Core values that a small team will actually use in decisions

Choose core values by looking at the last three hard calls you made, not by brainstorming words. In each, note what you gave up and what you protected. What you protected, more than once, is a value. Then test each candidate with one question: would I accept losing an order to keep this? If not, it is a preference, and it comes off the list. Three or four that survive are enough for a team of ten.

Why do so many value lists end up on a wall and nowhere else?

Lists like this are often written in one sitting with a pen and a sense of occasion. "Integrity, Excellence, Teamwork, Customer First." They could hang in any company, so they decide nothing. When a salesperson asks whether to give a discount to a buyer who threatens to leave, "Customer First" has no answer.

A useful value settles an argument. It tells a new hire what to do when the owner is not in the room. The way to find one is to look at times when you were in the room and had to choose.

How do I find the values in the last three hard calls?

Take a sheet of paper and write down three decisions from the past year where two good things pulled apart. Not crises, just calls that cost you something. For each, write four lines: what happened, what you chose, what it cost, and what you were protecting.

Here is a filled sheet for an invented tyre retreading workshop in Tirunelveli that serves lorry and bus operators.

Read the last column across several calls. Where two rows say the same thing, you have found one value. Where a row says something you are uncomfortable with, such as "we protect the margin before the customer", do not hide it. Decide whether you want it to be a value or a habit to change.

Which values should you drop?

Apply the order test to every candidate. Say it aloud: "I would rather lose an order than break this." Notice which ones you hesitate on.

Hesitation means the value is a hope. "Fast service" is the usual one. Many owners would not lose an order to keep every promise of speed, because speed gets traded against price every week. "Quality" fails the same way unless you can say what you would reject. "We do not ship a product that has failed our own check" passes, because you can name a day you refused.

A value that survives goes down as a sentence a new joiner could act on. "Integrity" tells nobody anything. "We tell the buyer before they find out" does.

What does a value look like in the workshop?

In the retreading shop, the first draft read "Safety, Quality, Teamwork". It fitted every workshop on the highway and settled nothing. After the sheet above, the owner wrote three sentences instead:

1. The inspector's rejection stands, whoever is asking.
2. We say it is late before it is late.
3. Nobody is paid for a count that depends on skipping a check.

The test came three weeks later, in the owner's own office. A good customer rang on a Saturday and asked for a doubtful casing to be pushed through. The owner hesitated. The sentence was on the wall behind the desk and the supervisor was standing at the door. The answer was no, with a place offered on Monday's batch.

It did not feel like a triumph. The customer was cold for a month. But the supervisor learned that the sentence applies to the owner as well, which is a large part of why the other two will be believed. Retreading is also a field with its own rules and standards. Check what applies to you with the relevant body or your own adviser, and let the values sit on top of the rules, never in place of them.

How do I make a small team use them?

Do three small things. Put the sentences into the conversations where decisions happen: in the weekly sales review, ask which value a call touched. When someone follows a value at a cost, say so in front of the others, with the cost named. And when you break one yourself, say that too, because the team is watching for exactly that.

Test the wording on your newest person. Read a sentence aloud and ask what they would do if a customer rang tomorrow with the situation in it. If they say something different from what you would do, the sentence is too loose. Rewrite it until a stranger would act as you would.

Do not put values in a hiring advert as decoration. Use them in the interview: ask a candidate what they did the last time honesty cost them a sale.

When is this not worth doing?

If you are a team of two and still finding what the business is, you may not have enough hard calls to read from. Wait. Writing values early freezes guesses.

It is also a poor use of an afternoon if you have no intention of acting on them. A value you will not enforce is worse than none, because the team learns it is optional. If the answer to "would you lose an order for this" is no on every candidate, that is information about the business, and it deserves an honest conversation, not a prettier list.

Write the three sentences

Do the table this week, with your own three calls in front of you. Show it to whoever handles your difficult customers. Does it match what they saw? The sales process hub shows where a value turns up at each step of a sale. If you would like help sorting your own calls into sentences, see brand strategy or tell us what you need.