Are your core values wall art?

Somewhere on your organization’s website — usually the About page, often near a photo of people laughing at a whiteboard — there are five words in a nice font. Integrity. Excellence. Community. Collaboration. Maybe Innovation, maybe Compassion.

Here’s a small experiment for your next board meeting. Ask the room to name them without looking.

In most boardrooms, what follows is a thoughtful silence. Somebody gets two. Somebody confidently names a value the organization retired years ago. The executive director gets four out of five and feels genuinely bad about the fifth. And these are the trustees — the people who, at some point, voted to adopt those words.

Nobody in that room did anything wrong. But the silence tells you what the words have become. They’re not values anymore. They’re wall art.

How values turn into decoration

It’s worth being precise about how this happens, because it isn’t carelessness. Values become wall art in three ordinary ways.

They were aspirations wearing values’ clothing. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras drew a useful line, in an HBR article that has aged well, between core values — the things an organization actually holds, and would keep holding even at a competitive disadvantage — and aspirations, the things it would like to become. Both are legitimate. Mixing them is the mistake. When a board publishes “Transparency” while the organization is still learning how to share bad news, everyone inside can feel the gap between the poster and the hallway. The gap breeds a quiet cynicism, and the poster makes the cynicism worse, not better.

They would fit any organization anywhere. No board has ever adopted Sloppiness or Contempt. Which means Integrity and Excellence, standing alone, say almost nothing — they’re the values equivalent of being in favor of weather. If your five words would look equally at home in a hospital lobby, a software startup, and a regional bank, they may be perfectly good words. They just aren’t yours.

They were adopted at a retreat and never consulted again. This is the most common one, and the saddest, because the original conversation was often real. The values got a facilitated Saturday, honest discussion, maybe some genuine feeling in the room. Then they were ratified, sent to the designer — and never appeared on an agenda again. A value that is never consulted isn’t guiding anything. It’s in storage.

The working test

Here is the test, and it’s the only one you need: when did a value last decide something?

Not decorate a decision — decide it. A hire made, or not made, because of a value. An opportunity declined because it didn’t fit one. A budget line defended in a lean year because a value said it had to be. If the board can point to a moment in the last year or two when one of the words tipped a real decision one way instead of the other, the values are working. If the honest answer is “never,” then the values have never cost anything — and a value that never costs anything is indistinguishable from a slogan.

That’s the uncomfortable heart of the Collins and Porras distinction. A core value is something you’d hold even when holding it hurts. The price is the proof.

What working values look like at board altitude

A board doesn’t run programs, so the board’s relationship to its values isn’t about hallway behavior. It’s about decisions — and there are three places the values either show up or don’t.

They get named out loud during hard decisions. When the board is weighing two defensible options — take the restricted grant or pass, expand the program or deepen it — someone asks, in so many words, “which of these actually looks like us?” and points at a value by name. Said seriously, in deliberation, sometimes reflected in the minutes. Values that never enter the room during the hard calls aren’t values the organization holds. They’re values it exhibits.

They live in the evaluation criteria. The executive director’s annual evaluation and the board’s own self-assessment both ask about the values by name: where did we act on them this year, and where did we flinch? A value nobody is ever asked about is a value nobody is accountable to.

They shape who gets recruited and who gets thanked. The nominating conversation includes them — not as a quiz, but as an honest description of what serving here asks of a person. And the thanking matters as much as the recruiting: what a board praises publicly teaches everyone watching what it actually values, whatever the poster says.

Fewer values, held harder

If your list has failed the naming test and the deciding test, the fix is usually not better words. It’s fewer.

Eight values is a list nobody can hold; three is a list a treasurer can recite in the parking lot. Three values the board would genuinely pay for — in declined money, in harder hires, in awkward conversations — are worth more than eight it would frame. So cut until the board can remember what’s left without looking. Then start saying the survivors out loud, at real decision points, until forgetting them becomes impossible.

The wall can keep the poster. Just make sure the poster is a record of something, not a substitute for it.