Why published values rarely shape culture, what research from MIT Sloan and Kouzes and Posner shows, and how families and teams can turn values into daily behaviour.
Some organisations have a set of values. Some families have them too, spoken or unspoken: we look after each other, we tell the truth, we work hard. The trouble is that values, on their own, change very little.
Donald Sull, Stefano Turconi and Charles Sull at MIT Sloan made this unusually clear in 2020. They compared the official values of hundreds of large companies with what employees said about their experience in online reviews. They found no meaningful link between the values a company published and how well staff felt those values were lived. Stating a value made a company no more likely to be seen as living it.
Patrick Lencioni had warned about this in the Harvard Business Review nearly two decades earlier. Most values statements, he argued, are bland and interchangeable, and values that are not lived create cynicism, because people learn to treat leadership’s words as decoration.
So how do values actually become culture? In my experience, the path runs through a step most organisations and families skip.
The missing step
A value is an abstract commitment. Respect. Honesty. Excellence. Family first.
A behaviour is something you can see someone do. Letting a colleague finish speaking. Telling a parent about a bad mark before they hear it from the school. Calling a client back the same day even when the news is disappointing.
Culture is what emerges when enough behaviours are repeated by enough people, for long enough, that they become normal and nobody has to think about them.
Without the middle step, values remain words. Leaders talk about respect while tolerating behaviour that contradicts it. Parents talk about honesty while reacting to a confession with anger. The people watching learn the behaviour, not the word.
Turning values into behaviours
The most practical way I know is to take each value and ask one question: if this were true here, what would we see people doing?
I know of a church in Lewisham that listed welcome as one of its values. When the leadership team asked what welcome would look like in practice, they realised that first time visitors were often left standing alone after the service while regular members gathered in familiar groups. They agreed three behaviours. Every member of the leadership team would speak to at least one new person before speaking to a friend. Newcomers would be invited to lunch the same day. And someone would follow up within the week. Within a year, the number of first timevisitors who returned had roughly doubled.
I know of a family in Owerri whose stated value was respect for elders. When the grandchildren were asked what that looked like, they described greeting grandparents properly and not arguing with them. When the grandparents were asked, they described something different: being consulted on family decisions, and being visited without a special occasion. The family agreed a set of behaviours that honoured both views, including a monthly phone call from each grandchild and a family meeting before any major decision.
Why leaders must go first
James Kouzes and Barry Posner have surveyed leaders and followers around the world for more than three decades. In The leadership challenge, they report that honesty is consistently the quality people most want in a leader, and that credibility comes down to one thing: doing what you say you will do.
This is why values only become culture when leaders go first. A manager who asks for punctuality and arrives late teaches lateness. A parent who asks for calm and shouts teaches shouting. A leader who admits their own failure to live a value, and changes, teaches more than a hundred reminders to other people.
Reinforcing the behaviours
Once behaviours are named and leaders are living them, a few practices help them spread.
Notice and name them. When someone lives a behaviour well, say so, specifically and in front of others where appropriate.
Address contradictions early and calmly. Every behaviour that goes unchallenged teaches that the value is optional.
Build them into routines. Begin meetings, family meals or weekly check ins with a short reflection on onebehaviour.
Revisit them. Values stayfairly stable. Behaviours may need updating as a team grows or children get older.