Are Your Values Just Bad Corporate Poetry?

Subscribe – Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube

Why Most Company Values Fail—And How to Make Them Real

Anne Melinger, CEO of Bink, joins co-hosts Scott Morris and Jackson Lynch in this episode, to tackle a question that keeps senior leaders up at night: Do company values actually matter, or are they just corporate poetry? Anne brings over 20 years of experience helping organizations translate values into everyday behaviors that fuel performance. Together, they explore why most values fail to drive results, the critical gap between aspiration and reality, and how brave leaders can wire consequences into their cultural operating systems to create real accountability.

Three Key Takeaways

• Values Without Consequences Are Just Wallpaper – Only 10% of companies take the time to translate values into specific behaviors, and even fewer connect those behaviors to actual rewards and consequences. If your top performer violates core values without penalty, those values aren’t real – they’re marketing.
• Managers Are the Carriers of Culture – Your frontline and mid-level managers determine whether values live or die in practice. Without training them on what values look like in action, what misalignment looks like, and how to give feedback based on behaviors, your culture will default to whatever baggage those managers bring from previous employers.
• Behaviors Should Drive Values, Not the Other Way Around – Start with storytelling about your best performers and the specific actions they took that drove business results. Then back into the values those behaviors represent. This grounds your values in operational reality instead of aspirational fiction.

Practical Advice

The Do-Say Audit Framework:

Culture reveals itself in decisions made under pressure. Use this three-step process to diagnose the gap between stated values and operational reality:

1. Audit Your Last 100 Decisions – Document recent promotion decisions, firing decisions, partnership choices, and strategic trade-offs. Look for patterns in what actually drove those choices versus what your stated values would have driven.
2. Identify Your Trust Deficit – The gap between your aspirational values and current behaviors is your trust deficit. Anne recommends an 80/20 split – 80% grounded in current reality, 20% aspirational. If the gap is wider, you’re writing fiction.
3. Start by Picking a Single Business Process – (performance reviews, promotion criteria, or job descriptions) and explicitly map where your values show up. If they don’t appear naturally, they’re not real in your operating system.

Remember: Culture doesn’t eat strategy – it digests it. Strategy is what you plan to do. Culture is how you’re expected to behave. If the two aren’t aligned, performance collapses.

Want More?

1. Strong Ground by Brené Brown – Brown’s latest book on bravery in leadership explores why defining values requires real courage, especially when specifying what misalignment looks like and what consequences will follow. The book includes research showing only 10% of companies translate values to behaviors.
2. When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk? – MIT Sloan research revealing that integrity and collaboration top the list of hollow corporate values, with analysis showing no correlation between companies’ stated values and how employees feel they live up to them (MIT Sloan Management Review, July 2020).
3. How Microsoft Became Innovative Again – Analysis of how Satya Nadella transformed Microsoft through cultural change that made the tech giant think like a startup, focusing on existential purpose, strategic pivots, and bold business decisions (Harvard Business Review, February 2023).

Skip to Footer

Founder & CEO

Copy link