The third in a series of deep-dive guides on building Purposeful Organizational Pillars
🧭 INSPIRE
The Difference Between Values That Guide and Values That Decorate
Do your core values breed co-created stories?
If the answer came quickly, if stories and names surfaced without hesitation, you’re already doing something most organizations aren’t. If there was a pause, or if the question itself felt unfamiliar, keep reading. That gap is exactly what this post is about.
Walk into almost any organization and you’ll find core values somewhere. On the website. On a poster in the lobby. In the employee handbook. Sometimes all three.
And if you ask people to tell you what they are without looking them up? Or share a story about how they’re lived out? That’s where things get quiet.
I’ve lived this from both sides. As a school principal, I inherited an organization with no core values at all, just a blank slate waiting to be filled with something meaningful. Years later, I walked into an organization that had core values. Four of them, professionally designed, clearly displayed.
They were: Student-Focused. Innovative Leadership. Collaborative Relationships. Diversity & Inclusiveness.
And here’s the honest truth about those four values: every single one of them was something we genuinely believed in. Not a word of it was wrong. But not a word of it was uniquely ours either. Any school district in the country could have claimed those same four values without changing a syllable. They were aspirational in the vaguest possible way and because of that, they weren’t doing anything. They weren’t guiding decisions. They weren’t showing up in how people talked about their work. They weren’t being lived in a momentum-building kind of way.
That gap, between values that exist and values that actually do something, is what this post is about.
The difference, I’ve come to believe, comes down to one word: sticky.
What Makes Core Values Sticky
The concept of sticky core values came out of our work at Taylor Mill Elementary, a task group wrestling with what it would actually mean to have values that mattered. After diving into the research and sitting with what we knew from experience, we landed on a simple test: a sticky core value is one that tells a story that makes people curious enough to ask, “What does that mean?”
That curiosity is the signal. It means the value is specific enough to be distinctive, human enough to carry meaning, and real enough to make people lean in.
Effective core values share three qualities: they are authentically distinctive, reflecting what truly sets a team apart; genuinely guiding, serving as a clear filter for decisions and behaviors; and deeply internalized, memorable, rich with shared stories, and demonstrated through daily actions. (You can read more about those three qualities in The Power of Purposeful Organizational Pillars.) Those three are the destination. But knowing you’ve actually arrived there requires a gut-check… a way to test whether what you’ve built is truly sticky or just well-intentioned. That’s where the following criteria come in.
To get there, we developed a set of criteria… a gut-check for whether a value is truly sticky or just well-intentioned:
- We will defend it and won’t look away — even when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient
- It reflects reality, not aspiration — who we are, not who we wish we were
- It guides all decisions — including the hard ones
- It tells a meaningful story people want to understand — and make their own by living it out loud
Run any set of core values through those four criteria and you’ll know quickly whether you have values that guide and shape or values that merely decorate.
Student-Focused? Innovative Leadership? Collaborative Relationships? Diversity & Inclusiveness? Every one of those fails the first criterion immediately. No one is going to defend Collaborative Relationships when it gets hard. No one is going to look someone in the eye and say, “That decision doesn’t reflect our commitment to Innovative Leadership.” The language is too safe, too generic, too aspirational to hold any weight in the real moments that matter.
Sticky values are different. They run deep. They make people think. And when they’re right, they become the fabric of how a team agrees to show up… for the work, and for each other.
✏️ CREATE
Step-by-Step: How to Build Core Values That Stick
Core values work is some of the most meaningful — and most challenging — cultural work a team can do. It requires honesty, creativity, and a willingness to sit with uncertainty long enough for something true to emerge. What follows isn’t a shortcut. It’s a process that honors the grittiness of the opportunity and rewards the patience.
A note before you begin: If you’re coming to this work having already led mission or vision work with your team, you’ll bring a useful lens. The criteria for sticky values are ones I had internalized from our Taylor Mill experience before I led the NKCES process… and that shaped how I framed the work from the start. If you’re newer to this, lean on the criteria above. They’ll serve as your compass throughout.
1️⃣ Establish the Criteria Together
Before a single value is proposed, your team needs a shared understanding of what you’re actually building toward. This is what separates values work that produces something real from values work that produces a list of nice-sounding words.
Bring your representative working group into a conversation about what sticky actually means. Share the criteria. Look at and talk through examples of values that resonate versus values that don’t. Invite people to name organizations whose values they genuinely admire and articulate why.
This step does something important beyond just building shared language: it gives everyone permission to push back later. When the criteria are established upfront, the question “Does this pass the gut-check?” becomes a shared, clear filter, not a leader’s veto. That changes the energy of the whole process.
Pro tip: if you’re bringing the criteria to the group rather than co-developing them, introduce them as a starting point and invite the group to react and claim them. By the time you start generating ideas, they shouldn’t feel like yours anymore — they should feel like everyone’s.
2️⃣ Generate Without Editing
Here’s where the real work begins… and where the temptation to get it right too quickly will undermine everything.
At Taylor Mill, we used a strategy I love called 100 Bad Ideas. The premise is simple: instead of reaching for the perfect answer, you commit to generating as many ideas as possible, bad ones encouraged and welcomed. When you take the pressure off quality, creativity opens up. People start bringing their real thoughts instead of their polished ones. And hidden in that messy, sprawling list of not-quite-right ideas are the seeds of something true.
We set out to create 100 stories – real stories tied to things we thought might represent who we were as a school. Not polished values statements. Stories. What happened in that meeting. What someone did when it was hard. What we were proud of when no one was watching. What we stood for and why. (The 100 is less a target than a permission slip. We stopped when we sensed we had the seeds of something real.)
Get everything out before you start narrowing anything down. More ideas, more honesty, more mess first. The refinement comes later.
In both cases, the generation phase was slower and more uncomfortable than anyone expected. That’s normal. Sit in it.
3️⃣ Reflect, Gather, Return… and Repeat
This is the step that separates values that stick from values that were just convenient on the day you wrote them.
After the initial generation, don’t rush to narrow down. Instead, give people time, individually and in informal conversation with colleagues, to let the ideas marinate. What’s still resonating a few days later? What felt exciting in the room but falls flat on reflection? What did someone say in the hallway that reframed everything?
At both Taylor Mill and NKCES, we returned to the work multiple times before we felt confident. Each time, the group came back having done informal temperature checks with colleagues, having reflected individually, and having let some ideas quietly drop away while others kept rising to the surface.
This iterative rhythm — generate, reflect, gather informal feedback, return — is where the real distillation happens. By the time you’re ready to move to the next step, you shouldn’t be choosing from a long list anymore. You should be clarifying something that has already mostly chosen itself.
Run each emerging value through the criteria. Does it pass? Can you defend it? Does it tell a story? Is it real, not just aspirational? Keep only what earns its place.
4️⃣ Reveal, Seek Feedback, Refine
When your working group has arrived at a set of values you’re genuinely proud of, ones that have passed the criteria and that everyone in the room can speak to with commitment, it’s time to bring them to the full team.
This step matters more than many leaders realize. Not because the working group might have gotten it wrong, but because the full team’s engagement with the values is what begins to make them real. A value revealed is just a proposal. A value understood, questioned, and internalized is the beginning of a culture.
At NKCES, we introduced each value to the full team and told the story behind it… why this phrase, what it meant to us, where it came from. Then we genuinely asked for feedback. Not a vote. Not approval. Real input: What resonates? What’s missing? What would make this feel more like us?
We took that feedback back to the working group, sat with it one more time, and made final refinements. Then, and only then, did we call them ours.
5️⃣ Activate — Make Them the Fabric, Not the Frame
Writing the values is the beginning. The real (and fun!) work is making them live.
At Taylor Mill, our four sticky core values — The Genius of AND, Mind in Boat, Just Like Roosevelt, and Turn the Ship Around — were introduced through storytelling. Each one had an origin, a moment, a reason. And because those stories were shared widely and returned to often, people didn’t just know the values. They could tell you why they mattered. (You can read the story behind each one: Sticky Core Values.)
At NKCES, we activated our values through a rhythm: at our team retreat to kick off the year, we dedicated real time to storytelling and meaning-making around each value. Then we chose one value each month to focus on, celebrate, and deepen. We looked for examples in the daily work. We named them when we saw them. It didn’t take long before they started showing up everywhere… in how people framed decisions, in how they supported each other, in how they described their work to outsiders.
That’s the moment you know you’ve built something real: when the values stop being something leadership references and start being something the team reaches for on their own.
Reference them in meetings. Use them as a filter when decisions get hard. Celebrate stories that embody them. Let new team members learn not just what the values are, but where they came from and why they matter. The story is part of the value.
And revisit them periodically. Sticky values aren’t static. They deepen over time as new stories accumulate and iterate and new team members add their own meaning to them.
🌀 AMPLIFY
Ready to Do the Work?
Download the resource below to guide your team through each phase: establishing criteria, generating freely, iterating through reflection, gathering team-wide feedback, and activating your values in the daily life of your organization. Feel free to edit and make it your own.
Whether you’re starting from a blank slate or breathing new life into values that exist on paper but aren’t yet alive in practice, this resource will walk you through each step with reflection questions, facilitation prompts, and drafting guides designed for real teams doing real work
🧭 Download the Core Values Worksheet
This post is part of the Purposeful Organizational Pillars series. Read the full overview: The Power of Purposeful Organizational Pillars. Next up: the goals that turn your vision into measurable, motivating action.
Melody Stacy is the Founder of Culture of Belief and creator of The 5-Minute Mentor. She has led mission, vision, and values work at two organizations — first as a school principal and later as Chief Academic Officer of a regional service agency — and writes about leadership development, team culture, and the practices that help people bring their best to their work.
#CultureofBelief
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