Your Values Are Not a Poster. Here Is How to Find the Real Ones.

Tuesday, March 20th, 2018. First day of spring. Full of hope, optimism and a fresh start. It also happens to be your first day at Initech.

Little do you know that in two years the world will be shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. You will not even be at this office for a solid 18 months. The world will be upside down and you will need to navigate a global crisis the likes of which the world had not seen since the Spanish Flu.

But that is not today.

Today you are starting your new position as a Client Services Associate, responsible for handling all of the key accounts on the east coast. You have built solid relationships in the ad tech space and you cannot wait to leverage your knowledge with your new company.

You are greeted at the front door by the HR representative, Peggy. It is her job to get you onboarded. She will show you the conference rooms you can book and the ones you cannot. She will show you the coffee machine, which you already know will have 17 different variations of pumpkin spice. And she will show you your glamorous desk, which happens to be part of the open floor plan concept. Perfect for you since you will be on the phone. All. Day.

Peggy then says you will head to conference room 325. She will walk you through medical benefits, special perks, the 401k plan, and their amazing culture. If Initech has the budget, they will show you a four-minute culture video. Orientation will also cover the values that Initech shares and what they expect from their employees.

Because conference room 325 is where they do all their orientation, you notice a few motivational posters on the wall.

“Dedication: It is the effort of many that creates the ripples that can move mountains.” Charming lake.

“Execution: Put in the work and let the results do the talking.” Snowcapped mountain.

“Mindset: The driving force in the quest for success and achievement.” Bald eagle.

It may be your first day at Initech, but you have seen similar posters at every company you have ever worked at. Then the core values screen comes up in Peggy’s presentation. Dedication, Execution, and Mindset are the first, fourth, and seventh core values at Initech.

Those were not random posters someone pulled from Amazon. Those are their actual core values.

Did not see that coming, did you?

They have eight core values total. How did they land on eight? Who knows. Maybe it is the CEO’s high school jersey number. Maybe it is Peggy’s favorite number. Somehow they got to a solid eight.

Sometimes an entire company’s core value system is derived out of thin air. Buzzwords that make little sense when you actually try to live by them. Because the real values are not on that poster. They are in what the company actually does when nobody is watching.

The Gap Between Stated and Real

Most companies have two sets of values. The stated values are the posters. The operating values are everything else.

A company that says it respects your time and offers work-life balance is usually not the company emailing you at 11pm on a Sunday. There are exceptions. Someone might email at 11pm because that is what works for them. They went to their kid’s soccer game Friday afternoon, spent the weekend in the Berkshires, and Sunday night at 11pm was when they could finally sit down in a quiet house. That is real work-life balance. It is not 9-to-5. It is getting to do the things that fill your cup outside of the office.

But that is usually not what is happening.

What is usually happening is this. A well-known influencer tries a new skincare product and hates it. She posts about it. The client calls the CEO at 7pm furious. The CEO calls the Director of Social Media. The Director sends you the 11pm email. You are the PR consultant. You need to reach out to the influencer. Send free products. Get her to rescind the review. Make it disappear. This is a four-alarm emergency and solutions need to happen now.

Is it really that serious? You are not curing cancer. Nobody needs an emergency room. This can wait until Monday morning.

The gap between what companies say they value and what they actually value is where most professionals begin to lose trust. And when that trust is gone, people start looking for the door.

What a Real Value Looks Like

Google’s number one core value: “Focus on the user and all else will follow.”

Google was not the first search engine. I would argue Yahoo provides more utility. You go to Yahoo and you get news, sports, entertainment, games, and travel all on one page. You go to Google’s homepage and there is a search bar. That is it.

But Google understood something nobody else did. The user wants simple. You type something in and you get the best result, fast, without noise. Every time Google has drifted from that core value it has struggled. Google+ lasted about seven years. They wanted to compete with Facebook in the social networking space. It did not work. Major security issues, low engagement, and an experience that felt like Google trying to be something it was not.

Their core value was never a poster. It was a decision they made every day across every product they built.

It is why Google became a verb. Nobody is Yahooing things. Nobody is AskJeeving anything. We are Googling.

The professionals who become verbs are the ones whose values show up consistently, not just on their first day at a new job.

Three Questions to Find Your Real Values

Patrick Lencioni wrote: “Values are only real if they cost you something.”

Think about what that means in practice. Maybe you took a job for the money knowing it conflicted with everything you stood for. Your spouse had quit smoking three years earlier and you went to work for a tobacco company. The salary was too good to pass up. You told yourself it was just a job. But Monday morning felt wrong and it kept feeling wrong until you left eighteen months later having spent a year and a half somewhere your values did not live.

That cost you something. Not just the discomfort. It cost you the certainty of knowing who you are.

Think about someone you know. Let us call them Ray. Ray spent 20 years as a police officer. His value was never “public safety.” That is a poster. His real value was simpler: he showed up when nobody else would. That value followed him into his second career in crisis consulting. Different industry. Same commitment. People do not call Ray because of his resume. They call him because they know what he stands for.

Here is how you find yours. Three questions. Answer them honestly.

What decision have you made in your career that cost you something — money, status, comfort — because it was the right thing to do?

What would you refuse to do professionally even if it paid extremely well?

If your closest colleague described your professional values to a stranger, what would they say?

Your answers are not aspirational. They are archaeological. Your real values are already written in the decisions you have already made. You just have to go back and read them.

I connect people with opportunity. That is my value. Not a mission statement. Not a poster. A decision I make every day whether I am placing a candidate, selling a house, or recruiting members for a drum corps.

Can I put it on a poster? Sure. But why waste the ink?