Core Values

Mike Jones
February 13, 2026

Core Values Done Right - How to find your values and actually use them to build team culture.

Read time - 11 minutes

Core Values Done Right - How to find your values and actually use them to build team culture.

You’ve likely heard of Core Values, and depending on your experience with them, likely think they’re generic words like “honesty” and “integrity” that are listed someplace on your company’s website and never spoken of again.

Used poorly that’s exactly what Core Values are - forgotten and unused phrases.

Used well, however, Core Values can be used to reinforce and build the culture of your organization - giving you a crystal clear filter to:

Make better, faster strategic business decisions
Hire more of the right people
Reinforce the right behavior in your company
Discourage the wrong behavior, and ultimately fire the wrong people

Getting Core Values right - and using them correctly - will literally save millions over the course of a decade through less bad hiring, and make millions through more good hiring.

It’s that important.

In this article I’m going to outline:

What are Core Values and what AREN’T Core Values
How to find them in your organization
How to use them to build your culture

What are Core Values

Core Values are the few 2-4 defining characteristics of the culture of your organization. They are the most important, immovable and unchanging, values that define who you are and aren’t as a culture, and define how the right people will behave when pressed.

You, and by extension of yourself and your leadership team, and your organization have many values that are important to your culture, but only a few Core Values.

When established well no two companies have the same Core Values, and the define who you are as a culture.

What values are not core? Patrick Lencioni, the primary thought leader on Core Values in organizations, outlines three value traps that organizations should remove from their list of Core Values:

Permission to play - Generic values that are required to even get an interview with the company, like “honesty”, “integrity”, and “responsible”
Aspirational - Values you wish you have or are working towards developing are important for your company, but they’re not Core. Example - “Tenacious” may be an aspirational value if you have a relaxed, collegial culture. While you may want to move the organization in that direction, calling it core will fall flat and not describe anyone in the organization.
Accidental - Values that served you to get where you are, but won’t serve you going forward, are accidental. Example - Saying yes to your customers no matter their request may have built your company, but to get to the next level a more refined customer approach is required, so “saying yes always” may be an accidental value.

Establishing your Values

Since your values already exist within your organization, you just need the right exercise to uncover them. Here is the exercise I use with leadership teams to find there’s, created by Gino Wickman and explained in his classic book “Traction”:

First, assemble your leadership team in an offsite, uninterrupted location for at least 2 hours:

Have each member list 3 people (not in the room) who are absolute rockstars in their organization and if they had 100 of them, they could accomplish any goal.
These people are ideally within the organization, but if that’s not possible have them think of people outside the org.
Have everyone list their names on the board
With those three people in mind, have everyone spend 5 minutes writing down the characteristics those people exhibit that made them choose them.
Have everyone put their full list on the board
Begin narrowing your list down. We use a process called Keep, kill, combine - If anyone thinks a word is part of a Core Value they say keep, if they think it’s not they say kill - and if nobody objects the word is erased, and if they’re synonyms of the same theme say combine and the words can be combined.
This process should get you down to 10-15 values.
Narrow further - this is where the team debates and argues about which are the 3-7 core values that define them. Look back at Lencioni’s value traps to remove any non-core values, and don’t stop until you get to the right number.
Once you’ve agreed on them - have one leader take a to-do to write “the speech”, which is revising the draft words into bulletpoint format and creating a short speech to explain the values to their team.
Don’t share them with the team yet - let this sit for 30 days.
Revisit the values until the leadership team is a 100% yes on the values. This could take a few months, don’t rush this.

Using your Core Values

Once they are established and the team loves them, the next step is to bring them to life and use them in the organization. Here’s a few brief areas where they should be used:

Hiring - Since these values represent the culture of the organization, they should be used in the hiring process to attract the right people, and repel the wrong people.
Example - If “Relentless” is a core value, tell a story about how the founder went to 5 different places to track down a prospect to close his business, and ask the candidate to share one story when they’ve been relentless in completing a project.
Evaluating performance - Every quarter each manager should do a 1:1 with their team members. Check-in specifically around the core values and how they’ve been living them or need to work on them.
Rewarding the right behavior - Core values awards, shoutouts, bonuses, any way to celebrate and reinforce behavior that exhibits your core values should be used throughout the organization.
Firing the wrong people - Regularly evaluate your people against your core values, and if someone consistently doesn’t exhibit your values, make the hard decision and let them go. The company and they will do better by going elsewhere.
Make them visual - Put them up on your walls, name your conference rooms after them, find any way to bring them to life visually for your teammates to see and be proud of.

Mistakes to avoid

The most important thing to avoid is not bringing them to life. Poorly made and unused Core Values are worse than no listed values at all. Stay away from these other mistakes as well:

Delegating Values Creation - this is an exercise for the leadership team of the company, not the HR person (although they may be on the team)
Rushing the process - this can’t be done and finalized in 2 hours. Give it a few months to iterate and finalize
Choosing value trap values - avoid permission to play, aspirational, and accidental values
Picking values that sound great but aren’t really core - they won’t resonate and will land flat
Not reinforcing regularly - values need constant reinforcement to become engrained in the organization
Not integrating into all people systems - must be used in hiring, reviewing, rewarding, and firing
Not being willing to fire the wrong people - this will kill your culture in ways you can’t even imagine
Making them too long or complicated - less is more, anything that can’t be memorized by all team members is going to be too long

Final thoughts

Establishing, reinforcing, and using Core Values is the answer to building a long-term culture that works for decades. Take a look at your company, if you fall short of the above - get your team together and get to work.

You won’t regret the time put into them.

Additional Resources

Different Types of Core Values by Patrick Lencioni - click here

“Traction” by Gino Wickman - click here