Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence.

Those were Enron's core values. The company that became the biggest corporate fraud scandal of its generation had values that would look perfectly at home on any boardroom wall in the country. And that's precisely the problem.

Most companies treat core values like corporate wallpaper. A list of noble-sounding words framed in reception, buried on page forty of the brand guidelines or trotted out at the annual conference before everyone promptly forgets them. Integrity. Innovation. Excellence. Collaboration. I've lost count of the number of businesses I've worked with whose values could be swapped with any competitor in their sector and nobody would notice the difference.

If your core values could belong to anyone, they belong to no one.

The real problem isn't the words

I've sat in values workshops where senior teams spend half a day agonising over whether to choose "Innovation" or "Creativity." Meanwhile, nobody in the business can explain what either word actually means in terms of how they're expected to behave on a Tuesday morning. The result is a set of values that sound impressive in a pitch deck but do absolutely nothing to guide decisions, shape culture or differentiate the business.

Research from MIT Sloan found no correlation between a company's expressed values and how well employees felt they lived up to them. And Gallup's data is even more damning: only 23% of American employees strongly agree that they can apply their organisation's core values to their work. Just 27% say they actually believe in them.

That's not a communication problem. That's a relevance problem. The values aren't useless because people haven't read them. They're useless because they don't mean anything specific enough to act on.

Values should be behaviours, not nouns

This is where most companies go wrong. They pick aspirational nouns and call them values. Integrity. Passion. Excellence. These aren't behaviours. They're concepts. And concepts don't tell anyone what to do.

The companies that get values right express them as actions. Method, the cleaning products company, doesn't have "Innovation" as a value. They have "What Would MacGyver Do?" which tells everyone in the building exactly what kind of problem-solving is expected. They don't have "Creativity." They have "Keep Method Weird" which gives people permission to think differently and a clear sense of what the culture actually rewards.

Compare that to "We strive for excellence." What does that mean? Who decides what excellence looks like? How would you know if you were violating it? You wouldn't, because it's too vague to violate. And a value that can't be violated isn't a value. It's a platitude.

The fewer the better

There's an instinct to create a long list. Five values. Seven values. Sometimes ten. The logic seems to be that more values equals more guidance, but the opposite is true. The more values you have, the less anyone remembers. And a value nobody can recall is a value that isn't shaping behaviour.

Three to four is the right range for most businesses. Enough to cover the ground that matters. Few enough that every person in the company can recite them without checking the website. If your team can't do that right now, that tells you everything about how embedded your values actually are.

The gap between the wall and the floor

Here's what I see repeatedly. A company invests in defining values. They're launched internally with some energy. They appear on the website, in the employee handbook, maybe even on a feature wall in the office. And then nothing changes.

The values exist as a statement of intent that never becomes a standard of behaviour. Nobody is hired against them. Nobody is evaluated on them. Nobody is challenged when they act in direct contradiction to them. They're decorative, not structural.

The companies where values genuinely work treat them as decision-making tools. When two priorities conflict, the values resolve the tension. When a hiring decision is marginal, the values break the tie. When someone in leadership behaves in a way that contradicts the values, it gets addressed. Not quietly. Visibly.

A Leadership IQ study found that employees are 115% more engaged when their organisation has well-defined values, but only 24% of organisations have actually detailed what specific behaviours are necessary to live them. That gap between definition and application is where most values go to die.

How to tell if yours are working

There's a simple test. Ask ten people across different levels of your business to name the company's values without looking them up. Then ask them to give a specific example of a decision that was made because of those values in the last month.

If they can't name them, the values aren't embedded. If they can name them but can't point to a decision they influenced, the values are decorative. Either way, they're not doing the job.

What to do about it

Start with behaviour, not aspiration. Ask what your best people consistently do that makes them effective. Ask what your worst cultural moments have in common. The answers will point you toward values that are rooted in reality rather than ambition.

Then express them as actions. Short, specific and impossible to misinterpret. If a value needs a paragraph of explanation to make sense, it's not clear enough.

Then embed them structurally. Into hiring criteria. Into performance conversations. Into the way decisions get made when nobody's watching. That's when values stop being wallpaper and start being architecture.

Core values should be the hardest-working part of your brand. If they're not guiding decisions, shaping behaviour and setting your company apart, they're about as useful as an ejector seat on a helicopter.