I was sitting in a windowless conference room in 2019, working for a mid-sized tech firm called CloudScale. The CEO was standing in front of a PowerPoint slide that just said RADICAL TRANSPARENCY in 72-point Helvetica. While he was talking about how we ‘owe it to each other to be honest,’ I knew for a fact that the leadership team had already decided to lay off 15% of the engineering department the following Tuesday. They’d been planning it for a month. He knew it, I knew it (because I’d accidentally seen a printed spreadsheet on the copier), and yet there he was, preaching transparency like he was some kind of corporate prophet. It was sickening. It made me want to go home and wash the ‘culture’ off my skin.
That is the problem. Most company core values are just a cheap suit worn by a person who hasn’t showered in a week. They look okay from a distance, but the closer you get, the more you realize something is deeply wrong. We all know the drill: some HR consultant gets paid $20k to run a workshop, everyone uses sticky notes to pick words like ‘Innovation’ or ‘Excellence,’ and then those words get printed on mugs that eventually end up in the back of someone’s kitchen cabinet, covered in dust.
The laminated lie in the breakroom
Most values are ignored because they are aspirational lies rather than descriptions of actual behavior. If your value is ‘Integrity’ but your top-performing salesperson is a known liar who gets a pass because they hit their quota, then your value isn’t integrity. Your value is ‘Money at any cost.’ People aren’t stupid. They see exactly what gets rewarded and what gets punished. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Culture isn’t what you say; it’s the smell of the house when you walk in. You can’t just spray some ‘Core Values’ Febreze and expect the underlying rot to disappear.
I used to think that having any values was better than none. I was completely wrong. Having fake values is actually worse than having no values at all. When you tell employees that you care about ‘Work-Life Balance’ while the VP of Product is sending Slack messages at 11:45 PM on a Saturday, you aren’t just being hypocritical. You are actively gaslighting your entire workforce. You are telling them that their eyes and ears are lying to them. It creates this weird, low-level psychic stress that makes people want to quit even if the pay is good.
I might be wrong about this, but I honestly think most companies would be more successful if they just admitted they didn’t have values. Just say, ‘We pay you to do a job, don’t be a jerk.’ That’s it. At least it’s honest. It’s better than the ‘Passion’ nonsense. I refuse to work for any company that lists ‘Passion’ as a core value. Passion is for hobbies and relationships; I am not passionate about your B2B SaaS platform for managing logistics. I am professional. I am diligent. But I am not passionate, and asking me to pretend I am is an insult to both of us.
The gap between what you say you value and what you actually reward is where culture goes to die.
I spent 90 days tracking the ‘Cringe Factor’
A few years ago, at a different job, I got so annoyed by the constant ‘Values Talk’ that I started a spreadsheet. I tracked every time a leader publicly mentioned a core value and then immediately contradicted it with an action. I did this for 12 weeks. I called it my ‘Culture Debt’ tracker. I even decided that every time a value was ignored, I’d put $5 in a jar. By the end of three months, I had $485. That’s 97 instances of blatant hypocrisy in one quarter. I used the money to buy a really nice espresso machine for my home office because, frankly, the office coffee was swill. (Seriously, why do multi-million dollar companies buy the cheapest, most bitter beans possible? It’s like they want us to be angry.)
Anyway, back to the data. Here is what I found from my little experiment:
- ‘Collaboration’ was the most abused word. It was used 34 times to justify a meeting that could have been an email.
- ‘Ownership’ was used 22 times, usually when a manager wanted to blame a junior staffer for a project that didn’t have enough budget to begin with.
- ‘Diversity’ was mentioned 12 times in meetings where everyone at the table looked exactly the same.
Total theater.
The worst part was that the leadership thought they were doing a great job. They’d look at the posters and feel a sense of pride. Meanwhile, the actual employees were using those same posters as punchlines for jokes in private Discord channels. If your employees are making memes about your core values, you have already lost. You can’t ‘rebrand’ your way out of that. You have to stop acting like a lizard.
The ‘Beer Test’ is stupid and exclusionary
I know people will disagree with me here, but I think the whole ‘cultural fit’ thing is a massive scam. Usually, when someone says a candidate isn’t a ‘culture fit,’ what they actually mean is, ‘I wouldn’t want to have a beer with this person.’ This is a terrible way to build a company. I don’t need to want to have a beer with my accountant. I need them to be incredible at accounting. I have my own friends for beer.
This ‘Beer Test’ is how you end up with a monoculture of people who all think the same, dress the same, and have the same blind spots. It’s boring. It’s also dangerous for business. I’ve seen companies like WeWork (a classic example of culture gone toxic) prioritize ‘vibe’ over actual competence, and we all saw how that ended. It turns the workplace into a high school cafeteria where the ‘cool’ kids decide who gets to sit at the table. It’s exclusionary, and it’s usually biased against anyone who has a life outside of work—like parents or people who just don’t like drinking IPAs with their coworkers on a Thursday night.
I actively tell my friends to avoid companies that talk too much about ‘family.’ Your company is not a family. It’s a professional arrangement. Families don’t fire you because of a ‘downward trend in the quarterly projections.’ Calling a company a family is just a way to guilt people into working overtime for free. It’s a red flag. Stop doing that.
How to actually fix it (The messy version)
If you actually want to fix your culture, you have to stop looking at what’s on the walls and start looking at what’s in the trash. What are the things you tolerate? That is your real culture. If you tolerate a brilliant asshole who makes everyone else miserable, then your culture is ‘Brilliant Assholes.’ If you tolerate missed deadlines with no consequences, your culture is ‘Apathy.’
Here is how you fix it. It isn’t pretty, and no consultant will sell you this because it’s too hard to put in a PDF.
- Fire the high-performing jerk. I’m serious. If you have someone who hits their numbers but treats people like garbage, fire them today. It will send a shockwave through the company that is worth more than 1,000 town hall meetings.
- Make values about what you DON’T do. Instead of saying ‘We value innovation,’ say ‘We don’t punish failed experiments.’ It’s more concrete. It gives people permission to actually do the thing you want them to do.
- Kill the ‘Best Places to Work’ obsession. Those awards are mostly bought or manipulated by HR departments who force employees to take surveys. They mean nothing. Focus on your employee churn rate instead. That’s the only metric that matters.
- Stop using Jira for everything. Okay, this is a personal one, but Jira is where creativity goes to die in a sea of tickets. It makes people feel like cogs. (I know, I know, ‘how else do we track work?’ I don’t care. Jira is depressing.)
Actually, let me give you a specific number. I think a healthy company should have a ‘Value-to-Action’ ratio of at least 1:1. For every time you mention a value in a public setting, you should be able to point to a specific, difficult decision that was made because of that value within the last week. If you can’t do that, shut up. Just stop talking about them until you have something real to say.
I’ve worked in places where the culture was actually good, and you know what? They rarely talked about ‘culture.’ They just did the work, treated people like adults, and didn’t lie to us when things were going badly. It wasn’t flashy. There were no beanbag chairs or ping-pong tables. It was just a group of people who respected each other’s time and didn’t pretend to be a ‘family’ while they were trying to hit a KPI.
Is it possible to have a company with 500+ people that isn’t a performative nightmare? I honestly don’t know. Maybe scale is the enemy of truth. But I do know that the current way we do ‘Core Values’ is a waste of everyone’s time. It’s just corporate wallpaper. And honestly, I’d rather have bare walls than be lied to every time I walk into the breakroom.
Worth every penny.