Most organisations can write impressive values.
The harder test comes when following those values has a cost. A business may celebrate work–life balance while rewarding the person who replies at midnight. It may champion transparency while keeping promotion criteria opaque. It may praise collaboration and consistently promote people whose behaviour undermines it.
The distance between a values statement and daily practice is not a copywriting problem. It matters because employees learn that what the organisation says it wants is not necessarily what it rewards.
Are your values decision-making criteria or office decoration?
Respect is easy to support until a high performer treats colleagues badly. Transparency sounds uncomplicated until an unpopular decision needs explaining. Autonomy becomes more demanding when someone uses their judgement to challenge a senior view. A value starts to matter when it helps an organisation choose between competing priorities.
That does not mean a company must get every decision right. It does mean people should be able to see what happens when behaviour falls short: who acknowledges it, what changes and whether the organisation is willing to accept a cost in order to remain consistent.
Inconsistency teaches its own informal rules.
When behaviour that contradicts stated values is repeatedly tolerated, employees stop treating the posters as instructions. They watch who is promoted, whose conduct is excused and who is allowed to disagree. Over time, these observations become a more powerful guide than any induction presentation.
The implications are different depending on where you sit. An employee needs to understand the limits of their influence without taking on responsibility for repairing an entire institution. A manager may need to revisit reward criteria and tolerated behaviour. Senior decision-makers have to turn abstract commitments into practical consequences.
Consistency does not mean the absence of difficult choices.
Real workplaces face tensions between people, performance, customers and commercial constraints. The answer is not to remove the tension with another slogan. It is to make the criteria visible, explain the choice and own its consequences. Without that, values live on the wall while decisions follow a different rulebook.
O Teu Próximo Passo examines these tensions through professional identity, leadership and the systems that shape work. The Portuguese edition develops a fuller method for looking at a situation, weighing choices and putting decisions into practice.
If you would like to discuss the book with a Portuguese-speaking leadership team, ask about team copies or a book discussion ↗