Walk into almost any large corporate office and you will see a poster on the wall. It usually lists words like Integrity, Excellence, or Teamwork. Most employees ignore it. Most customers never see it. This is because, for many organizations, core values are nothing more than marketing fluff designed to make the leadership feel good.
For a startup founder, this approach is a waste of time. Real core values are not aspirational adjectives. They are the fundamental beliefs of a person or organization that dictate behavior when no one is looking.
Core values act as a distributed decision making framework. They tell your employees how to make choices when you are not in the room to guide them. If you view them as a code of conduct rather than a marketing campaign, they become one of the most powerful tools in your operational toolkit.
Algorithms for Hard Decisions
#The true test of a value is not whether it sounds nice. The test is whether it helps you navigate a trade off.
Imagine your customer support team finds a bug. Fixing it requires delaying a product launch by two days.
- If your core value is “Speed,” the team ships the product and patches it later.
- If your core value is “Reliability,” the team delays the launch to fix the bug.
Neither answer is objectively wrong. Both are valid business strategies. However, you cannot have both. Core values clarify which attribute wins in a tie. They align the team so that everyone prioritizes the same things without needing to ask the CEO for permission every time.
Discovery vs. Invention
#A common mistake founders make is trying to invent values they wish they had. You might want to be a company that values “Work Life Balance,” but if you are emailing your team at 2 AM every night, that is not your value. Your value is “Relentless Execution.”
Values are discovered, not created. You find them by looking at who you hire, who you fire, and who you promote.
If you promote the brilliant engineer who is a jerk to everyone else, then “Kindness” is not a core value, no matter what the poster on the wall says. Your actions prove that “Competence” outweighs “Collaboration.”
The Willingness to Pay
#Patrick Lencioni, a business author, argues that a core value is only real if you are willing to lose money to uphold it.
If you claim to value “Transparency,” are you willing to tell a client about a mistake you made even if it means they might fire you? If you claim to value “Quality,” are you willing to scrap a production run that is 95 percent perfect but misses the mark?
If you only stick to your values when it is convenient or profitable, they are not values. They are just preferences. Preferences change based on the weather. Values stand firm regardless of the cost.
Using Values as a Filter
#Once you articulate your actual values, you must weaponize them in your hiring process. You cannot train someone to share your fundamental beliefs. You can teach a salesperson how to use a CRM, but you cannot teach them to care about the customer if they are fundamentally selfish.
Founders should design interview questions specifically to test for these values. You are looking for alignment at the DNA level. If you hire people who naturally behave the way your culture demands, management becomes significantly easier. If you hire for skills and ignore values, you are building a ticking time bomb of internal conflict.