🤝 Culture

Culture Values PollAsk, Don't Announce

Values written by leadership and posted on a wall change nothing. Values the team ranked themselves get used in actual decisions.

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Culture
Live preview · Ranked choice
Which values resonate most with you?
🤝 Collaboration
💡 Innovation
🎯 Excellence
❤️ Empathy
🔓 Transparency
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Built for Culture building, Values alignment and leadership

What's in this template

Five candidate values in a ranked-choice format. Ranking forces the trade-off that makes values meaningful — a list where everything is equally important is not a list of values.

Q
Which values resonate most with you?
1
🤝 Collaboration
2
💡 Innovation
3
🎯 Excellence
4
❤️ Empathy
5
🔓 Transparency

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Why ranking is the only honest format

Values that cost nothing aren't values

If every candidate scores highly, you've learned nothing. Ranking forces people to say what they'd sacrifice, which is what a value actually is.

Announced values get ignored

A values statement the team had no part in producing gets treated as decoration. One they ranked gets quoted back in decisions.

The gap is the interesting part

Run it with leadership and with the wider team separately. Where the two rankings diverge is the most useful conversation this exercise will produce.

Anonymity changes the answer

People rank the CEO's favourite value first when their name is attached. Run it anonymously or don't bother running it.

Run it in three steps

1

List five to seven candidates

Include ones that genuinely trade off against each other — speed against thoroughness, for instance.

2

Run it anonymously

Leave name collection off. Values exercises are where deference distorts results most.

3

Compare leadership against the team

Two separate polls, same options. The divergence is the finding.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I run a company values poll?
Click Use This Template, replace the example values with your candidates, and click Create Poll. Share it with the team anonymously.
Why ranked choice rather than picking favourites?
Because everything sounds important in isolation. Ranking forces the trade-off, which is the only way to learn what people would actually prioritise under pressure.
Should it be anonymous?
Yes. Values exercises attract more deference than almost any other kind of internal poll, and a named vote will simply reflect what leadership already said.
How many values should I include?
Five to seven. More than that and the ranking becomes arbitrary past the top three.
Should leadership and the team vote separately?
Yes, and this is the most valuable version of the exercise. Where the two rankings disagree is where your stated culture and your actual culture differ.
What do I do with the result?
Use the top three in an actual decision within a month. Values that never affect a decision are decoration, and the team will notice.
How many values should a company actually have?
Three to five that genuinely trade off against each other. A list of ten reads as a list of nice words, and nobody can recall it when a decision is actually contested.
What if the team ranks differently from leadership?
That gap is the most valuable output of the exercise. It usually means the stated culture and the lived culture have diverged, and it is worth discussing openly rather than quietly reconciling.
Should we re-run this?
Annually at most. Values that change frequently are not values. Re-run when the company has changed significantly — a merger, rapid growth, or a new leadership team.

Ask what actually matters

Free, anonymous, ranked choice included.

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