On Culture: Do values impact performance?
- Eugene Sepulveda
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Brené Brown has asked 150 high-performing leaders to name their core values. Not one named more than two. Some named only one. In a podcast discussing Brené's book, Strong Ground, Adam Grant, one of the most cited organizational psychologists alive, tried to hold onto three. By the end of the conversation, he was down to two. Both acknowledge how critical it is to operationalize these values; Adam believes less than 10% of us do so.
It's difficult to find peer reviewed literature directly linking values to enhanced financial and operating performance. We find direct links to motivation and the guiding principles most important to how we work - a compass for behavior and decisions. Some studies show correlations between management orientations and income & operating performance but only directly to a human orientation - "an orientation toward employees contributes more to financial performance than an orientation toward any other key stakeholder group." The financial & operating performance enhancements of visionary leadership orientation, customer (or market) orientation, ethics orientation, and work orientation all appear to tie back to a human orientation.
I am further exploring the difference between terminal values and instrumental values - the former representing end states (ie., freedom, happiness, world peace), the latter modes of conduct that get us there (what we might call behaviors). Brené refers to core values, which can include either. My friend Brian Johnson, author of Areté and founder & CEO of Heroic, adapts Aristotle's virtue ethics into a modern framework — what I'd call behavior design. I believe it is insightful and valuable to differentiate virtues from values; I'm not sure the differentiation communicates broadly, however.
For the record, Brian doesn't just reference virtues within his model, he explicitly adapts and rebuilds Aristotle's cardinal virtues (swapping Temperance for Discipline, Justice for Love) into his own four/eight-virtue compass. More on Brian's work in a later posting - maybe he'll guest author one week :)
People-first and Generosity are my core values. It was hard to edit out Excellence, but I find its importance is serving people, organizational objectives, communities, and even the generosity I prioritize - ditto Hospitality.
We founded Culturati to explore and learn from each other in intimate, vulnerable settings. We're looking forward to releasing information on our Fall pop-ups, intimate gatherings to discuss specific issues in Austin and around the country. We're also exploring establishing a virtual Culturati AI Circle for CHROs & other c-suite executives overseeing their organization's AI infrastructure. Let me know if you might be interested.
Just wrapped up Culturati: LIVE: How Do We Develop Business Judgment For The Age Of AI. Abilities' Bjorn Billhardt, St Edwards Business Dean Alexis Stokes and Hagerty's Kate Hogan spoke about managing risks while learning to see around corners. None of us yet see AI as reliable enough to replace judgment — only to test it. Which means teaching students and employees how to sharpen their own may matter more than ever.
Yours in curiosity & discovery,
Eugene Sepulveda
Founder & CEO, Culturati
In this Culturati: LIVE, Abilitie CEO Bjorn Billhardt, St. Edward’s University business school dean Alexis Stokes, and Hagerty VP of Learning & Development Kate Hogan explore why business judgment is becoming more essential—not less—as AI makes information, analysis, and recommendations instantly accessible. Together, they define judgment as the ability to frame the right problem, distinguish what is important from what is merely urgent, weigh competing priorities, anticipate second- and third-order consequences, and take responsibility for both a decision and its impact. As AI reduces the scarcity of knowledge and technical output, the conversation examines how business education and workplace learning must evolve from primarily transferring information to developing critical thinking, ethical reasoning, curiosity, learning agility, and moral courage.
Brené Brown and Adam Granton Finding Our Strong Ground
Dare to Lead Podcast Brené Brown, with Adam Grant Summary: Brené maps a lesson on physically finding her ground directly onto leadership: organizations and leaders build on dysfunction instead of a strong core, using the wrong tools to compensate for missing values clarity. Adam Grant presses her on the mechanics of narrowing values to just two, and Brown reveals the actual research origin: interviewing 150 high-performing, strong-culture leaders roughly 15 years ago, none of whom named more than two values when asked — some named only one — which is how the "get to two" exercise was reverse-engineered. She adds a sharper data point here than in earlier interviews: having worked in "hundreds" of organizations, only about 10% have operationalized their values into observable, measurable behaviors. Both agree there's no split between personal and professional values — Grant calls the very question incoherent — and the conversation turns to the harder edge of the idea: real accountability means being willing to lose high-revenue performers whose behavior violates the organization's values, something Brown says most leaders lack the skill (not just the will) to do. They close on a distinction Brown borrows from Buddhist "near enemy" theory — rigidity is discipline's near enemy, not its synonym — arguing that true discipline preserves the capacity to adapt, while rigidity just protects the leader's own ego and discomfort. |
Brené Brown and Barrett Guillen on Living Into Our Values
Unlocking Us Podcast Brené Brown, with Barrett Guillen Summary: Brown and her Chief of Staff Barrett Guillen walk through Brown's values exercise live. Brown explains her "get to two" instruction came from reverse-engineering over 500,000 pieces of data — people with real clarity never named eight or four values when asked; they named one or two. The exercise starts by circling 10–15 values from a master list, then narrowing further by asking which ones everything else is "forged" from — the filters used to make hard decisions. Both then translate their two values into specific observable behaviors, since — drawing on 11 years of organizational research — only about 10% of companies they've worked with, including many Fortune 100s, have turned stated values into behaviors employees are actually taught and held accountable for. A key throughline: Brown insists there's no separate "personal" and "professional" values — people carry one set into every context, and workplace disengagement often traces to a mismatch between an employee's values and the organization's. |
Do corporate values have value? The impact of corporate values on financial performance
Behavioral Sciences (PMC) By Karen Robayo-Sanchez, Michael A. Cacciatore, and Juan Meng Summary: This survey of 1,055 U.S. and Canadian communication professionals found empathetic leadership demonstrated a strong positive correlation with employee engagement and organizational commitment but did not significantly impact burnout, and — surprisingly — showed a positive association with turnover intention, suggesting empathy alone can't override dissatisfaction over pay, advancement, or fairness, and may even sharpen employees' awareness of the gap between what leaders say and what they deliver. The study also found significant gender disparities, with male professionals reporting higher perceived empathy compared to female professionals, and that higher-ranking employees perceived stronger empathic leadership than those below them. Bottom line: empathy drives real trust and engagement, but it's unevenly experienced and can't substitute for structural fixes to burnout and retention. |
The Concept of Workplace Values and Its Effect on Employee Performance and Corporate Profitability
Asian Academic Research Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities (2015) By Israel Kofi Nyarko et al., Ghana Summary: This literature review finds that publicizing values doesn't affect performance — but living them does. A Great Place to Work study (2007–2011) found no correlation between an organization's publicized values and financial performance, but a real link between employees' perceived "high integrity" culture (whether "management's actions match its words") and performance — plus higher customer satisfaction, though integrity carries short-term costs (turning down profitable-but-unethical deals) for long-term gain. A 2004 Booz Allen Hamilton/Aspen Institute study of 365 companies found 89% have written values statements, yet fewer than half can measure any "return on values" — except top-performing companies, which consistently emphasize employee commitment and adaptability, and actually operationalize those values into practice. The single most effective reinforcement mechanism across regions and industries: visible CEO commitment. The paper contrasts Barclays (weak, siloed values contributing to the LIBOR scandal) with Capital One (a values-driven turnaround that took employee engagement from 26% to 83% in four years) to make its case: real performance requires living values, not just stating them. |
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