Core values show up in almost every conversation about EOS, but rarely get a deep dive of their own.

This episode goes there: how to actually find them, how to make them real day to day, and what it looks like to hold people accountable to them.

Core Values Are Discovered, Not Prescribed

The biggest mistake in building core values is writing them alone in a room.

Values written solo tend to describe who a leader wants the company to be, not who it already is. The exercise only works when it's built with the team, typically the leadership team, during the second day of an EOS rollout.

It starts by naming the people who already define what's best about the company — the ones everyone wishes there were more of — and pulling out their characteristics.

Ask a leader what they despise, not just what mildly bothers them. Flip that answer into a positive, and it produces something far more specific than generic words like honesty or respect.

From there, a facilitator runs a clustering exercise: each person offers a word or phrase, and the group decides whether it belongs with something already on the board or needs its own column. The instinct is always to end up with six or seven buckets — the discipline is pushing back down to three to five, since fewer, sharper values are what a team actually remembers and repeats.

One Company's Own Values Journey

Even a well-run exercise doesn't always land the full set of values on the first try.

Wonder's session produced four values on day one: Make It Happen, Be Curious, Be Courageous, and Be Generous. Each one needed roughly 30 days to marinate before the team was ready to commit to it publicly.

A fifth value, Outshine, didn't surface until months later. It came from a nagging sense that something in the set was missing — specifically, the standard for the quality of the work itself, not just how the team behaves while doing it.

That gap is worth watching for generally: it's easy to land on a strong set of behavioral values and still miss the one that speaks to output, product, or work quality if that's core to the business.

Making Values Real: From Artificial to Authentic

Repeating a value for the seventh time can start to feel hollow to the person saying it — even though a newer team member may be hearing it for the very first time.

That gap is exactly why values need constant, visible repetition rather than a one-time launch. A few ways that show up in practice: a dedicated Slack channel for calling out values in the moment, a weekly team share that rotates through updates and value callouts, and using the customer and employee headlines section of an L10 as a natural weekly spot to name where a value showed up — or didn't.

A missed value makes just as good a teaching moment as a celebrated one. Forgetting to give a teammate a heads-up about a canceled meeting, for instance, is a small but real breakdown in generosity worth naming out loud.

Values earn real teeth once they show up in hiring. Running every candidate through the People Analyzer tool, and writing a core value speech specific enough that it provokes a real reaction — strong agreement or genuine discomfort — does more than a values page ever will.

Holding People Accountable to the Values

Values only take root once they show up in real personnel decisions, not just in celebration.

When a value isn't being lived, the standard is to address it within 24 hours rather than let it build. Leadership means repeating the message often and having the courage to raise it early, even when it's uncomfortable.

Watch for BCDs — blaming, complaining, and being defensive — when a values conversation comes up. A player teammates take the feedback and own it instead.

When a performance issue comes up, values come before job description. Running the situation through each value first often reveals that the real issue isn't a skills or role mismatch — it's a values misalignment, and no seat fixes that.

It helps to remember this isn't a moral judgment. Someone who doesn't share a team's values isn't a bad person — they're simply not going to be happy or thrive on that particular bus, and finding them a better fit serves them too.

Final Takeaway: Values Are the Foundation of Culture

Every strong culture carries a bit of tribe in it — shared language, shared objectives, and a shared sense of what the team is chasing together. Core values are what that shared feeling is actually built on.

A brand is just the sum of every interaction a company has — and core values are the foundation underneath all of them.

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Wonder's MAP Brief™ EOS Compatible Marketing Operating System

The One Marketing Document You Didn't Know You Needed: The MAP Brief™

By Jami Mullikin • June 23, 2026

More than a decade ago, I was serving as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for a growing company. We were preparing for annual planning, and like most organizations, we had a long list of things we wanted to accomplish. Before the planning process started, I asked the CEO for thirty minutes. I told him I had one question. "If we jump forward a year and this plan absolutely crushed it, how would we know?" Then I waited. What followed changed the way I think about planning. He didn't start talking about marketing. He didn't mention trade shows, campaigns, advertising, websites, or lead generation. Instead, he described what success would look like for the business. Revenue growth. New opportunities. Strategic wins. The kinds of outcomes that would make us all look back and say, "That was a great year." It was a simple conversation, but it revealed something important. Most planning starts with activity when it should start with outcomes. We spend a lot of time talking about what we're going to do before we've fully aligned on what we're trying to accomplish. That idea stayed with me for years. Later, when I discovered EOS, it immediately clicked. The 3-Year Picture, the 1-Year Plan, and quarterly Rocks all start with the same principle. Define the future first. Then work backward to determine what needs to happen next. Over time, that thinking evolved into what we now call the MAP Brief™. The MAP Brief™ is a simple tool we use with every client at Wonder. It helps leadership, sales, and marketing align around a shared vision of success before we ever start talking about campaigns or tactics. The first page captures the big picture. Where are we today? What does success look like three years from now? What needs to happen this year? What are the key strategies that will get us there? The second page translates those strategies into quarterly priorities. This is where strategy becomes activation. Instead of creating a long list of marketing activities, we identify the Rocks that matter most over the next 90 days and build momentum one quarter at a time. Like the EOS V/TO, what I love most about the MAP Brief™ is its simplicity. It's not a hundred-page strategic plan. It's not a complicated marketing framework. It's a conversation tool that helps everyone stay aligned around the same goals. We use it internally. We use it with clients. We revisit it regularly whenever priorities shift or new opportunities emerge. Most importantly, it helps answer a question that every leadership team should be asking: What has to be true for this year to be considered a success? Everything else becomes much easier once that answer is clear. We've made our MAP Brief™ template available as a free download. If you're looking for a simple way to align leadership, sales, and marketing around your annual objectives, I hope you'll give it a try. Download the Free MAP Brief™ Template Use it. Make it your own. We hope it helps your team create the same kind of alignment it has created for ours and for the clients we serve.