Values & Vision: what it is and how to measure it

Most organisations have values. They are on the wall in reception, in the onboarding deck and in the footer of the careers page. Far fewer teams can tell you the last time a value changed a decision. Values & Vision is the KPI that measures the gap between the two: not whether the team has written something down, but whether direction and principles are shared strongly enough to guide what people do when nobody is checking.

What the KPI actually covers

Three things, which are easy to conflate. The vision is where the team wants to be in a few years and why that is worth the effort. The values are the principles it will not trade away on the way there: how it treats customers, colleagues and quality when those pull in different directions. The strategic priorities are what the vision implies the team should do first. The survey asks about all three, but the common thread is alignment. The question is not "are these good values" but "do we hold the same ones, and do they show".

It sits in the Input pillar of the PEAKTEAMS model next to Purpose & Objectives, and the two are easy to confuse. Purpose & Objectives is about the mission and the goals of the next quarter. Values & Vision is about the long horizon and the how. A team can have crisp quarterly goals and no idea where it is heading in three years, and that is the gap this KPI picks up.

Espoused versus enacted

Edgar Schein's model of organisational culture (Organizational Culture and Leadership, 2010) separates three levels: visible artefacts, espoused values, and the underlying assumptions people actually operate on. The useful insight for a team survey is that espoused values are easy to produce and tell you almost nothing on their own. What predicts behaviour is the third level, and the only way to see it is to watch what happens under pressure: who gets promoted, what gets dropped when the deadline tightens, which complaint gets taken seriously. The Deep-Dive items "We live by our stated values" and "Our actions are consistent with our values" are there precisely because the Snapshot items alone could be answered from the poster.

Hackman (2002) lists a compelling direction as the first of his conditions for team effectiveness, and he is specific about what compelling means: the direction is clear, it is challenging, and it is consequential, meaning the work matters to someone beyond the team. A vision that fails any of the three does not do its job. "Be the best team in the company" is clear and challenging but consequential to nobody outside it.

In Built to Last (1994), Jim Collins and Jerry Porras described the long-lived companies in their sample as combining a small set of core values that rarely changed with ambitious goals that changed often. The pattern transfers to teams. The values are the fixed point; the goals rotate around them. Teams that treat their values as negotiable tend to renegotiate them every time a goal gets hard.

What you would hear in the team

Values & Vision is one of the easier KPIs to observe without a survey, because it shows up in language.

When the score is high

• People use the values as reasons in ordinary arguments: "we said we would not ship that without testing it".
• Someone can describe the three-year picture in a sentence, and the sentence matches what the lead would say.
• Trade-offs get named. "That is faster but it is not how we treat customers" is a normal thing to say.
• New members pick up what the team stands for from how decisions are made, not from a document.

When the score is low

• The values exist as a list but nobody can give an example of one being used.
• The vision is whatever the most recent leadership email said.
• Two senior members would give different answers to "what are we building towards" and both would be confident.
• Strategy arrives as a surprise. People hear about priorities through reorganisations rather than conversations.

How PEAKTEAMS measures it

The Snapshot survey (about 12 minutes per member, 18 KPIs) asks two statements for Values & Vision, one for each half of the name.

The Deep-Dive adds twelve further items that break the two halves apart: whether values are defined and lived, whether the vision is clear and motivating, whether strategic priorities are communicated, whether the team discusses its direction regularly, and whether a new member would quickly understand what the team stands for. There is no reverse-keyed item for this KPI; the acquiescence check for its Deep-Dive module, Communication & Values, is the reverse-scored Communication Culture item ("Important information often reaches some team members late or not at all").

Alignment is the point of this KPI, so look at the Consensus Matrix before the score. It plots each survey item's average against the team's agreement on it, so read this KPI's items together. A Values & Vision item with wide disagreement is the more interesting finding: part of the team believes in a direction the rest cannot see. Results appear only once at least five team members have answered; the owner's own answer does not count, which matters here because the owner is usually the person who wrote the vision.

How to improve it

• Cut the values list to three or four. Schein's point is that what guides behaviour is a small set of deeply held assumptions, and ten values on a slide are a sign that nobody chose.
• Attach a story to each value. A value with a remembered decision behind it ("the time we delayed launch to fix the data") is enacted; one without is espoused.
• Write the vision as a description of a day, not a slogan. "In two years a customer can do X without calling us" is testable; "world-class service" is not.
• Bring strategy into the team's own rhythm. Ten minutes in a monthly meeting on "what changed in our direction" keeps priorities from arriving as surprises.
• Use the values explicitly in hiring and onboarding. The Deep-Dive item about new members is a leading indicator; if newcomers cannot say what the team stands for, the values are not transmitting.

Related KPIs

Read Values & Vision together with Purpose & Objectives, which covers the mission and the near-term goals the vision should produce. Leadership Principles is the adjacent Input KPI about whether leaders walk the talk, which is where enacted values usually break first. On the Process side, Identification & Engagement measures how strongly members identify with the team, and that is hard to sustain when the team's direction is unclear.