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Values on the Wall — or in the Work?

Most social care organisations have values. Very few have made them truly live. Here is how to know which side of that line you are on – and three practical questions to move this forward today.

I asked the question and the room changed.

Not because the leaders I was working with did not have an answer. Because they did: immediately and specifically. The conversations they had been avoiding were already there, sitting just below the surface. Named within seconds of being asked.

That is the moment I come back to whenever I work with leaders on culture. Because what it reveals is something important: the gap between the culture we intend to create and the one our people actually experience is almost never a values problem. The values are usually right.

The gap lives somewhere else entirely.

The values on your website tell me what you aspire to. The culture in your building tells me what you have actually built.

In this post: why naming your values is the easy part, what observable behaviours have to do with it, and three questions you can use today to test whether your values are genuinely embedded — or just well-signposted.

Naming values is the easy part

Most social care organisations have values. They are on the website, in the induction pack, sometimes on the wall of the staff room. Leaders can recite them without thinking and will, if you ask, describe them with genuine conviction.

What is considerably harder, and far more revealing, is answering a different question: what does each value actually look like in practice?

Not in your best moments. Not in the example you would reach for if someone asked. Consistently, across your team, across your services, day to day. What are the observable behaviours that tell you a value is genuinely being lived?

This is the question I return to with almost every leader I work with. And it is consistently where the gap lives.

Values that cannot be described in observable behaviours are not embedded. They are aspirational and aspiration, without action, changes nothing.

A value of ‘respect’, for example, is not an observable behaviour. But ‘we speak to one another directly and honestly before we speak about one another’ is. ‘We always tell people in our care what we are doing before we do it’ is. The moment you move from the word to the behaviour, you have something that can be taught, modelled, noticed when it is absent, and addressed when it is not there.

Until you make that move, your values are signposted. They are not embedded.

The conversation the room was avoiding

Let me go back to that room.

I was working with a group of senior leaders at an organisation going through a significant transition. We had spent time on their values: naming them, exploring what each one meant, beginning to describe what they should look like in day-to-day leadership. The session was going well. Real engagement, genuine reflection, a growing shared language.

And then I asked them to name the difficult conversations they had been avoiding.

The conversations were already there. The values were right. The behaviours that contradicted those values were also present and they were going unaddressed.

Not through malice or indifference. But because the avoided conversation feels harder in the moment than the cost of leaving it.

Every avoided conversation is a small permission – a quiet signal to your team about what this organisation will and will not hold.

This is what I see time and again in leadership development work across the sector. Leaders who can articulate their values fluently, who care deeply about the quality of what they deliver, and who are simultaneously allowing behaviours that contradict those values to go unaddressed. The culture does not stay still while that conversation waits. It shifts, almost imperceptibly, in the direction of what is being permitted.

Three questions to test whether your values are truly embedded

Here is where I want to make this practical. Because reflection without action changes nothing and you did not read this far for nothing.

Take one of your organisation’s values. Write it at the top of a page. Then answer these three questions as honestly as you can:

1.  What does this value look like when it is being lived?

Be concrete. Not ‘we treat people with dignity’ but what does that actually look like in practice? Describe a behaviour you would observe. If you cannot, that is useful information.

2.  What does it look like when it is absent?

Name the behaviour that signals the value is not being upheld. This question is often harder than the first. That gap is worth sitting with.

3.  When did you last address it — specifically?

Not in a general sense. When did you last have a real conversation, with a real person, about this value, what it means, and what you are seeing? If your values live primarily in an induction pack, they are signposted, not embedded.

If any of those questions stop you, that is not a sign something is broken. It is a sign you have just found where the real work is.

The leaders who build genuinely outstanding cultures are not leaders who have more time or fewer problems. They are leaders who have made the connection between their values and their daily behaviour explicit and who keep making it, consistently, under pressure, when nobody senior is watching.

Culture is not built through strategy documents or away days. It is built through the everyday choices leaders make about what they address, what they let pass, and what they model when things get difficult.

Want to know where your culture actually stands?

The Lumina Culture Diagnostic is a reflective tool designed specifically for social care leaders — a structured way to surface what is working, what is not, and where the gap between your intended culture and your lived culture actually sits.

It is free, it takes around twenty minutes, and it will give you something honest to work with.

→  Download the Lumina Culture Diagnostic

→  Book a free 30-minute insight call

→  Find out more about the Culture Review

About Claire Callaghan

Claire Callaghan is the founder of Lumina Leadership & Wellbeing Ltd. With nearly thirty years of senior leadership experience in health and social care — including leading a service from CQC Inadequate to Outstanding — she works with directors, CEOs, and registered managers to build leadership cultures that deliver outstanding care, consistently and sustainably. She is an EMCC Senior Practitioner in executive coaching and was named National Registered Manager of the Year at the Great British Care Awards 2024.

info@luminaleadership.co.uk  |  luminaleadership.co.uk