Values in Action: Values You Can See—Not Just List

Lists of values tend to meet a familiar fate: They hang in the lobby, and in everyday life, no one can say exactly what they mean. The problem is abstraction. A word like “responsibility” carries so many possible meanings that it effectively has no shared meaning. Only demonstrated behavior creates a shared understanding. This is where an important finding from memory research comes into play. The Picture Superiority Effect states that images are remembered better than words—a strong argument for visualizing values. However, one caveat is crucial: if images are too similar to one another, the effect disappears; only distinguishable images stick. This is doubly relevant when it comes to values. On the one hand, it means that generic value symbolism—the same old hands, hearts, and gears—remains ineffective because it is interchangeable and could belong to any company. On the other hand, it means that your values will only stick if they are anchored to specific, recognizable situations from your own reality. A tailor-made image of your values that illustrates your specific behavior is therefore consistently more effective than any off-the-shelf visual language.

A strong illustration of values shows, for each value, a recognizable situation of behavior in action—a moment in which the value becomes visible. It makes clear what the value means in practice and, ideally, where the line is drawn: What is part of it, and what contradicts it? The people in the illustration are central, because values are revealed in our interactions with one another. What doesn’t belong there is a mere string of value terms accompanied by decorative symbols. That is precisely the trap that many representations of values fall into—they illustrate the words instead of showing the behavior. A values illustration is most effective when it is concrete and credibly depicts a few values, rather than superficially asserting many.

Weak value statements are easy to spot. They use symbols to represent concepts rather than behavior—they look nice, but they don’t explain what the value actually means. They’re interchangeable because the imagery is generic and fits any company. They’re overloaded with too many values, so none of them really stick. Or they’re dishonest: They depict behavior that has nothing to do with lived reality—and thus undermine their own credibility, because employees immediately sense the discrepancy. The strongest warning sign remains: If, after looking at an image, no one can say what a value means for their own actions, the image has failed in its purpose.

A set of values proves its worth whenever behavior is the focus. During onboarding, it shows new employees not only what the values are, but also how to recognize them. In team meetings, it serves as a reference point for discussing collaboration—“How do we put this into practice here?” In employee development and feedback sessions, it helps anchor expectations regarding attitude to observable behavior rather than to empty concepts. On the intranet and in print, it remains visible and serves as a reminder that values are tied to our daily actions. In this way, a catalog of values becomes a tool that guides behavior.

A set of values can be displayed as a poster in a room, shared digitally through internal channels, or presented interactively so that specific examples of behavior can be explored in depth for each value. Precisely because values are tied to specific situations, an interactive version can be particularly engaging—it allows viewers to delve into individual examples. The poster in the room, in turn, keeps the values front and center. It is crucial that the display appears in places where collaboration is discussed and decisions are made.