The Army taught me a phrase early, and it shaped everything I have done since. Be the Standard. Know the task and the duties of your profession. Then do them, every day. You represent what right looks like.

Be, Know, Do. Three words, and the order matters. Being comes first. Before you know anything technical and before you do anything at all, you are the standard, whether you intend to be or not. People do not absorb values from a poster. They absorb them from watching what their leaders tolerate, reward, and refuse. Then they emulate what they see.

I think about that phrase whenever a leadership team asks me to help them “roll out” their Values, as if Values were a product launch. You cannot roll out Values. You can only live them until people believe you, or fail to live them until people stop listening to anything you say.

Values Are the Component That Everyone Claims and Few Set

The third component of the organizational Azimuth is Values for a good reason. Mission tells people where we are going. Intent tells them what winning looks like and why. Values tell them what we will and will not do to get there.

Almost every organization I walk into has some Values already. They are on the wall, on the lanyards, in the onboarding deck. Some examples I see frequently: Integrity. Excellence. Teamwork. Respect. I have read the same four words in many lobbies. And in most of those organizations, if you asked people to describe a moment in the last month when a real decision turned on one of those Values, you would get silence.

This is the gap between stated values and set values. A stated value is a word you chose. A set value is a word that costs you something, because it rules out choices you would otherwise make. Values that never rule anything out are not values. They are decorations. The test of whether a Value is real is whether you can point to a profitable, convenient, or comfortable thing your organization declined to do because their set Value would not allow it.

What Makes a Value Part of the Azimuth

A value earns its place in the Azimuth when it functions as a boundary on the map. Direction is not only about where you are heading. It is also about the terrain you will not cross to get there. When Mission and Intent pull the organization forward, Values are what keep the path honest, so that you arrive at the right destination by a route you can defend.

This is why Values belong in Set the Azimuth and not in some separate culture initiative off to the side. A team that knows its Values can make a hard call without escalating it, because the Value already made the call. That is an enormous advantage in exactly the moments leadership is hardest: when the information is incomplete, the pressure is high, and there is no clean answer. Values do not tell you the answer. They tell you which answers are off the table, and that narrowing is often what makes a fast, sound decision possible at all.

Getting Values from the wall into daily decisions is the real work, and almost no one does it deliberately. Below, I share how I help teams pressure-test their values, the Mirror Test I use personally, and the way Values connect to a Personal Leadership Philosophy. Paid subscribers continue below.

How to Pressure-Test a Value

Take any value your organization claims and run it through a single question. What decision does this Value make for us that we would otherwise make differently? If you cannot answer, the Value is not set yet, and your first job is to make it real or take it off the wall.

I do this exercise live with leadership teams and it is uncomfortable in the best way. We take “we put safety first,” a common one, and I ask for the last time safety cost them a deadline or a dollar and they paid it without argument. If the room goes quiet, we have found a decoration, not a Value. Then we do the harder work of deciding whether they mean it. Some Values survive that scrutiny and come out stronger. Some do not, and it is better to know.

The goal is not a longer list. It is a shorter, truer one. I would rather an organization set three Values it will truly defend than display ten it merely admires. A short list that rules things out beats a long list that rules nothing out, every time.

The Mirror Test and the Personal Leadership Philosophy

For the individual leader, I come back to what I call the Mirror Test. At the end of a hard day, can you look at yourself in the mirror and know you did the right thing when no one was watching? That test is personal, and it is where organizational Values either take root or die, because an organization never holds a value its leaders will not hold in private.

This is also why I ask every leader I coach to write a Personal Leadership Philosophy, a signed and dated commitment that states their own Values and how they intend to lead. I renew mine every year.

The PLP is not a corporate exercise. It is the individual azimuth underneath the organizational one, and when the two are aligned, people can feel it. When they conflict, people can feel that too, and no set of wall-mounted words will paper over the difference.

Be the Standard first. Everything you hope people will value, they will learn by watching whether you truly value it when it is expensive.

I’d love to hear about one value your organization claims that has truly ruled out a tempting choice, and one that maybe has not yet. Leave a comment below and let’s talk about it.

Enjoy the journey!