# Core Values at Work: What They Are, and How to Find Yours Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/core-values-at-work/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/core-values-at-work.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 Core values at work mean two different things. Here's how to tell your own work values from your employer's, find yours, and handle a mismatch. ## Key facts - Title: Core Values at Work: What They Are, and How to Find Yours - Category: Setting Goals - Primary skill: Setting Goals - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Building Self-Awareness - Primary keyword: core values at work - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/core-values-at-work/ ## What this page covers - Core values at work mean two different things. Here's how to tell your own work values from your employer's, find yours, and handle a mismatch. - Practical guidance for core values at work - How this topic connects to Setting Goals ## Detailed explanation Somewhere in your first month, a slide about core values at work goes up — integrity, accountability, respect, innovation, collaboration — and everyone in the room nods politely. Nobody explains what you are supposed to do with them on a Tuesday afternoon. The phrase actually names two different things. A company's core values are the principles an organization publishes to describe how it wants people to behave. Your own work values are the things that make work feel worth doing to you — what you would protect if you had to choose. They are personal, and nobody assigns them. Most articles on this topic cover the first kind. The second kind is the one that decides whether a job fits you, and it takes a little more work to get at. ## What are core values at work? Core values at work are the principles that guide how people behave and decide when the rules run out. In practice, the term covers two layers that rarely get separated. The organizational layer is the published set — the words on the careers page, meant to align behavior across thousands of people who will never meet. The personal layer is your own: the small number of things that determine whether you find a job tolerable, energizing, or quietly corrosive. The two layers interact, but they are not the same thing, and confusing them is why values conversations so often feel hollow. A company can be genuinely committed to "customer focus" while you are quietly starving for autonomy. Neither party is wrong. They are simply measuring different things. ## What's the difference between your work values and your company's core values? The clearest way to keep them apart: your employer's values describe how the organization wants work done. Yours describe why you would want to do it at all. This distinction is oddly hard to find online. Search the term and the results skew heavily toward the employer side — Indeed's list of 80 examples, AIHR's 27, Achievers' 25, CultureMonkey's 75-plus, all written for whoever is defining values for a company. The material aimed at you as an individual is a much thinner cluster: Glassdoor, Zippia, CareerOneStop, The Balance Money. The consequence is that a career starter searching this term usually gets handed a corporate branding exercise when what they need is a personal decision filter. If you have felt like the advice didn't quite fit your situation, that asymmetry is why. ## What are some examples of core values in the workplace? The organizational examples recur so consistently that you can almost predict them: integrity, accountability, respect, customer focus, innovation, collaboration, teamwork, transparency. Useful to recognize, but hard to act on personally — they describe conduct an employer wants from everyone. The personal list looks different. Career-advice sources typically name [work-life balance](/knowledge/professional-behaviors/setting-boundaries-at-work/), professional development, stability and security, autonomy and independence, honesty and integrity, recognition, and social contribution. Sources such as Zippia and The Balance Money sort these into three families, which is a more useful lens than any list. Intrinsic values are about what makes the work itself meaningful. Extrinsic values are about what makes it rewarding — pay, security, status, recognition. Lifestyle values are about how work fits with everything outside it. The three-way split explains something a flat list can't: how two people in identical jobs can rate them completely differently. ## How do I figure out what my core values actually are? Picking words off a list is the easy part, and it tends to produce aspirational answers rather than true ones. Nobody browsing a values list picks "status" or "security," even when those are exactly what drives them. A better technique, recommended by Aspire Counseling among others, points outward instead of inward. Ask a few [people who have watched you work](/knowledge/self-awareness/how-to-ask-for-feedback/) — a colleague, a mentor, a friend from a previous job — what principles they see you consistently act on. A concrete prompt works better than a vague one: when you've seen me make a hard decision, what seemed to be guiding it? Values show up more reliably in behavior than in self-description, which is precisely why other people can often name yours faster than you can. If you want structure, free instruments exist — CareerOneStop's Work Values Matcher, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, is one. Most guidance suggests narrowing a long list to five to ten, then cutting further, because the narrowing is what does the work. And expect the result to move: Indeed and Glassdoor both note that work values shift across a career, which is normal rather than a sign you got it wrong. One limit worth naming. Values tell you what you are aiming at; they say nothing about what you are currently equipped to do. If you're curious about that second half, you can see [where your skills stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) in a few minutes and compare the two pictures. ## How do I answer "What are your core values?" in an interview? For a lot of people, this interview question is the first time anyone has forced them to articulate values at all. The Interview Guys, who devote two separate articles to it, note that it frequently arrives in disguise — as "What motivates you?", "What type of employee are you?", or "Why did you apply here?" The answers that land are not the most impressive-sounding ones. They are the ones attached to evidence. Naming integrity is worth nothing on its own; naming it alongside a specific moment when it cost you something is worth a great deal. Pick two or three values you can actually demonstrate from your own experience, including from part-time work or study projects, rather than reciting the values you saw on the company's website. Interviewers hear that echo constantly, and it tells them nothing. ## How can I tell whether a company actually lives its stated values? This is the question the employer-facing literature quietly concedes. Achievers and Harvard Business School Online both acknowledge, in articles written to promote values programs, that values only function when they are tied to day-to-day reality — and that otherwise people merely nod at them during onboarding. Your skepticism is shared by the people selling the concept. So look at behavior rather than wording. What gets someone promoted here? What happens when a value and a deadline collide — which one bends? Can the person interviewing you name a specific decision the company made because of a stated value, or does the answer stay abstract? In your first weeks, watch [what gets rewarded in practice](/knowledge/setting-goals/good-company-culture/) rather than what gets said in all-hands meetings; the gap, where it exists, usually shows within a month or two. ## What if my values don't match my employer's? First: a partial mismatch is ordinary and survivable. Nobody aligns on everything, and disagreeing with an employer's emphasis is not the same as being in the wrong place. A deep mismatch is different, and the sources treat it as a genuine occupational risk rather than a preference. Working somewhere that conflicts with your own values is associated with moral distress, emotional exhaustion, cynicism, reduced commitment, and eventually turnover — the pattern turns up repeatedly across the workplace-culture literature. What makes it costly is the slow burn: people usually absorb the friction for a long time before naming it. The practical response is to be specific about which value is being violated and how often, rather than concluding that [the whole job is wrong](/knowledge/setting-goals/should-i-quit-my-job/). Some mismatches are fixable by changing team, manager, or scope. Some aren't. Knowing which values are genuinely non-negotiable for you is what makes that call possible — which is the whole reason the discovery work matters. ## Do core values really matter, or is this just corporate talk? Both, honestly, depending on who is doing the talking. Be careful with the numbers you'll see cited here. A claim that people whose values align with their employer's are three times more likely to stay past three years circulates widely, usually credited to Harvard Business Review; a companion claim that over half of employees choose employers based on core values shows up just as often. Neither traces back to a locatable primary study. Treat them as folklore rather than evidence. The part that holds up without statistics is simpler. If you cannot name what you want from work, you have no criteria for judging an offer, a team, or a bad month — so you end up borrowing someone else's. That is a real cost, and it doesn't require a study to notice. ## The skills that make this easier to handle Read back over those answers and a pattern shows up. Almost none of the difficulty is about knowing what a value is. It's about being honest with yourself about what you want, reading what an organization actually rewards, and behaving consistently once you know — three quite different capabilities, and all of them learnable. **Setting Goals** is the one doing most of the work here. It treats your core motivations — whether they cluster around money, security, and status, around social connection, or around self-expression — as deeply personal and effectively non-negotiable, and it holds that a job violating them will leave you unhappy regardless of what else it offers. It also argues for shorter horizons than most career advice: six to eighteen months, letting direction emerge from what you learn about yourself, rather than a fixed plan built on a values statement you wrote at 22. **Professional Behaviors** covers the other half — what a value looks like on an ordinary Tuesday. Treating everyone impartially, showing humility, handling confidential information properly, speaking about colleagues as if they were in the room. It also names the behaviors that quietly contradict any stated value: passive non-contribution, personal attacks, arrogance, indirect maneuvering, constant complaint. This is the difference between holding a value and enacting one. **Building Self-Awareness** is what stops your values list from being aspirational fiction. It uses feedback to expose the gap between the values you claim and how colleagues actually experience you, and it flags iceberg beliefs — exaggerated convictions about achievement, acceptance, or control — which are easy to mistake for principles until one of them makes you overreact to something small. None of the three is a temperament you either have or lack. If you want a read on where yours currently sit, the free Work Skills Test maps [your strongest and weakest skills](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) — twelve of them, these three included. ## Where this leaves you Some of this may already describe how you operate. Noticing that a job felt wrong before you could explain why, hesitating over an offer that looked good on paper, wondering whether the values on the wall matched what you saw in the corridor — those are not signs of overthinking. They are the raw material of the work above, and you were already collecting it. Where you are weaker, that's a gap in something you haven't practiced yet, not a fixed feature of who you are. You can get sharper at reading an organization and clearer about your own criteria without becoming a different person. And this tends to count for more as you go — the decisions get bigger, and borrowed criteria hold up worse under real stakes. You've done the part most people skip by thinking this through at all. What's left is finding out where you currently stand. ## Find out where your skills stand The one thing values work can't tell you is what you're already good at — and that's the other half of any decision about where to work. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of your work skills. It takes 7 minutes and shows you where you stand across all twelve, so you can see which ones already work for you and which one or two would most change your next move. ## 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? Core values at work mean two different things. Here's how to tell your own work values from your employer's, find yours, and handle a mismatch. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Setting Goals. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Building Self-Awareness. ### 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/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/self-awareness.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/setting-goals/core-values-at-work/ Preferred summary: "Core values at work mean two different things. Here's how to tell your own work values from your employer's, find yours, and handle a mismatch." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.