Bringing Values to Life: From Words to Action
During times of rapid change and uncertainty, institutional values play a critical role. Strong values guide our decisions when there isn’t a clear roadmap to follow. They’re also a powerful way for leaders to reassure teams of what will remain constant even in the face of the unpredictable. When values are unclear—or when there’s a gap between what’s stated and what’s lived—people can feel disconnected, disillusioned, or adrift.
Below you’ll find several sections exploring how values shape culture and decision-making in higher education, even amid disruption:
Mission vs. Values: Understanding the Critical Difference
Do Values "Live and Breathe" at Your Institution
Making Values Distinctive and Memorable
Practical Ways to Make Values Live
Understanding Your Locus of Control
Red Lines: Clarifying What Matters Most
Allowing Ourselves to (Re)Imagine the Future
1. Mission vs. Values: Understanding the Critical Difference
MISSION describes WHAT we do:
Examples:
“Educate future leaders”
“Advance knowledge through research”
“Serve our community through excellence in healthcare”
“Prepare students for meaningful lives and careers
VALUES describe HOW we do it:
Examples:
Innovation: Embracing new ideas, encouraging creative solutions
Collaboration: Working across boundaries, sharing knowledge
Inclusion: Creating spaces where all feel valued, supported, welcomed, and respected
The Difference in Practice
Mission might be “advance student success,” but values determine if we do this through collaboration or at cross-purposes with our colleagues
Mission might be “community impact,” but values shape whether we achieve this through innovation or “the way we’ve always done things”
2. Do Values “Live and Breathe” at Your Institution?
Discussion Prompts for Team Discussion
Consider the statements below as discussion prompts with your team. Rate each 1 (rarely) to 4 (consistently) and compare perspectives:
Our institution has a set of distinctive, memorable values
Team members can name our values without looking them up
Team members can easily describe recent examples of values in action
Values inform day-to-day decisions, not just major initiatives
People regularly recognize colleagues for demonstrating values
Values discussions happen naturally, not just in formal settings
New ideas and practices are evaluated against values
Values guide behavior even during stress or conflict
Team members feel comfortable raising concerns when actions don't align with values
Team members can clearly articulate what our values mean in practice.
Using the Prompts:
Have team members rate statements individually
Compare ratings to surface different perspectives
Discuss where ratings differ and why
Identify areas for focused attention
Use insights to select practices from above sections
3. Making Values Distinctive and Memorable
Research shows that traditional approaches to embedding values — posting them everywhere and mentioning them frequently in meetings — often fall short. As Shawn Pope and Arild Wæraas note in Harvard Business Review, “Core values cannot deliver on their promise — defining [institutional] culture and guiding workers' decisions — if nobody remembers them." Most values statements consist of "generic, taken-for-granted assumptions like honesty, integrity, accountability, and responsibility" that fail to capture attention or imagination.
For more insights on creating memorable values, see "How to Create Company Values that Actually Resonate" by Shawn Pope and Arild Wæraas. Additionally, click below to review examples of distinctive values. While these are all private sector organizations, other types of institutions will likewise find that values become memorable when they capture distinctive institutional identity and culture. As Pope and Wæraas note, organizations can frame values through metaphors that resonate with their work, such as "rules of the game" for athletics or "source code" for technology.
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Focus on the user and all else will follow.
It’s best to do one thing really, really well.
Fast is better than slow.
Democracy on the web works.
You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.
You can make money without doing evil.
There’s always more information out there.
The need for information crosses all borders.
You can be serious without a suit.
Great just isn’t good enough.
For more info: https://about.google/philosophy/
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Deliver WOW through service
Embrace and drive change
Create fun and a little weirdness
Be adventurous, creative, and open minded
Pursue growth and learning
Build open and honest relationships with communication
Build a positive team and family spirit
Do more with less
For more info: https://www.zappos.com/c/about
There is also an extensive discussion of values and how to integrate them into daily work in founder Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness
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Champion the mission: We’re united with our community to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere.
Be a host: We’re caring, open, and encouraging to everyone we work with.
Embrace the adventure: We’re driven by curiosity, openness, and the belief that every person can grow.
Be a cereal entrepreneur: We’re determined and creative in transforming our bold ambitious into reality
Note: the “cereal” in the last bullet is a playful reference to how the founders pulled themselves out of $40,000 debt in 2008 by selling themed breakfast cereal boxes at political conventions. This story of creative problem-solving became central to their identity.
For more info: https://careers.airbnb.com/life-at-airbnb/
4. Practical Ways to Make Values Live
Explore representative practices for bringing values to life by clicking each heading below. These examples can spark ideas for approaches that will work in your context.
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Start meetings by sharing recent examples of values in action
Create peer recognition systems, where colleagues can provide small rewards (like coffee gift cards) to colleagues for value-aligned behaviors
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Ask "How does this align with our values?" in planning discussions
Reference values when explaining decisions to stakeholders
Use values to evaluate new initiatives, changes, or decisions
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Designate rotating "values spotters" to identify and share examples
Create informal channels for sharing values moments
Build values discussion into regular check-ins
Design team activities around specific values
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Include values scenarios in onboarding
Create spaces for openly discussing values challenges
Use values as a framework for giving and receiving feedback
5. Understanding Your Locus of Control
In complex systems, even senior leaders operate within larger forces. Not everything is within our control—but that doesn’t mean we’re powerless. The locus of control framework, described more here, helps managers and team leaders focus on what they can act on directly, what they can influence, and what may require collective advocacy or broader institutional support. Examples include:
Within Your Control
How your team talks about and applies values in daily work
The norms you set around communication, collaboration, and inclusion
How you recognize and support values-aligned behavior
Creating space for ongoing, reflective conversations
Defining local values that reflect how your team wants to work together
Raising values-based considerations in meetings and decision-making spaces
Modeling alignment in cross-functional partnerships
Participating in shared governance or committee work to advocate for inclusive, transparent processes
Mentoring or supporting peers in ways that reflect a culture of care, equity, and collaboration
Within Your Influence
Institution-wide policies and public statements
External pressures, including political or legal constraints
ecisions about budgets, staffing, or priorities
NOTE: These areas may still be addressed—but usually through collective action, advocacy, or collaboration across teams, departments, or institutions.
Beyond Your Direct Control
Focusing on what’s within your control helps sustain a sense of integrity, connection, and purpose. Even when institutional decisions are feel far away, managers at all levels can shape their own team culture, influence those around them, and work with others to advocate for what’s beyond.
6. Red Lines: Clarifying What Matters Most
Living our values isn’t about perfection. For individuals and institutions alike, values play out on a spectrum. Someone who values honesty might tell a white lie to avoid a social event—but wouldn’t falsify data or betray a friend. There’s a difference between everyday adjustments and a line that, if crossed, would violate the core of what a value means.
The same is true in organizations. Values are often lived in shades of gray, but there’s usually a point—sometimes hard to define—where they stop being real. Red line exercises help teams name those boundaries before they’re crossed. They can also be part of scenario planning, allowing groups to explore how they might respond to difficult situations while staying grounded in their values.
Questions for reflection:
What does each value look like at its best? And what does it look like when it’s stretched too thin?
Where’s the line between adapting to circumstance and losing integrity?
What signals might tell us we’re approaching a red line?
How do we create the conditions to notice, talk about, and respond to those signals?
Red lines aren’t rigid rules. They’re about naming what we’re unwilling to lose—so that even amid complexity, our actions stay rooted in what matters most. These conversations are useful at any time, but they’re especially vital in moments when values—and the missions they support—are under pressure.
7. Allowing Ourselves to (Re)Imagine the Future
How do we keep bold new visions for our mission and values at the center—even when the present is this challenging?
When institutions are in survival mode, it can feel counterintuitive—maybe even impossible—to imagine the future. But moments like these are when it matters most. The ability to envision not just how we get through a crisis, but what we could become on the other side, is a key part of long-term integrity and leadership.
This kind of imagining isn’t naive optimism. It’s a discipline. One that allows us to stay connected to purpose, direction, and possibility—even when the path forward is unclear.
Drawing from the Arts and Imaginative Storytelling
Personally, I’ve found that this is where we need to draw from the imaginative arts. Creative storytelling—especially science fiction—has long helped us see beyond the constraints of the present. I’ve been developing a method I call Utopia/Dystopia, inspired by speculative fiction and the dual tendency we have to avoid both the worst and the best.
Why We Avoid Imagination (and Why We Need it Anyway)
We often say “hope for the best, expect the worst”—but we rarely do either. Emotionally, our brains protect us from fully imagining the worst. Culturally, especially in the U.S., we’re often taught to believe “it won’t happen here.” That blend of human denial and American exceptionalism makes it hard to reckon with what’s truly at stake—and just as hard to imagine what might actually be possible.
The Utopia/Dystopia method invites us to go further.
To imagine what we’d do—and who we’d be—if things truly broke down.
And to imagine what we’d build if we were starting from scratch.
Often, what emerges is not fantasy, but clarity.
Prompts for Reimagining the After
This kind of reflection can spark ideas about what needs protection, what needs to evolve, and what kind of leadership and community we want to shape moving forward.
Starter ways to explore this might include:
Free-writing or journaling from a future scenario: one where your institution failed to uphold its values, and one where it fully lived them
Reflecting on moments in fiction, history, or life that show how systems can collapse—or transform
Asking: What if we were designing this from scratch? What would we keep? What would we leave behind?
Considering: What does your boldest version of “mission-aligned” look like? Who does it serve, and how