Clarifying and living workplace values that build great culture

Executive overview

Most leaders know values matter but struggle to define them in a way that sticks. The gap between posting values on a wall and actually living them is where culture breaks down.

Values only work when they are stated, understood, and held accountable — by everyone, including the leader.

Anne Chow outlines a repeatable process: individual stakeholder brainstorming → group synthesis → gut-checking core vs. aspirational values → measuring behaviors → periodic review as part of strategy.

Values vs. ideology

• Values are the guiding principles that define how a team works together — they form culture.
• Ideology represents individual beliefs, shaped by upbringing, religion, politics, and experience.
• No two people share identical ideology; demanding ideological alignment creates echo chambers.
• Seeking common values while embracing diverse ideology is the foundation of inclusive leadership.
• Leaders who conflate the two inadvertently filter out the diverse perspectives that drive performance.

Step 1: Individual stakeholder brainstorming

• Select participants deliberately — don't ask for volunteers, or you get only extroverts.
• Choose a cross-section: employees, contractors, partners, and key stakeholders.
• Start each person from the same anchor: the purpose and strategy of the business.
• Ask: what are the attributes of how we work together that most enable our success?
• Individual input prevents groupthink and stops dominant personalities from setting the agenda.
• Grounding people in their personal values first makes the professional values question concrete.

Step 2: Group synthesis and multi-voting

• Consolidate all individual inputs; themes emerge naturally (integrity, trust, respect, ethics appear in nearly every exercise).
• Use multi-voting — each person votes for their top three — to reveal where alignment already exists.
• Don't discard the tail: ask those who voted for low-count items to explain why; words behind the words often surface important gaps.
• Use leadership judgment to categorize results into core values vs. aspirational values.

Core vs. aspirational values

• Core values are the ones the organization already embodies today — the present-tense pillars of culture.
• Aspirational values are what the organization is actively working toward but hasn't yet achieved.
• Common aspirational candidates: innovation, operational excellence, customer excellence.
• Labelling an unachieved value as "core" is a form of small leadership — it signals that the gap between stated and lived values is acceptable.

Step 3: Measuring behaviors against values

• "You can only monitor, manage, and improve what you can measure" — apply this to values, not just financials.
• Design specific measurements for each value: surveys, behavioral indicators, process outcomes.
• Example: a union-heavy company treats trust as a core value and measures it via regular trust surveys, action planning, speed of collective bargaining agreements, and strike frequency — all broken down by geography, job title, and management tier.
• Measurement must cascade below the corporate level to be actionable.

Step 4: Reviewing and updating values regularly

• Culture is part of strategy — not separate from it.
• No leader would set a strategy once and never revisit it; the same logic applies to values.
• Build values review into the annual strategic planning cycle alongside financial and operational plans.
• Ask: do our current values still enable success against our updated strategy?
• If yes, refresh the framing. If no, course-correct and adjust.

On generational diversity

• Grouping workforce behavior by generation is a lazy shortcut that obscures individual variation.
• Gen Z grew up with fundamentally different tools and contexts — but still wants meaningful work.
• Leaders who default to generational stereotypes miss the real drivers of engagement and disengagement.
• Assess people as individuals; use HR as a structural partner to audit team composition for genuine diversity of background, experience, and perspective.

Holding the line on values under pressure

• Anne Chow lost a client worth over $1M/year by requiring respect from a verbally abusive CIO — and earned lasting trust from her team.
• Pre-defining values as a team makes it easier to act on them when dollars are at stake.
• A clear value only functions as a value when it is upheld at personal cost.
• The client who was held accountable was later fired from his company; the relationship was eventually recovered.