I spent nearly twenty years at a manufacturing company, helped write a section of the employee handbook myself, and couldn't recite a single one of our stated values today without going and looking them up.

That's not a one-time slip. It happened again at the next company — a smaller, family-owned business where the management team genuinely cared about every person there, and I still couldn't point to a solid reason behind what we did. And again at the construction company after that. Three organizations. Three handbooks I had a direct hand in producing. Not one set of values I could tell you from memory.

None of those were bad companies. That's the part worth sitting with.

Naming the Gap

My wife and business partner, Cindy, gave that stage a name: Values Void. It's the first of five stages every organization moves through, and it doesn't mean an organization has no values. Most have plenty — carried around in the heads of the people who founded the place or who've been there the longest.

What's missing is the through-line. Nothing has been written down, defined, and said out loud often enough that a new hire, a client, or a supervisor two levels down could predict what happens next. Decisions still get made, and they're usually defensible one at a time. What's missing is the thing that would let someone see the pattern before it happens.

This is the stage most likely to be mistaken for health, because the people are usually good and the work usually gets done. That's exactly why organizations sit in it for years — sometimes for generations — without ever recognizing it.

What Changes When Values Get Named

We work with a couple, Craig and Kim, who bought a seventy-five-year-old business that had never once documented a mission statement, a handbook, or a set of values. Seventy-five years. Nobody would have called that company broken.

Here's what happened once they closed that gap: fifty percent revenue growth inside two years. Voluntary turnover at roughly a fifth of the national average, over twice the time period. Wage increases across every role. Three additional business acquisitions since.

That isn't the reward for having good values — plenty of organizations have good values sitting quietly in the background. That's the reward for finally writing them down, defining what they look like in practice, and refusing to let a single decision get made outside of them.

Every decision Craig and Kim make in handling a demanding customer ties back to their stated values. Every interaction with every employee, every day, is based on those values. The reputation they're building in their community reflects it.

None of that growth fell into their laps, though. Listing values in a handbook and printing them on the back of a shirt would have made little impact on its own. The challenge in most businesses isn't a shortage of good values — it's that even the most articulate ones rarely get real attention after the ink is dry.

If You Can't Name Yours Right Now

So here's the honest question: could you name your organization's core values right now, without looking them up?

If not, you're not failing. You're in Stage 1 — and it's the easiest stage there is to leave.

The work isn't complicated, but it is specific. It starts with putting your values to actual words rather than a feeling everyone assumes they share. It continues with defining the behaviors that prove someone is living those values, not just agreeing with them in theory. And it holds only when leadership stops treating values as a poster and starts treating them as the standard every decision gets measured against.

We've watched this play out with dozens of clients over the years, and the pattern repeats: the businesses that name their values, define them in specific behavioral terms, and hold every decision to that standard consistently outperform — not because their values are more impressive than anyone else's, but because they're actually in use.

Worth Asking Yourself

• If a new hire, a client, and a longtime employee each described what your organization stands for, would their answers actually match?
• Where's the last place a decision got made that quietly ignored what your organization claims to value?
• What would it cost you — in turnover, in culture, in reputation — to stay in the Values Void for another year?

A mouth will say anything. What an organization actually does, every single day, is the only version of its values that counts.

This post is drawn from The Values Advantage, part of the People Optimization System's Advantage Series. Want to go deep specifically on Values? The Values Optimization Assessment walks through exactly where your organization stands on this pillar. Not sure Values is where you should start? The POS Assessment takes about four minutes and points you to the right pillar first.