Core values are the small set of non-negotiable behaviors that define how your company operates, hires, and makes decisions when nobody is watching.
That is the full definition. Everything else is commentary.
Most companies have core values on a wall somewhere. A few companies actually use them. The difference between the two is not the quality of the writing. It is whether the values are connected to anything that happens on a Tuesday afternoon when a client is pushing back and a team member has to decide how to respond.
If the values are not in that moment, they are not values. They are decoration.
Core values examples that actually hold up
The most common mistake when building core values is aiming for inspiration instead of specificity.
"Integrity." "Excellence." "Innovation." Every company on earth has claimed one of these words. They are not wrong. They are just not useful. You cannot hire against "integrity." You cannot fire someone for violating "excellence." You cannot use "innovation" to decide whether to take a particular client.
The core values examples that hold up are the ones that are specific enough to create friction. They have to actually rule something out.
Here are the markers of a value that holds up:
It describes a behavior, not a quality. "We tell clients the truth even when it costs us the account" is a behavior. "Honesty" is a quality. The behavior is hirable and fireable. The quality is not.
It would not appear on every company's list. If a competitor could publish the same value without embarrassment, it is probably not a real value. Real values are occasionally uncomfortable.
You can tell a story about a time it was tested. If you cannot tell a story where living by the value cost your company something, you have not tested it yet.
At Sneeze It, one of our values is that we do not make clients dependent on our interpretation of their data. That value has cost us upsells. It has also shaped every report Dash, our analytics agent, produces. The value is in the product, not just on the wall.
Company core values and the accountability trap
Here is where most companies lose the thread.
They do the values exercise. They write the values down. They post them in the office and include them in the onboarding deck. Then nothing changes. Six months later, a star performer who violates the values every day is still a star performer because they hit their numbers. A quiet team member who embodies the values gets average reviews because nobody is tracking values behavior.
Company core values only work if they are built into three systems: hiring, performance review, and departure decisions.
Hiring: every interview includes questions designed to surface values behavior. Not "do you value honesty" but "tell me about a time you told a client something they did not want to hear." You are looking for stories, not declarations.
Performance review: values behavior is a column on the scorecard alongside metrics. A team member who hits their numbers but violates values is not a star. They are a problem that has not become visible yet. The high performer who also embodies the values is the model to replicate.
Departure decisions: when someone leaves or is let go, the values explanation is part of the honest record. If a person violated a core value and that fact is not recorded, the next hire will face the same situation without context.
These three systems are where company core values either take root or die. Most companies skip all three.
Core values of an organization versus team rules
There is a useful distinction that most frameworks collapse.
Core values of an organization are the non-negotiables that apply to everyone, always, regardless of role or seniority. They are the behaviors the founding team would have named before there was a team. They do not change with strategy pivots. They survive leadership transitions. They are the floor, not the ceiling.
Team rules are different. Team rules are the operating norms a specific group develops to work together well. A sales team might have a rule about how quickly to follow up on a lead. A design team might have a rule about how many rounds of feedback happen before a deliverable ships. These are real and important. They are also negotiable and role-specific.
Conflating the two creates problems in both directions. When team rules get elevated to organizational values, the values list becomes unwieldy and inconsistent across departments. When organizational values get treated as team rules, they become optional and context-dependent.
The test is simple: would this value apply to every person in the company, in every role, forever? If yes, it is a candidate for a core value. If no, it belongs in a team handbook, not on the values list.
Most companies need three to seven core values. Fewer than three suggests the founders have not been honest about what actually differentiates their culture. More than seven suggests they have confused values with everything they wish were true about their company.
How to define core values without faking it
The exercise that produces real values is not a brainstorm. It is a retrospective.
Start with your best people. The ones who have been with you through hard moments, who made decisions you were proud of, who you would hire again immediately if they left and came back. List five to ten names.
Ask: what do these people have in common that your average hire does not? Not skills. Not experience. Behaviors. The way they handle conflict. The way they communicate when things go wrong. The way they treat vendors, not just clients.
The behaviors that surface consistently across that group are candidates for core values. They are not aspirational. They are descriptive. You are not writing what you want your culture to be. You are writing what your best culture already is.
Then run the reverse test. Think about the worst cultural fits you have had. The people who were skilled but wrong. What behaviors did they show that your best people never show? If those behaviors are the inverse of what you wrote above, you have confirmation. If they are not, keep digging.
This process takes two to three hours with a leadership team. It is not glamorous. It produces something honest.
Once you have a draft list, run every candidate value through the friction test: can we name someone we did not hire because they failed this value? Can we name someone we let go because they violated it? If the answer is no to both, the value has not been tested. Use it provisionally and watch for the first real test.
Patrick Lencioni's work on organizational health makes the point that values only function when leaders are willing to reward and punish based on them, not just declare them. The same observation shows up in the EOS framework developed by Gino Wickman, where core values are part of the People Analyzer used to evaluate every seat in the company. The tool asks whether each person "gets it, wants it, and has the capacity to do it" for their role, and separately whether they demonstrate the core values. Both scores have to clear. One without the other is not enough.
If your company runs on EOS or a similar operating system, the values are not a separate exercise. They are an input into every hiring decision, every quarterly conversation, and every People Analyzer review.
Frequently asked questions
What is the right number of core values? Most healthy companies land between three and seven. Fewer than three is usually a sign the founders have not been honest about what actually shapes their culture. More than seven means the list has become a wishlist rather than a working tool. If you cannot recite your values from memory without looking, you have too many.
Should core values change over time? Rarely, and only with care. Real core values describe who the founding team actually is, and that does not shift with strategy pivots or market changes. What can change is how a value expresses itself in practice as the company grows. The value stays. The SOPs and interview questions around it evolve.
How do you know if your core values are real? The clearest signal is whether you have ever made a painful decision because of them. Passed on a high-revenue client. Let go of a strong performer. Turned down a partnership. If the values have never cost you anything, they have not been tested. Untested values are not real values yet.
Can AI agents have or reflect company core values? Yes, in a practical sense. The values show up in what an agent is built to do, what it will not do, and how it escalates. At Sneeze It, Pulse, our retention agent, is built around the value that we do not expand a client relationship during a performance downturn. That is a values call embedded in the agent's operating rules. The agent does not feel the value. But it consistently acts on it.
What is the difference between core values and a mission statement? A mission statement describes what you are building and why. Core values describe how you behave while building it. Both matter. They are not the same thing and should not be written at the same time or by the same process.
Run it in OTP
OTP lets you put your core values on the org chart where they actually function, connected to the seats that are accountable for demonstrating them. Tally, our scorecard agent, pushes values-adjacent KPIs into the same dashboard where Bogdan, Janine, and every other seat on the chart is measured. The values do not sit on a wall. They sit on a row.
You can read more about how we built the scorecard layer in Humans and agents on the same scorecard and how we assign seat accountability in Adding an AI agent to your org chart is not configuration. It is hiring..
In Claude Desktop or Cursor or any MCP client, add this block:
"otp": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@orgtp/mcp-server"]
}
Restart the client. Then ask: "Use OTP to show me which seats on our org chart have core values accountability attached to them."