We’ve all heard how important company values are; they are the basis of the culture of our company and we spend hours upon hours writing them, agreeing on them, training on them, hiring against them, and putting them on walls. And secretly (or maybe not so secretly), we all roll our eyes and know they’re bullsh*t.

Here’s why.

Most companies put up aspirational values – ways they WANT the team to act – ways they aspire to behave. But for every minor infraction of those values, every time a leader doesn’t act in alignment with those values, it immediately discredits all of the values, all of the time. Employees immediately know the values statements are just lip service because even the leaders aren’t following them. Yet how can a leader align with an aspirational value 100% of the time? It’s impossible. I aspire never to yell at my kids, but the 314th time I’ve asked for the dirty underwear to be picked up – I’m probably yelling it.

Values aren’t something you choose. A person’s values form slowly, throughout their life, and they are reflective of how the person actually acts. Values manifest in your behaviors, not in your words. You can’t choose them from a list, you can’t ship them over to marketing for wordsmithing. A company’s lived values are reflective of the founders’ personalities and how they behave, or if the founders aren’t there anymore, the CEO and executive team’s behaviors – and rarely are they the same as the company’s stated values.

If you say transparency is a company value, and you don’t share the board deck with the employees, boom, values shot. If you claim ownership as a value, but there are 4 layers of decision approvals, boom, values shot. If you claim constant improvement as a corporate value, but have zero mechanisms for doing retros on all decisions and actions, or rarely make changes to your processes, boom, values shot. Values have to be reflective of how you actually act, not how you want to act.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have aspirational values. I think it’s phenomenal to have 2 sets of values, 3 actual values, and 3 aspirational ones. But distinguish between them so everyone knows what you’re trying to do and how it is today. Otherwise, it’s total bullsh*t.

Since the company’s values tend to reflect the founders’ or the CEO’s values, it’s important to know what those are and use those as a foundation for the company. The trick is that you as the founder probably don’t know what your values are, because it’s just in how you behave every day. But everyone else can see them. If you want to do a values exercise, try this. Brene’ Brown has a great values worksheet. Fill it out for yourself, but then ask 5-10 people closest to you to fill it out for you. Ask them what they believe your values are. Your values are likely the ones the respondents identified and overlap. Have your co-founders do this same exercise, and the 3 or so respondent-identified overlaps between the co-founders are probably the right ones.

There’s something magical that happens when the right values are identified and listed. It’s like a collective exhale. The founders and leaders are acting in integrity with the values all the time, and the rest of the team now knows how to behave. And you really can start hiring for it, promoting for it, and using it as a guide to make decisions.