# Company Values: What They Actually Mean and How to Read Them Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/company-values/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/company-values.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving setting goals at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer Company values come in four types, and only one of them tells you what a workplace is really like. Here's how to read a values page before you join. ## Key facts - Title: Company Values: What They Actually Mean and How to Read Them - Category: Setting Goals - Primary skill: Setting Goals - Related skills: Building Self-Awareness, Professional Behaviors - Primary keyword: company values - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/company-values/ ## What this page covers - Company values come in four types, and only one of them tells you what a workplace is really like. Here's how to read a values page before you join. - Practical guidance for company values - How this topic connects to Setting Goals ## Detailed explanation Company values are the principles an organization states to guide how it makes decisions, treats people, and does business — usually three to six of them, published on a careers or about page. The ones that mean anything are the behaviors a company actually rewards, promotes, and fires on. The rest is wall decoration. Which is what makes a values page so hard to read from the outside. Nearly every company lists integrity, respect, and innovation, and almost none of them mean the same thing by it. But values are not all one kind of thing. They come in four recognizable types, and learning to tell them apart is what turns a bland list into real information about a place you are considering joining. ## What company values are for A values statement is supposed to do one job: tell everyone inside the organization which behaviors win when there is a trade-off. One working definition in wide circulation puts it bluntly — core values are the three to six behaviors a company agrees to reward, promote, and fire on. That word, behaviors, is the entire test. A value that has never changed who got hired, who got promoted, or who was asked to leave is not a value. It is a sentence. Most published values fail that test, and the people publishing them know it. Harvard Business School Online treats values as a strategy-execution problem: they only affect anything once they are built into real decisions and processes, rather than displayed. Nearly every major guide on the subject makes the same concession somewhere in the middle — values have to be lived, not posted. It is a striking admission to find inside articles whose main purpose is helping companies write more of them. That gap is also why researching this topic feels oddly unhelpful when you are on the receiving end. The results are written for whoever is drafting the values: Asana offers 15 examples, Indeed 21, Qualtrics 50, HubSpot more than 60. The publishers sell software to the people doing the drafting, so that is the reader they write for. If you are deciding whether to join a company, or trying to make sense of one you have just joined, a menu of nice-sounding nouns answers nothing. What you need is a way to sort. ## The four types of company values Patrick Lencioni supplied that sorting mechanism in a Harvard Business Review article, "Make Your Values Mean Something," arguing that most corporate values statements are bland to the point of dishonesty — and that the cause is companies mashing four genuinely different kinds of value into a single list. Pull them apart and the same page starts telling you things. ### Core values These are the small number of principles a company will not compromise, often traceable back to its founders, and defended even when defending them costs money. They are the source of whatever makes the place distinctive. The identifying mark of a core value is that it has been expensive at least once: it has made the company turn down a client, walk away from revenue, or decline a talented hire whose behavior did not fit. If you can find that story, you have found something real. ### Aspirational values These are qualities the company does not currently have but believes it needs — usually to support a new strategy or survive a changing market. There is nothing dishonest about them when they are labeled as a direction of travel. The trouble is that they read exactly like core values on a page, and mistaking one for the other is the single most common source of disappointment in a new job. You arrive expecting a place that already works this way and find one that has only decided it should. ### Permission-to-play values These are the baseline behavioral and social requirements of any workplace anywhere: integrity, respect, honesty, teamwork. They are entirely legitimate and entirely uninformative. Because they barely vary between organizations in the same region or industry, they cannot distinguish one employer from another — which means a values page made up only of these has told you nothing about that specific company. Most values pages are made up mostly of these. ### Accidental values These are [the norms nobody cultivated](/knowledge/setting-goals/company-culture/). They accumulate through who gets hired and what gets tolerated, and they reflect the shared personalities and habits of the people already there. Sometimes an accidental value is a stated value taken to a damaging extreme — the classic drift is "work hard" hardening into working to the point of exhaustion. Accidental values are never published anywhere, and they are usually the ones that decide what your Tuesday actually feels like. ## How to tell which type you are looking at Start with the cost test. For any value that matters to you, ask for the instance: when did honoring this cost the company something? A core value comes with a story attached, usually told slightly reluctantly. An aspirational or permission-to-play value produces a pause and a restatement of the value. Then run the comparison test. Open the values pages of two or three competing employers side by side. Whatever appears on all of them is permission-to-play language, and the overlap is where most people spend their attention. The differences carry nearly all of the information, and there are usually fewer of them than you expect. A recurring criticism of the whole genre is that companies copy the same abstract nouns from each other until the words stop meaning anything, which is exactly what the side-by-side reveals. For the rest, ask behavioral questions rather than reading documents. Career-services guidance from Robert Half and Northeastern University converges on the same move: convert an abstract value into a request for a concrete instance. What would someone in this role own from beginning to end? When and how do people here give each other feedback? Can you give an example of a suggestion from someone junior that was actually implemented? What did the last busy period look like — that final one is how you surface accidental values, because nobody has a prepared answer for it. And read the process itself. How you are treated while being hired is evidence of the same quality as everything on the page, and it has not been drafted by anyone. Whether interviewers arrive prepared, whether they let you talk to your would-be teammates, whether questions about hours get a straight answer or a practiced deflection — those are behaviors, which is what values are supposed to be made of. One caution on the numbers you will meet along the way. HR sources widely repeat figures showing that employees who feel their organization embodies its values are considerably more engaged and more likely to stay past three years. The direction is plausible; the underlying study is rarely named. Treat it as suggestive rather than as evidence, and apply the same skepticism to a company citing its own engagement scores at you. ## The half of the comparison that is about you All of the above tells you what a company is like. It cannot tell you whether that suits you — and this is where most people evaluating an employer come up short. The candidate-facing guidance is consistent about sequence: identify [your own values](/knowledge/setting-goals/work-values/) and your genuine deal-breakers first, then assess the employer. Without that, every well-written values page looks equally appealing, because a good one is designed to. Your own terms tend to sit in a few places. What [actually motivates you](/knowledge/setting-goals/what-motivates-you-at-work/) — security and money, connection to other people, the chance to do something that feels like yours? What conditions do you need to do good work? What have you already refused to put up with? These are personal and not especially negotiable, and a job that runs against them stays uncomfortable no matter how good the rest of the offer is. If you have never set them down explicitly, getting [a read on your own strengths](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) is a reasonable place to begin, because the environments that suit you are usually the ones that let [what you are good at](/knowledge/self-awareness/what-am-i-good-at/) show. ## The skills that make a values page readable Step back from the companies for a moment. Reading an employer accurately, and knowing what you need from one, are not really knowledge about organizations. They are a few specific capabilities, and they can be developed. **Setting Goals** is what puts you in charge of the comparison at all. Choosing where to work is not only about the role and the money; it is about picking places where you will learn the right things from the right people, and about knowing your own work values well enough that a mismatch registers as a mismatch rather than as a vague unease. It also includes the harder part: being willing to conclude that somewhere is a genuine misfit, which is usually clear within a few months, and to act on that instead of waiting it out. **Building Self-Awareness** is what makes your half of the comparison possible. You cannot judge a value against your own until you can name what you are genuinely good at rather than merely competent at, and until you notice the beliefs about achievement or approval that quietly decide which environments feel bearable to you. People who skip this step tend to read every impressive values page as a description of somewhere they would flourish. **Professional Behaviors** is what lets you see values in their only observable form. Values exist as conduct: whether people are treated impartially, whether humility and real interest in others are present, whether the corrosive patterns — the arrogant, the manipulative, the relentlessly negative — get tolerated or checked. Knowing what good workplace conduct looks like turns a vague impression of a company into a set of specific things you can watch for. None of that is fixed equipment. The free Work Skills Test scores where you currently stand on these three and on the nine others that sit alongside them, so you can [see which ones to build first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before your next move rather than after it. You may already do parts of this without naming it — noticing that an interviewer dodged a question, or that a company's stated priorities did not match what its people described. That instinct is real information; deliberate practice just makes it repeatable and gives you language for what you picked up on. Judging an employer well, and being honest with yourself about what you need from one, are both things you get better at, and neither requires becoming a different sort of person. They also matter more, not less, over time: the further into a career you go, the more consequential each choice of workplace becomes, and the more expensive it is to discover a mismatch late. That you are interrogating a values page at all, rather than taking it at face value or dismissing all of it as marketing, already puts you ahead of most people weighing up an offer. ## Know your own terms before you judge theirs Half of this comparison is the company, and half is you — and yours is the half you can actually measure. The **free** Work Skills Test is a short self-assessment that shows where you stand across all twelve work skills, so you walk into your next interview knowing what you bring and what kind of place will let it show. **[Get my skills profile](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and about seven minutes from start to finish.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? Company values come in four types, and only one of them tells you what a workplace is really like. Here's how to read a values page before you join. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Setting Goals. It also relates to Building Self-Awareness, Professional Behaviors. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/company-values/ Preferred summary: "Company values come in four types, and only one of them tells you what a workplace is really like. Here's how to read a values page before you join." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.