Forty-seven priorities. All of them “critical.” That’s what I was staring at during a quarterly planning session at Arcules.
I’d built what looked like a successful company. 150+ employees. Operations across three continents. Canon as our parent company. And I couldn’t name the five things that actually mattered.
A board director pulled me aside after the meeting. His words: “Andreas, you’ve built an efficient company solving the wrong problems.”
He was right. We were perfect at everything that didn’t matter. And the root cause wasn’t strategy. It wasn’t execution. It was this: I’d never defined my core values clearly enough to use them as a filter. So everything felt important. Nothing got cut. And growth stalled for 14 months.
That’s the cost of vague values. Not some abstract leadership lesson. $1M+ in lost revenue and over a year behind the market.
Core values are the operating system behind every decision you make as a CEO. When they’re clear and specific, they compress decision-making, attract the right people, and build a culture that scales without you as the bottleneck. When they’re vague, you end up saying yes to 47 priorities and wondering why your team can’t execute without your constant input.
This guide is the one I wish I’d had at Arcules. It covers what core values actually are, how to define yours with precision, how to pressure-test them against reality, and how to operationalize them so they become a daily leadership tool, not a poster on your wall.
What Core Values Are (And What They’re Not)
Here’s the simplest definition I’ve found useful after working with hundreds of CEOs: core values are the non-negotiable principles you default to under pressure.
Not when things are easy. Not during the quarterly offsite where everyone’s feeling collaborative. Under pressure. When a big client threatens to leave. When you have to choose between short-term revenue and long-term culture. When firing your top performer is the obviously right move but the financially painful one.
In those moments, your real core values reveal themselves.
Patrick Lencioni draws a distinction I use with every founder in my CEO mastermind: there are core values, aspirational values, permission-to-play values, and accidental values. Most companies confuse all four. Core values are the ones that would still define you even if they put you at a competitive disadvantage. Everything else is decoration.
For a deeper breakdown of definitions and examples, I’ve put together a full list of 250+ core values you can use as a starting reference. But don’t start there. Start with your decisions. The list is for narrowing, not brainstorming.
If you want the longer version of what separates real values from corporate wallpaper, read what are core values: the definition most leaders get wrong.
Why Core Values Matter When You’re Scaling
If you’re running a company between $1M and $10M, you’re at the exact inflection point where values become either your greatest asset or your biggest liability. I’ve seen this pattern with every founder I coach. Here’s how it shows up.
Your Values Replace You as the Decision-Maker
The number one challenge for founders at this stage: you’re the bottleneck. Every decision flows through you. Your team waits for your approval. Growth stalls because you can’t clone yourself. I lived this at Arcules. My team literally couldn’t move without my sign-off.
Clear core values fix this at the root. When your team knows exactly what you stand for and how those principles translate into daily operations, they make decisions aligned with your standards without needing you in the room. Values become your proxy.
I worked with a healthcare practice owner running 22 locations. Every operational decision came back to her. We mapped her core values, translated them into three decision filters, and within 90 days her regional managers were handling 80% of decisions autonomously. Not because they got smarter. Because they finally understood the criteria.
That’s why core values matter at this stage more than any other. You can’t scale yourself. But you can scale your judgment through values.
Your Values Determine Who Stays and Who Goes
Hiring and firing based on skills alone is a recipe for a toxic culture. Skills can be taught. Values alignment can’t.
I learned this the expensive way at Arcules. Peter was my Engineering Manager. Brilliant technologist. Also terrible with people. His team had 20% annual turnover. I calculated the cost: $450K per year in recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, and institutional knowledge walking out the door. $1.35M over three years.
We didn’t fire Peter. We used our core values in the workplace as the conversation framework. Stated the facts. Named the impact. Agreed on recovery. Within six months, turnover dropped from 20% to 8%. The values gave us a shared language to have a conversation that most leaders avoid.
For more on building a culture that runs on this kind of honest feedback, read about radical candor and how we implement it in every team we work with.
Your Values Build Trust That Compounds
Brene Brown’s research shows trust is built through consistency between what leaders say and what they do. Core values give you the structure to be consistent even when consistency is inconvenient.
February 14, 2018. While my family was having dinner, I was in the office facing the hardest decision of my CEO career. A private equity firm offered to buy Arcules at a valuation that would set my family up for generations. Terms were excellent. Multiple was generous. Board was enthusiastic. Every logical analysis said “sell.”
But something felt wrong.
It took me three days to realize what was happening. The deal violated a core value I didn’t even know I had. The PE firm’s approach to “human capital optimization” (their euphemism for aggressive layoffs) conflicted with my unnamed but deeply held value around building leaders, not just companies.
I passed on the deal. Eighteen months later, we sold to Canon at a better valuation to buyers who shared our values.
That’s the moment I learned: your real values reveal themselves in your hardest decisions. And most leaders discover them accidentally, expensively, often too late. I’ve identified the specific leadership values that build trust — seven principles backed by the decisions that actually earned my team’s loyalty, not just their compliance. For a deeper dive into how values drive core leadership values and decision-making, I’ve written about the framework I now use with every CEO.
How to Define Your Core Values: The Process That Doesn’t Lie
Most “define your core values” exercises produce a list of nice-sounding words that sit in a drawer. I’ve watched it happen dozens of times. A team goes to a retreat, circles words from a poster, and comes back with “Integrity, Excellence, Teamwork, Innovation.”
Those aren’t values. They’re vocabulary words that no sane person would disagree with.
The process below works because it focuses on three things most exercises skip: specificity, tension, and cost. If you want the full step-by-step walkthrough, I’ve detailed it in how to define your core values. Here’s the compressed version.
Step 1: Look at Your Decisions, Not Your Aspirations
Forget the brainstorming. Pull up your calendar from the last three months and your last ten significant decisions. Your history reveals your values far more honestly than your imagination.
Answer these questions. Write them down. Don’t skip this.
When was the last time I made a decision that cost me money because something mattered more? What’s the one behavior I refuse to tolerate on my team, regardless of that person’s performance? What consistently frustrates me about other leaders? When I’m at my absolute best as a leader, what am I doing and why?
The patterns in your answers are your real values. Not the ones that sound impressive on a wall. The ones you already live.
When I did this exercise after the Arcules acquisition, my answers surprised me. I expected my values to be around innovation and growth. The pattern said something different: building people, moving fast, telling the truth even when it hurts. Three values I’d been acting on for years but never named.
Step 2: Name Them as Phrases, Not Words
One-word values are useless. “Integrity” means something different to every person who reads it.
Robert Glazer, who’s written about this in HBR, argues that effective values should be short, action-oriented phrases. He’s right. Here’s the difference:
Vague: “Honesty” Specific: “Say the hard thing early.”
Vague: “Excellence” Specific: “Ship it better than expected, every time.”
Vague: “Family” Specific: “Protect the non-negotiables that keep me whole.”
The specific version tells you what to do. The vague version tells you what to feel. Feelings don’t scale. Behaviors do.
For more examples of how companies and leaders articulate values with this kind of precision, check out company core values examples that actually work.
Step 3: Pressure-Test for Tension
This is where most exercises fail. They produce a list that’s never been tested against reality.
For each value, ask: “Has this ever cost me something significant? Lost revenue? A relationship? Comfort?”
If the answer is no, it’s not a real value. It’s an aspiration.
The investor I turned down is my favorite example. A potential investor made comments about the women on my leadership team. I passed on the deal. Cost six months of runway. Slept fine. That’s a real value. It cost me something. I’d do it again.
“We value diversity” is a poster. “I will walk away from money that comes with disrespect toward my team” is a value.
Step 4: Narrow to Three. Maybe Five.
Brene Brown recommends two. Lencioni says three to five. I tell every CEO in my program: land on three for your company, and three to five for yourself personally.
Why three? Because three is the number your team can actually remember, recite, and apply in the moment when it matters. If your values require a reference card, they aren’t embedded deeply enough.
For exploring the distinction between what you hold personally versus what your organization should hold, read personal core values for leaders.
How to Operationalize Your Values (So They’re Not Just a Poster)
Here’s where most leaders stop. They define the values, feel good about the exercise, print something for the office, and nothing changes. I’ve done it too.
The harder and more important work is making values functional. Turning principles into daily practice.
Write Rules for Each Value
Every core value needs behavioral rules. Specific guidelines that translate the principle into action. Without rules, values stay abstract.
Example from how we run things at Leaders ADAPT:
Core Value: “Say the Hard Thing Early”
Rule 1: If you have feedback for a team member, deliver it within 24 hours. Not next week. Not at the quarterly review.
Rule 2: Frame honest feedback as respect, not criticism. Saying nothing when something needs to change isn’t kindness. It’s avoidance.
Rule 3: Accept the same standard in reverse. When someone gives you hard feedback, your response determines whether they’ll ever do it again.
That last rule is the hardest. Most leaders want radical candor going one direction. For more on how to build this into your team’s DNA, check out how we implement radical candor in our mastermind groups.
Build Values Into Your Rhythms
Values that exist only in onboarding decks or annual retreats are dead on arrival.
In your weekly team meetings, ask two questions: “Where did we see our values in action this week?” and “Where did we fall short?” This isn’t a feel-good exercise. It’s a calibration mechanism.
In your daily personal routine, review your calendar through the lens of your values. Does how you’re spending your time reflect what you claim to stand for? If health is a core value and you haven’t exercised in three weeks, your calendar is contradicting your principles. Your team will notice the gap before you do.
The Daily Command protocol in The 5-Minute Leader was designed specifically for this. Five minutes each morning to align your day with your priorities and values before the reactive chaos starts.
If you want structured exercises to run this with a group, I’ve put together core values exercises for teams that work for both leadership teams and full companies.
Tie Values to Recognition and Accountability
What gets recognized gets repeated.
Every quarter, identify one person on your team who exemplified a specific value in a meaningful way. Name the value. Describe the behavior. Connect it to the business outcome. This signals to your entire team that values aren’t decoration. They’re criteria.
The flip side matters more. When someone consistently acts against your values, address it. The fastest way to kill a culture is to let a high performer violate your values without consequences.
I almost made this mistake at Arcules. My top sales rep was closing deals but promising things our product couldn’t deliver. His numbers were great. His integrity was garbage. I waited too long to confront it because I was afraid of losing revenue. The cost of that delay was three clients who churned when we couldn’t deliver what he’d promised.
Your team notices who gets a pass. They adjust their behavior accordingly.
Core Values and Leadership Style: The Connection Most Miss
Your core values don’t just guide what you decide. They shape how you lead.
A leader who deeply values autonomy will naturally lean toward delegation and coaching. A leader who values precision will lean toward direct oversight in critical moments. Neither is wrong. But if you don’t see the connection, you’ll fight your own instincts instead of channeling them.
This is the basis of the Type vs. Style distinction we use in the Elite Leader Matrix. Your type (who you are) doesn’t change. Your style (how you behave) flexes based on the situation. Your values are the bridge between the two.
Understanding this connection helps you build complementary teams. If your values skew toward speed and directness (mine do), you can intentionally hire leaders who value thoroughness and patience. That’s how you build a balanced leadership ecosystem instead of an echo chamber.
For more on how these leadership dimensions interact, read about the CEO vs manager mindset and what makes a good leader at the 7-figure stage.
Real Scenarios: Values Under Pressure
Theory is easy. Application is where it gets real. Here are three situations I’ve seen repeatedly with the CEOs I work with.
The Profitable Client Who Poisons Your Culture
You have a client representing 15% of revenue. They’re also disrespectful to your team, demand out-of-scope work without paying, and their contact person yells at your project manager on calls.
Without clear values, this becomes a gut-wrenching debate. Can you afford the revenue hit?
With clear values, the decision is already made. If “Protect the people who protect the mission” is one of your values, the answer is obvious. You fire the client. You absorb the short-term hit. And you gain something worth more than 15% of revenue: your team’s trust that you’ll back them when it counts.
The Hiring Dilemma
Incredible skills. Strong resume. Perfect experience match. But during the interview, they dismiss questions about teamwork and only talk about their own accomplishments.
Without values as a filter, you convince yourself their skills will override the personality concerns. With values, you recognize the red flag and pass. Six months later, the person you hired instead, who had less experience but shared your values, is thriving and lifting the team.
The Tough Quarter
Revenue down. Pressure up. Instinct says cut corners, extend timelines, lower the bar.
Your value of “Ship it better than expected, every time” forces a different path. Cut scope, not quality. Be honest about timelines instead of overpromising. The short-term numbers might not impress anyone. The long-term reputation you build by holding the line during hard quarters is what separates companies that scale from companies that stall.
These are the moments that reveal leadership characteristics that prevent plateaus.
The 5 Mistakes That Kill Core Values
Mistake 1: Too Many Values
If you have more than five, you don’t have core values. You have a wish list. Cut until every remaining value genuinely costs you something to maintain.
Mistake 2: Copying Someone Else’s Values
Your core values aren’t Google’s. They aren’t your favorite author’s. They’re yours. Borrowed values feel hollow because they don’t come from your lived experience. I tried adopting a mentor’s value of “Move fast and break things” early at Arcules. It didn’t fit. My actual value was “Move fast and build right.” Subtle difference. Enormous impact on how I ran the company.
Mistake 3: Values That Never Create Tension
“We value teamwork and excellence.” That’s not a value statement. It’s a sentence no sane person would disagree with.
Real values are specific enough that someone could reasonably hold the opposite position. “We ship fast and iterate” is a value because someone could say “We don’t ship until it’s perfect.” That tension makes it real.
Mistake 4: Values Without Behavioral Rules
A list of words without corresponding behaviors is decoration. If you can’t describe what each value looks like at 9 AM on a Tuesday, it’s not operational yet. This is why values-based leadership requires more than a one-time exercise.
Mistake 5: Values Without Consequences
If violating a core value has no consequences, the value doesn’t exist. Full stop.
The 90-Day Core Values Sprint
If you want to go from vague awareness to fully operational values, here’s the timeline.
Days 1-10: Discovery. Review your decision history. Identify 8-12 patterns. Pressure-test each one. Narrow to 3-5 values. Write them as specific, action-oriented phrases.
Days 11-30: Rules and integration. Write 3-5 behavioral rules for each value. Share your values with your leadership team and ask for honest feedback. Do they see these values in your behavior? Adjust based on reality, not aspiration.
Days 31-60: Communication and testing. Roll out to the full team. Start incorporating values language into weekly meetings. Use values as filters in one hiring decision and one performance conversation.
Days 61-90: Operationalize and measure. Build values into your recognition system. Track how often values are referenced in team decisions. Identify gaps between stated and lived values. Adjust the rules, not the values.
By day 90, your team should be able to recite your values, reference them in decisions, and use them as a filter without prompting. That’s the benchmark.
Frequently Asked Questions About Core Values
What is the difference between personal core values and company core values?
Personal core values are the principles you hold as an individual leader. Company core values are the shared principles that define organizational culture. In founder-led companies, there’s significant overlap because the founder’s values imprint on the culture whether you intend it or not. The key distinction: company values need to be shared and embraced by the entire team. Personal values are yours alone.
How many core values should a leader have?
Three to five for yourself. Three for your company. Brene Brown recommends two. Lencioni says three to five. Every piece of research points the same direction: fewer values, lived deeply, beat a long list lived inconsistently. Three is the number your team can remember and apply in real time.
Can core values change over time?
Your foundational values rarely change. How you articulate and prioritize them may evolve. A health scare might move “Protect my health” to the top of your list. Becoming a parent sharpens what “family first” means in practice. My son Noel’s autism diagnosis changed my understanding of patience and presence completely. The underlying principle stayed. Its expression shifted.
How do core values relate to company culture?
Core values are the DNA. Culture is what happens when values meet daily behavior at scale. You can post values on a wall, but the actual culture is determined by which values are rewarded, which are tolerated when violated, and which are referenced in real decisions. Healthy culture means stated and lived values match. Toxic culture usually means they don’t.
What are examples of strong core values for leaders?
“Say the hard thing early.” “Protect the people who protect the mission.” “Ship it better than expected, every time.” “Earn rest, don’t steal it.” “Decide fast, correct faster.” Notice: phrases, not single words. The specificity makes them usable. For 250+ examples organized by category, check the complete core values list.
How do I know if my core values are actually working?
Three signals. (1) Your team can name them without looking at a document. (2) You hear values language showing up in conversations and decisions you weren’t part of. (3) You’ve made at least one difficult decision (firing a client, passing on a hire, saying no to revenue) specifically because it conflicted with a value. If none of those have happened, your values are still decorative.
Build a Leadership System That Runs on Your Values
Defining your core values is the foundation. But values without a daily system to activate them stay theoretical. I know because I lived it. I could name my values after the Arcules experience. But it took building a structured daily practice to actually live them consistently.
The 5-Minute Leader was built for exactly this moment. Five daily protocols designed for CEOs and founders who need to lead with clarity, make decisions faster, and build a culture that runs without them as the bottleneck.
The Daily Command gives you a 5-minute morning structure to align your day with your priorities and values. The Decision Sprint compresses complex decisions into a rapid framework so you stop overthinking and start executing. Communication Consolidation eliminates the scattered, reactive messaging that fragments your focus and your team’s. The Priority Lock forces you to protect what matters most, even when urgent requests pull you off course. And there’s a fifth protocol that ties the other four together. You’ll find it inside.
Each protocol takes five minutes or less. Together, they create the daily operating rhythm that turns your values from wall art into lived leadership.
