Off the wall

Hands up who’d rather stick pins in their eyes than:

• Read another staff room poster about ‘respect’, ‘integrity’, or ‘care’.
• Attend another lukewarm workshop about ‘aligning synergies with our core purpose’.
• Sit through another slide deck with that quote about people forgetting what you said and did, but never how you made them feel.

It’s fair to say that these days, ‘values’ have something of an image problem.

To employees, values usually just mean words on a poster. To leaders, values are all too often things to be outsourced to HR, rather than integrated into meaningful leadership practice. To IC professionals like us, they can be frustratingly vague, overly aspirational, impossible to measure, lacking in purpose or accountability, and entirely divorced from everyday actions or systems.

The worst thing about all this?

We have never needed values more.

Or rather, we have never needed values-led leadership more.

Trust is at an all-time low

Over the last few years we’ve had political turmoil, economic hardship, and wide spread disinformation. The advent of AI means we often can’t even trust what is in front of our own eyes.

The Edelman Trust Barometer puts trust in UK business at 39%. And while most UK businesses have ‘values’ - about 80% of large organisations share them on their websites - they’re just not living up to them. Research by Nottingham Trent University earlier this year showed just 18% of employees feel their organisation’s values align with the actual culture, while only 25% believe their leaders live up to them.

Yet ‘demand pull’ for values-led companies has never been higher; from customers, partners, society and employees.

LinkedIn report an increase of 154% in entry level job adverts that reference company culture, and two times as many applications for job ads that mention company values.

68% of workers in Europe want to work for companies whose values align with their own. This rises to 87% in the US, which perhaps isn’t so surprising, especially if you’ve watched  shows like Superstore, which highlight how corporate ‘care’ is usually anything but.

So how do we take our values off the wall and embed them into leadership?

The Four A’s of value-led leadership

In our experience, values must meet the four A’s in order to be meaningful. To give you an idea of what this looks like in practice, we’ve included some organisations who exemplify each.

1. Authentic: Values are connected to the tangible, daily reality of employees. Leadership lives up to the promises their values make.

BT Group

‘Personal’ is one of BT Group’s values, ‘we treat others as we’d like to be treated’. Earlier this year, when other organisations stepped back from inclusion and DEI commitments following the Trump administration’s policies, CEO of BT, Allison Kirkby, told her 117,000‑strong workforce, “not here, not at BT”. She then personally issued a memo to all employees, reaffirming BT’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. She has also reinforced real policies, including paid leave for carers, extended paid parental leave, and representation goals (aiming for 50‑50 gender split and 25% ethnic minority representation by 2030). In doing so, Kirkby makes inclusion a lived, ongoing practice, not a symbolic pledge.

2. Aspirational: Values stretch toward the future and challenge people to grow, whilst remaining achievable and measurable.

Burberry

The luxury fashion industry is not known for being ‘open and caring’, so at first glance these claims might seem a bit unrealistic when you read them as Burberry values. But look a bit closer and you soon see that ‘open and caring’ are woven into the very essence of who they are. Burberry was the first luxury fashion brand to receive Science Based Targets Initiative approval for its net-zero emissions target, and one of the first labels to be analysed and rated for the Standard Ethics rating company’s European Fashion and Luxury Index, securing a ‘strong’ sustainability compliance. It also provides detailed information on what it is doing. For example, it has helped 653,597 people in its community programmes since 2022, lists 383 on-site social compliance audits across its supply chain in this financial year, and shares the percentage of women holding leadership roles (58%).

3. Aligned: Values are embedded across all touchpoints, including purpose, strategy and the everyday treatment of employees and stakeholders.

Specsavers

‘Genuine care for one another’ is the first value Specsavers lists on its website. But they don’t just leave it there, continuing to say, ‘To live these values daily we follow a set of defining behaviours…’. In other words, people know what they need to do on a day-to-day basis. This starts all the way at the top; founder and owner Dame Mary Perkins famously handwrites staff birthday cards, and ‘genuine care’ runs all the way through from small personal touches like this, to the organisation’s structural DNA. Each store is part-owned and run by store partners who receive a percentage of profits. Last year, pre-tax profit stood at £323.6 million. Yes, we definitely should have gone to Specsavers.

4. Actionable: Values are visible in daily behaviours, decisions and ways of working.

Aviva

Aviva leadership doesn’t just express the values of Care, Commitment, Community, and Confidence, they translate them into operational policies and public advocacy. The organisation is one of the first UK employers to be accredited for all three Living Wage Foundation standards - Living Wage, Living Pension and Living Hours. It actively participates in the Government’s Keep Britain Working Review, and publicly advocates for national standards to improve workplace health.

Let’s stop treating values like wallpaper

When values are aspirational only, they become noise. When they’re lived, they shape behaviour. And when they’re embedded in leadership, they drive real performance. That’s where we, as IC professionals, come in. We’re here to make values stick, to challenge the gap between what leaders say and do, and to connect values to real behaviours, systems, and decisions. We’ve got the platform, the language, and the access to help take values off the wall and turned into something people can actually see, feel, and trust.

Just promise not to use that quote.