Most companies have values. They're printed on posters in conference rooms, listed on career pages, and recited during onboarding. Integrity. Innovation. Excellence. Customer-first. The words sound noble. They also mean almost nothing.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: if your values don't cost you anything, they're not values—they're marketing copy. Real values create friction. They force difficult trade-offs. They sometimes make you choose the harder path when an easier one beckons. If your stated values have never caused your company to lose money, pass on a profitable customer, or fire a talented jerk, they exist only on paper.

Every company claims to value integrity. No one puts "we cut corners when convenient" on their website. This is the first problem with most values statements: they describe who you wish you were, not who you actually are. They're aspirational bumper stickers, not operational guides.

The damage runs deeper than mere irrelevance. When employees see a gap between stated values and daily reality, cynicism spreads like mold. The sales rep watches leadership celebrate a deal won through aggressive tactics that violated "customer-first" principles. The engineer notices that "quality" gets abandoned whenever deadlines loom. People aren't stupid. They learn to read the real rules—the unwritten ones revealed through what actually gets rewarded and punished.

Values without trade-offs are just pleasant noises. "We value both speed and quality" means you value neither specifically. Real values require choosing. Netflix famously stated they value "adequate performance gets a generous severance." That's specific. That has teeth. Most companies would never say something so direct because real values make people uncomfortable.

Takeaway

Values that never force painful trade-offs aren't values—they're decoration. The test of a real value is whether it has cost you something you wanted.

Want to discover your company's actual values? Stop reading the poster. Start examining decisions made under pressure—when resources were scarce, when deadlines loomed, when money was tight. What people do when it's difficult reveals what they truly value.

Look at who gets promoted. Not the official criteria—the actual pattern. Are the people rising through your organization the ones who embody stated values, or the ones who hit numbers regardless of how? Look at what gets celebrated in all-hands meetings. Look at which customers you've fired and which problematic employees you've kept. Look at where budget cuts fall first when times get hard.

This audit often produces uncomfortable findings. A company claiming to value work-life balance discovers they've promoted every workaholic and passed over people who left at reasonable hours. A company claiming to value innovation realizes they've punished every failed experiment and only celebrated safe wins. The evidence doesn't lie. Your real values are the ones visible in your behavior, especially when that behavior is costly.

Takeaway

Your actual values aren't what you say—they're what you do when it's inconvenient, expensive, or unpopular to do it. Audit decisions, not declarations.

If you've done the hard work of identifying real values—principles you'll actually sacrifice for—the next challenge is making them operational. Values that live only in speeches and documents are already dying. They need to be embedded in systems: hiring criteria, promotion rubrics, compensation structures, meeting rituals.

Consider how values might show up in specific processes. If you value candor, your meeting formats should explicitly include time for dissent. If you value customer impact, your review criteria should weight it heavily in compensation. If you value learning from failure, you need visible examples of people being celebrated for smart experiments that didn't work. The system must make the value the path of least resistance.

This also means actively designing against competing incentives. Many values failures aren't character failures—they're system failures. Good people do bad things when systems reward the wrong behavior. If your bonus structure rewards short-term numbers while your posters celebrate long-term thinking, the bonus structure wins every time. Values must be encoded into mechanisms that shape daily decisions, not occasional inspirational moments.

Takeaway

Values become real when they're built into systems—hiring, promotion, compensation, and processes. If the system doesn't reinforce the value, the value loses.

Most company values are worthless because they cost nothing and mean everything. They're safe words chosen because no one could possibly disagree. That safety is precisely what makes them useless as guides for actual behavior.

Building values that matter requires honesty about who you really are, courage to choose specific principles over others, and discipline to embed those principles into every system that shapes behavior. Values should make decisions easier, not harder—because you've already decided what matters most.