make you feel better about your company culture while doing nothing to actually improve it.
The choice determines whether you build a company where people understand what matters, make decisions according to shared principles, and hold themselves and each other to meaningful standards. Or whether you build a company where people read the values statement during onboarding and never think about it again.
If you’re ready to examine how your current values function in practice and develop a plan for embedding them into hiring, firing, training, and rewarding decisions, consider booking a complimentary strategy session with one of our coaches. The conversation can help you identify the gap between stated values and operational reality, and create a specific roadmap for closing that gap over the next 12 to 24 months.
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