Long before I was an EOS Implementer, I worked on a leadership team that had some of the best-written Core Values I’d ever seen. Beautifully crafted. Framed in the boardroom for all to see. I believed in them.

Then we made a hire that contradicted at least half of them.

We all knew it. But the candidate had the right experience, the timing was convenient, and nobody wanted to slow things down. So the values stayed on the wall, and the hire was made. My colleagues and I were complicit in trading the behaviors we held dearly for something far less valuable.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work out.

That employee wasn’t a bad person. They just weren’t a fit for our team—which was as unfair to them as it was to the rest of our organization.

I’ve thought about that moment a lot. It gives me that feeling you get when you wish you could go back in time and fix a wrong.

Core Values are Cultural Guardrails

A values-driven organization uses its Core Values as a filter for decisions; the everyday ones, not just the big formal ones. The values don’t just describe the culture. They protect it.

When you push outside of them, something is going to go wrong.

Here’s the thing about Core Values: you don’t create them, you uncover them. They already exist in the people and behaviors that represent your company at its best.

Your job is to name them clearly enough so that they come to life – using them for hiring, firing, reviewing, rewarding, and recognizing your team. In fact, the issues that keep resurfacing often trace back to a values misalignment that nobody has named yet.

That’s what pulls your values off the wall and makes them real.

Living Your Core Values Will Cost You Something

That’s how you know they’re real.

The hardest part is consistency. It’s genuinely easier to make exceptions: the candidate who’s almost right, the client who pays well but treats your team poorly.

Each exception feels justifiable individually, but over time, they erode your culture. That’s exactly what happened in that boardroom way back.

The second hardest part is modeling them. Your team is watching how leaders behave under pressure. I think about this personally. Before I became an EOS Implementer, I had to know I was truly a fit for the role – the same standard I wish we’d held that hire to. It meant being honest about whether I could actually live the five Core Values EOS holds its Implementers to:

• staying humbly confident
• choosing to grow rather than die
• helping first
• doing the right thing, and
• doing what I say.

I don’t live up to all of them perfectly, all the time. I’ve sat on a difficult conversation longer than I should have. I’ve prioritized being liked over being helpful. The values matter to me precisely because they give me something to strive for when I slip.

Values aren’t a destination. They’re a direction. As EOS Visionary Mark O’Donnell put it: “Core Values are not what we hope to become. They’re who we are, right now, today. They’re our handful of rules, and they’re non-negotiable. You can’t be here if you don’t share these Core Values.”

Where to Start

The first question isn’t “what should our values be?”

It’s “what do our best people do that makes us love them so much?”

Look at the people you’d clone if you could. How do they behave when things are hard? That’s where your Core Values live – not on the wall, but in them.

I think back to that boardroom often. Nobody in that room was a bad person. We just let convenience outvote the thing we said mattered most – and we paid for it. I’ve almost made that trade-off since, on smaller stakes, and caught myself.

That’s the whole job: using those cultural guardrails to ensure you stick to your values – even when it isn’t convenient.

What About Your Team?

Who are the people at your company you’d clone, and what would it take to name what they’re already doing?

I help leadership teams get what they want from their businesses. If your team needs help identifying their Core Values or driving the organization from them, reply to this email or let’s connect directly.