When most business owners hear the word values, they think of words on a wall: honesty, teamwork, integrity. But in a growing company, values are not decoration. They’re a decision-making system that keeps your culture aligned as you scale.
As a business grows, the founder’s direct influence fades. You can’t be in every meeting or make every call. That’s when values become powerful—they help everyone know what “right” looks like, even when you’re not in the room.
Strong values make hiring easier because they define who fits. They simplify management by clarifying what behaviors are rewarded. And they strengthen customer loyalty by shaping how your team consistently delivers the brand promise. In short, values translate culture into daily action.
Bringing Values to Life
In the Scaling Up framework, we use the Mission to Mars exercise to bring values to life. Imagine sending a small team from your company to Mars to represent the best of your culture. Who would you choose? What traits make them ideal ambassadors? As you describe those people, the true values of your organization start to surface – not the ones you wish you had, but the ones you actually live.
Testing Whether Your Values Are Real
A simple test for whether your values are real is whether you can tell stories about them – stories of people who lived them out, decisions made because of them, or times they guided the team through challenge.
If you have to look them up to remember them, they’re not truly driving behavior. But when they show up naturally in conversation, recognition, and stories, that’s when values move from a poster to a practice.
When lived consistently, values don’t just make a company feel good, they make it work better.