Hello again,
After the last newsletter on what your team really thinks about your core values, a founder replied with a question that hit the nail on the head:
“Okay, but how do we actually live our values?”
That is the question.
And it’s exactly what we unpack inside Living Your Values – the six-month learning journey I lead with teams who are serious about building cultures of integrity.
But I know most organisations are in budget lockdown right now, organisational development spend is frozen and this final-quarter squeeze is real.
So, while you wait for budgets to open for 2026, here are five essential building blocks you can work on today to start operationalising your organisation’s values because this isn’t a tick-box exercise or a workshop series, it’s an ongoing practice of alignment…
The 5 Nuts & Bolts You Need To Live Your Values
1) Your Core Values: Clarify, Don’t Assume
It sounds obvious but most organisations’ “core values” aren’t actually theirs. They’re words on a page, cut-and-pasted from what good is supposed to sound like, but without real meaning.
I recently wrapped a project with a European non-profit that had operated for five years without clearly defined values. Friction had built up, trust had eroded and everyone had a slightly different definition of what their unexpressed values meant in ‘real life’.
Now we’ve defined their values in their own language – specific, contextual and actionable – the culture can start to shift.
Key Action: Write down what each value actually means in your organisation’s context.
Example: Transparency = “We share decisions early, even when they’re unfinished, so others can help shape them.”
If you can’t describe what a value looks like in action, you’re not actually living it.
[Extra Tip: I recorded a short podcast last week on why your values aren’t working yet – you can listen to it here.]
2) Frameworks: The Structures That Help Shape Culture
Your values can’t exist in isolation; in order to bring them to life, they need scaffolding.
Your chosen frameworks guide how decisions are made, products are built and delivered, feedback is given and accountability works. These frameworks are how culture is transmitted, and they make abstract values operational.
For example, one key high-level framework we use at Mission Equality is the Circles of Influence Framework; a useful framework to consider various levels of influence and impact. For a world based on equality, it must ‘work’ – that is, meet a variety of needs and have an impact – at different levels. These levels are:
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The individual level: At a personal, singular individual level.
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The collective level: At a group, community and/or societal level.
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The systemic level: At a systemic level; consider this as the water in which we all swim or the wrapper that wraps around everything.
There is an ongoing tension to balance across these levels in all the work we do.
Key Action: Identify and articulate your key frameworks, for example:
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Decision-Making Framework: How choices are made and by whom
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Communication Framework: How truth travels in your organisation
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Accountability Framework: How you repair when values are breached
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Design Framework(s): The guidelines you use to design your offering
Your frameworks should make it easy for people to act in alignment with your values and hard to act against your values.
3) Principles: The Rules Beneath the Rules
Principles are the bridge between values and policies. They’re the short, memorable commitments that tell your team how to act when no one’s watching.
Example: Value = Equality > Principle = “We listen to the quietest voice first.”
Principles make culture scalable. When new people join, they don’t need to guess how things are done, they can see it, and feel it.
Key Action: Define 3–5 guiding principles that bring your values to life in day-to-day decisions across key functions (this may be as simple as a 1-page document for finance, HR, product design, service delivery etc.).
4) Policies: Where Integrity Meets Infrastructure
Policies are often treated as compliance paperwork, but they’re actually moral documents and the longer version of your principles. Where your principles might be a shorter 1-page document that lists the high level ‘rules’, your policies are the longer explanations of implementing those rules.
If your policies contradict your stated values – let’s say, you claim to value trust but require approval for every small spend – you’re teaching your team that your values don’t matter.
Key Action: Audit your core policies – recruitment, hiring, pay, feedback, parental leave – and ask: “Does this policy reflect our values, or contradict them?”
5) Processes: Where Culture Is Either Reinforced or Eroded
Processes are where most organisations lose alignment. You can have great values, solid frameworks, succinct yet clear principles and sound policies, but if your day-to-day processes – how you actually do things every single day – reward speed over integrity or silence over honesty, your culture will drift from your values.
Key Action: Map your top five recurring processes – e.g. performance reviews, team meetings, onboarding – and review them through your values lens.
Ask: “What behaviour does this process encourage and/or reward?”
This Is The Work.
Living your values is an ongoing practice of review, reflection, redesign and repair.
Which is exactly what we build inside the Living Your Values journey:
✅ Define and codify your real values (not corporate jargon)
✅ Align your frameworks, principles and policies
✅ Redesign your processes so integrity is built-in
✅ Train your leadership team to model the culture you want
You can’t shortcut this. But you can start now. And if you need support with this in 2026, take a look at the Living Your Values learning journey.
Over six months, your team will work directly with me to:
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Audit your culture through the values lens
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Redesign your operating systems for alignment
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Embed equality and integrity into daily practice
👉🏽 Just hit reply with “VALUES READY” and we’ll explore whether it’s a good fit for your organisation.
In solidarity and transparency,
Lea
Founder, Mission Equality CIC
PS. If you missed the last issue – What Your Team Really Thinks About Your Values – you can read it here. It’s the perfect companion piece to this one.