Corporate values displayed on posters rarely translate into actionable guidance during difficult, real-world decisions.
Reframing "values" as "principles" changes the focus from declarative statements to usable tools for decision-making.
Inconsistent hiring, siloed management styles, and employee cynicism are key indicators that stated values are disconnected from reality.
A six-step sprint framework helps discover what is already true in the company by surfacing stories, clustering themes, and validating them with teams.
Make principles actionable by defining not only the observable positive behaviors but also the explicit anti-behaviors that are not acceptable.
Collect specific stories of both successes and failures to create a library of evidence that demonstrates the principles in action.
Keep principles alive by integrating them into existing processes like hiring scorecards and feedback templates, as shown in a full walkthrough of the six steps.
Learn how to avoid common failure modes like lack of leadership buy-in and test the process with a small, 30-minute team exercise.
The goal is not to create better posters but to fix the connection between words and real-life behaviors so that values guide difficult decisions.
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.