Hello Hello…

Happy Bank holiday Monday (and the sun is out)

Grab a coffee (or tea) for this one as it long, today we are looking at why your values aren't landing, and why communicating harder will never fix it.

TL;DR: Values don't fail because they're wrong, they fail because nobody designed them to be lived and felt.

I was on a call with someone who'd just been handed a culture programme. Four behaviours crafted by leadership before he arrived. His job was to "make them land" across the organisation. He read me the first one. "Act with ownership." I asked him what the other three were. He laughed and said…Vanilla, vanilla, vanilla, vanilla.

He wasn't being cynical, just accurate. He'd been in enough organisations to know what happens next. The values get printed, they get put on everyone's screensaver, get mentioned in a big town hall supported by lots of nodding heads.

Then Monday morning arrives and nobody behaves any differently, because nothing about the experience of those values ever touched them…at all.

I've sat across from enough CPOs and People Directors to know this is one of the most common frustrations in the building. You've got values, principles or what not. They're on the wall, in the handbook, on the careers page. They sound right, they probably are right to be fair and yet nobody gives a shit about them.

In my experience most employees can't name their values, let alone share how the values align to them on any given day.

The instinct that makes it worst

The instinct is to communicate harder with better comms, maybe even a quick leadership alignment session or a values ambassador programme if you're really going for it.

None of it works, the Edelman Trust Barometer has been telling us for years that employees don't believe what their employers tell them. You're trying to “tell” people into caring about something they've never felt, and they've already stopped listening..

What feeling a value looks like

I once worked with a tech scale up. They had a set of principles, one of which was "Own The Mistakes." A good principle that nobody lived. After running a diagnostic across the org, one of the friction markers was "value veneer," people walking past the poster saying own the mistake to go and blame someone else.

So we rented a space, put cameras everywhere and invited all the leaders and put them into mini squads.

In each station was a little envelope which simply said, bake a cake with the ingredients laid out, your ovens are already heated, your timer starts now.

What we didn't tell them was that we'd swapped some ingredients. Self-raising flour gone, one egg instead of two. Every cake was going to fail, not because anyone messed up, because the conditions made success impossible.

And then we watched.

The second a cake didn't rise, the blame started. "Bob, you didn't put the flour in." "That was your fault, you put it in too early." Instant and reflexive, nobody paused. Nobody said, "Hang on, maybe the conditions are the problem." They just pointed fingers, because that's what stress does when accountability hasn't been felt.

Then once the timers stopped and the blame hit its peak, we got each person to write down in an envelope who was to blame. Nobody would see it but them. Then we played back the videos. Told them the truth, that nobody was ever going to succeed because the ingredients were rigged. The room went quiet. We asked them to open their envelope, for their eyes only.

This was the moment. This is where they could see themselves doing the exact thing the principle was supposed to prevent.

They saw the gap between who they thought they were and how they behaved when conditions got hard. That's behaviour change through designed experience. And that silence did more for accountability than any workshop or toolkit ever could.

That's what I call the difference between intending a value and living it. Most values programmes operate entirely at the level of intention.

Here's the value, here's what it means, crack on. But intention without a why is wallpaper.

The missing layer

Micro experience design is often the missing layer. Instead of real experience design many orgs opt for BS team-building days, escape rooms or trust falls. Fun, absolutely, but designed to make someone live the behaviour the value describes, they are not.

I've seen this work with communication values too. Get two strangers, put them in a space that strips away the professional armour, armed with a few real human questions like:

The value you spent six months trying to cascade through toolkits happened in six minutes because the environment did the work. You didn't teach communication. You built a moment where communication was the only thing that could happen.

These don't have to be big production moments. During Covid, I ran a little experience for my LinkedIn network. Ten people, no brief, just click the link. They cracked a code, picked a number, gave me their address. Something arrived at their door. A pottery kit, a paint set, a pink flamingo. Because it wasn't about the object, it was about the feeling of someone going, here, I thought about you. Experience design doesn't need a big space and hundreds of leaders.

Sometimes it just needs a pink flamingo and the right question

The two tests your values are probs failing

There's a simple test you can run right now.

If yes, what you have isn't a value. It's a generic sentence your competitors are also saying. "Act with ownership," "act with integrity," "put people first." All corporate bullshit and marketing. I once remember working for a large HR director who summarised their values as propaganda. He was dead right. Your people know it, which is why they nod politely and carry on doing whatever they were doing before.

Second test is more brutal simply ask:

If this value disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice?

If no, or not until performance time then it's nice to have. And nice to have is the death of culture, because nice to have means optional, and optional means invisible.

Values as a subscription

When I talk about experience of work as a subscription, values are the currency, because your culture is the thing people subscribe to when they choose to stay. The reason someone thinks twice before taking the competitor's offer. But if your values could belong to anyone, if removing them would change nothing, there's nothing worth staying for. An extra hundred quid a month and your values won't even enter the conversation.

This isnt a solo HR/PX problem

When your values are wallpaper, you haven't just got a culture problem. You've got a strategy problem. Values are supposed to be a lens for how you make decisions, set direction, and hold a transformation together when things get messy. When nobody feels them, nobody uses them. Your strategy has no thread running through it. Every transformation becomes a set of instructions people follow until the pressure hits, then they default to whatever they were doing before. Values that live on a wall can't hold anything together, but values that live in the experience of your people can hold everything together and be used to hold each other to account in all directions.

So what can you actually do?

Stop communicating values and start deconstructing them. Take "act with ownership." Start with the word. What does "act" look like? What is "ownership," what does it look like, how does it show up, what words live inside it?

Responsibility, follow-through, initiative, accountability. All building blocks hiding inside one word that nobody has ever unpacked for the people expected to live it.

Now take it across someone's whole life, the full version of them, their "work self" and their "weekend self." What does ownership look like personally?

Imagine your child is watching you. How would you demonstrate it as a role model? It might look like keeping the promise you made, even when it's inconvenient. Being the one who says "I got that wrong" before anyone else has to point it out. In your family life, picking up the thing that's been sitting there for a week because it's yours to deal with. Now professionally. Stepping into the gap when something falls between teams. Saying "that's mine" when nobody's assigned it yet. Completely different behaviours attached to the same word. If you hand someone one word and expect them to live all of that without ever pulling it apart, you're dreaming.

Take it even further

How does ownership shift when the situation and state changes? A manager who's calm, rested, and backed by their team will show ownership one way. That same manager under restructure pressure, half their team gone and a board presentation on Friday, will show it completely differently, or won't show it at all.

The value hasn't changed but the situation and state have, and that gap is where leadership hypocrisy comes from. Leaders aren't liars. Nobody designed for what happens to the value when the pressure changes. When your senior team drops the behaviour the moment things get hard, everyone else sees it. And the cynicism that follows isn't about wrong values, it's about unsupported ones.

Then thread it into everything. How does this value shape the questions you ask in interviews? How does it show up in onboarding, in performance reviews, in how you handle someone's first mistake, in how someone re-enters the building after maternity leave? The value can't live in a handbook. It has to be woven into how you hire, how you develop, how you recognise, how you let someone go. Attraction through to exit. If it's not threaded through your value chains, it's not part of the experience. It's floating above it.

I've run strategy workshops where we spent hours identifying and validating values then threading them into the strategy as a lens for direction. Mapping them into the value chains so they show up in how the business operates. Without that work you're asking people to live something that has no structural home.

And the experience has to come before the toolkit. Someone builds a beautiful set of resources and nobody uses them, because there's no emotional weight behind the thing the resource supports. Design the feeling first and the resource follows.

If your people can't feel it, they can't live it. And if they can't live it, you're just decorating walls and honestly they painter and decorators can do a better job