How to Define Company Values That Actually Stick

You’ve seen them before.

“Integrity. Innovation. Teamwork.” Framed in the lobby. Printed on the careers page. Repeated at the all-hands.

And completely ignored by everyone who actually works there.

If you’re a management consultant, you’ve probably walked into dozens of organizations where the stated values have zero connection to daily behavior. The leadership team spent a weekend offsite brainstorming aspirational words, printed them on posters, and called it culture.

Here’s the problem: that’s not how to define company values that people actually live by.

Photo by Nguyễn Hiệp

In this guide, you’ll learn a three-phase methodology for uncovering authentic company values — the ones already embedded in how people behave, make decisions, and treat each other. You’ll also get a framework for identifying the gap between what a company says it values and what it actually values.

No brainstorming workshops. No word clouds. Just evidence.

Why Most Company Values Exercises Fail

Let’s start with the uncomfortable truth.

Traditional values exercises fail because they measure aspiration, not behavior. When you put people in a room and ask “what do we stand for?”, you get the answers they want to be true.

Edgar Schein — the MIT professor who literally wrote the book on organizational culture — described culture as operating on three layers: artifacts (what you see), espoused values (what people say), and underlying assumptions (what people actually believe).

Most values exercises never get past layer two.

Here’s the deal: a survey asking employees to “select your top 5 values” tells you what they think sounds good. It doesn’t tell you what drives their decisions when no one is watching.

Collins and Porras made this point in Built to Last: enduring companies don’t invent their core values — they discover them. The values are already there, embedded in the organization’s DNA. Your job as a consultant is to excavate them.

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The Say-Do Gap: What You’re Really Looking For

Before diving into methodology, let’s name the real deliverable of a company culture assessment: the say-do gap.

This is the distance between what an organization claims to value and what it demonstrably values.

A company might say it values “transparency,” but if promotions consistently go to people who hoard information, that’s a say-do gap. A startup might claim “work-life balance,” but if the CEO sends Slack messages at midnight and expects replies, that gap is a canyon.

Now here’s the thing: the say-do gap isn’t inherently bad. Every organization has one. What matters is whether leadership is aware of it and willing to close it.

As a consultant, your job is to make that gap visible — with evidence, not opinions.

The Three-Phase Method to Define Company Values

This methodology draws on frameworks used by McKinsey, Bain, Deloitte, and the Barrett Values Centre, adapted into a practical three-phase process that any consultant can run.

The open-source Company Values Discovery project on GitHub documents this full methodology in detail — including the 50-value taxonomy used for classification.

Phase 1: Desk Research — Map the Espoused Values

Before you talk to a single employee, you already have a wealth of data.

Phase 1 is about analyzing what the company says about itself across every public surface. You’re building a map of espoused values — the official story.

Sources to analyze:

The company website (About, Careers, Mission pages), social media profiles and posts, employee reviews on Glassdoor and Indeed, press coverage and media interviews, job postings (the language reveals priorities), internal documents if available (handbooks, onboarding materials), and leadership speeches or blog posts.

What you’re looking for:

Recurring themes, language patterns, and value signals. If the CEO’s blog consistently uses language around speed, urgency, and “moving fast,” that’s a data point. If every job posting emphasizes “culture fit” but none mention specific values, that’s also a data point.

Map everything you find against a structured value taxonomy. The Company Values Discovery framework uses a 50-value taxonomy that covers categories from achievement orientation to community impact.

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The output of Phase 1 is a clear picture of the values the organization projects to the world. Think of it as the “official narrative.”

But it gets better.

Phase 2: Behavioral Interviews — Surface the Lived Values

This is where the real work happens.

Phase 2 uses structured behavioral interviews across all levels of the organization. Not surveys. Not focus groups. One-on-one conversations designed to surface what people actually do — not what they say they do.

The key principle here: never ask about values directly.

Instead, you ask about behavior. About decisions. About moments.

Sample questions:

“Tell me about a time you saw someone get recognized or promoted here. What had they done?” This reveals what the organization actually rewards.

“Describe a recent conflict in your team. How was it resolved?” This reveals the real decision-making culture.

“When was the last time someone pushed back on a decision from leadership? What happened?” This reveals the real level of psychological safety.

“What’s something a new hire would be surprised to learn about how things work here?” This is a goldmine for surfacing underlying assumptions.

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The interview structure matters.

You need to talk to people across the org chart — not just senior leaders. Values look very different from the C-suite versus the front line. Aim for a representative sample: different departments, tenure levels, seniority bands, and locations.

Each interview should run 30-45 minutes. Open-ended questions only. And critically, the interviewer needs to probe. When someone gives a vague answer like “we value teamwork,” the follow-up is: “Can you give me a specific example from the last month?”

Here’s the scale challenge, though.

Running 30+ in-depth behavioral interviews is time-intensive. For a large engagement, you could easily spend weeks just on Phase 2. And the quality of insights depends heavily on the interviewer’s ability to build rapport quickly and ask adaptive follow-up questions.

In fact, this is exactly the bottleneck that’s driving more consultants to explore AI-conducted interviews.

Phase 3: Cross-Reference — Find the Truth

Phase 3 is where the magic happens.

You take the espoused values from Phase 1 (what the company says) and compare them against the behavioral evidence from Phase 2 (what people actually do).

You’re looking for three things:

Core values — themes that appear in both the public narrative and the behavioral evidence. These are real. They’re authentic. They’re the values the organization actually lives.

Aspirational values — themes that appear in the public narrative but not in the behavioral evidence. The company says it values innovation, but no one can point to a time someone was rewarded for taking a risk. These are the say-do gaps.

Hidden values — themes that show up strongly in the interviews but are never mentioned publicly. Maybe the company has a deep culture of mentorship that it doesn’t talk about. Or maybe there’s an unspoken value of “don’t rock the boat” that no one would put on a poster.

Photo by Vitaly Gariev

The cross-reference matrix becomes your deliverable. It’s evidence-based, it’s specific, and it gives leadership something they can actually act on.

Think about it: instead of handing over a list of “recommended values,” you’re showing them exactly where their culture is aligned and where it’s not. That’s a fundamentally different conversation.

How to Present Your Findings

The deliverable isn’t a list of values.

It’s a culture map with evidence trails.

For each value you identify — whether core, aspirational, or hidden — you should be able to point to specific data. Quotes from interviews. Patterns from the desk research. Behavioral examples.

Here’s why this matters: leadership teams are far more likely to act on findings when they see their own people’s words reflected back at them. Abstract recommendations get filed away. Specific evidence drives change.

Structure your final report around these elements: a summary of the say-do gap (the headline finding), the core values with behavioral evidence, the aspirational values with the gap analysis, hidden values and their implications, and recommended actions for each gap.

Scaling the Methodology With AI Interviews

Look: the three-phase method works. But Phase 2 — the behavioral interviews — is the bottleneck.

Running 30-50 interviews manually takes weeks. Transcribing them takes more time. Coding them for themes takes even more. And the quality depends on having skilled interviewers who can adapt in real time.

This is where Odevio is changing the game for consultants running company culture assessments.

Odevio is an AI interviewer that conducts adaptive voice interviews at scale. You design the interview guide, set the behavioral questions — and Odevio handles the rest. Participants receive a link, complete the interview on their own time by speaking naturally, and the AI adapts in real time: probing vague answers and exploring unexpected threads.

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Every interview is transcribed, themed, and ready for your Phase 3 analysis. What used to take weeks now takes days.

And the best part: because it’s voice-based and open-ended, the data quality is comparable to human-conducted interviews. Participants speak naturally rather than clicking buttons on a survey. The AI catches the nuances a multiple-choice form never could.

For consultants who want to explore how this methodology works in practice, the full Company Values Discovery framework is open-sourced on GitHub. It includes the complete 50-value taxonomy, interview guide templates, and the cross-referencing computation logic.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Mistake #1: Starting with a values list. Don’t hand people a menu of values to pick from. That’s a survey, not a discovery process. Let the values emerge from evidence.

Mistake #2: Only interviewing leadership. Values look different at every level. If you only talk to the C-suite, you’ll get the aspirational story. The front line tells you the real one.

Mistake #3: Ignoring the hidden values. Hidden values aren’t always negative. Sometimes the most powerful aspects of a culture are the ones nobody thought to name. Make sure your process surfaces them.

Mistake #4: Delivering a list without evidence. “We recommend these five values” is weak. “Here are the three values your people already live, backed by 47 specific behavioral examples” is a different conversation entirely.

Mistake #5: Treating it as a one-time project. Culture shifts. Values evolve. Build in a cadence for reassessment — whether that’s annual or tied to major organizational changes like mergers, leadership transitions, or rapid growth.

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The Bottom Line

Defining company values isn’t about choosing words that sound good on a wall.

It’s about uncovering the behavioral truth of how an organization actually operates — and making that visible to the people who can shape it.

The three-phase approach (desk research, behavioral interviews, cross-reference) gives you an evidence-based methodology that stands up to scrutiny. It separates real values from wishful thinking. And it gives leadership a map they can actually follow.

Whether you run the interviews yourself, use AI to scale them through a platform like Odevio, or combine both approaches — the principle is the same.

Don’t invent values. Discover them.