EOS core values are the three to seven behaviours that already describe your best people — not the ones you wish described everyone. That distinction is the whole exercise. Values invented in a brainstorm produce a poster. Values discovered by examining the people you would clone produce something you can hire, review and occasionally fire against. This page walks through the discovery exercise, which a leadership team can run in about ninety minutes.
EOS® is a registered trademark of EOS Worldwide, LLC. Trinity One is an independent practice, not affiliated with or endorsed by EOS Worldwide. The exercise below is our own working version.
What EOS Core Values Mean
Core values in this system are a filter for people, not a statement of ambition. They describe how your best people already behave, so that you can recognise more of them at interview and notice when someone is drifting.
The practical test is whether a value can produce a "no". If a value has never cost you a hire you wanted to make, or has never been the reason a conversation happened, it is decoration. "Integrity" almost never produces a no, because nobody self-identifies as lacking it. "Says the difficult thing in the room, not afterwards" produces a no regularly — and half your candidates will fail it.
Values feed directly into the People component of the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and specifically into the scoring grid described in the EOS People Analyzer. Weak values make that grid useless, which is the usual reason a People Analyzer session produces a wall of pluses.
The Core Values Exercise, Step by Step
Ninety minutes, leadership team only, whiteboard. Run it in this order.
1. Name three people. (10 minutes) Each person silently writes down three current employees they would clone — people who, if the whole company behaved like them, would make the business unrecognisably better. Real names, no diplomacy. Ignore role and seniority.
2. List what makes them that way. (20 minutes) Go around the room. For each named person, describe the specific behaviours that put them on the list. Push for behaviour, not adjectives: not "she's great with clients" but "she tells clients when we've got it wrong before they find out". Write everything on the board. You will end up with thirty to fifty items, many overlapping.
3. Group and cut. (25 minutes) Cluster the overlapping items. Then cut hard, using one question per cluster: has this ever cost us something? If nobody can name an occasion where the company chose this behaviour over an easier option, it is aspiration, not a value. Aim to get to five to eight clusters.
4. Test against real people. (20 minutes) Take the shortlist and score three people against it, out loud: your best performer, your most difficult, and someone who left in the last year. If your most difficult person scores well on all of them, your values are not discriminating. If the person who left scores badly on the ones that mattered, you have found something real.
5. Write them as behaviours. (15 minutes) Each value gets a short name and one sentence describing what it looks like on a normal Tuesday. Cut to three to seven. Then leave it for a week before finalising — the list always looks different once the room's energy has worn off.
Why Aspirational Values Fail
The failure is not that aspirational values are dishonest. It is that they are unusable.
"Excellence" cannot be scored, so the People Analyzer returns pluses for everyone. It cannot be interviewed for, because every candidate claims it. It cannot justify a difficult conversation, because the person will genuinely believe they have it. A value that cannot produce disagreement cannot produce a decision.
There is a second, worse failure mode: values that describe the company's ambitions rather than its behaviour actively erode trust. If the wall says "we put people first" while the company is visibly doing the opposite, every employee learns that stated commitments are theatre. It would have been better to say nothing.
The uncomfortable version of this exercise sometimes surfaces a value you do not like — a company that genuinely runs on speed over craft, say. Naming it honestly is more useful than replacing it with something more flattering, and it explains a lot about who thrives there.
How Many Core Values Should You Have?
Three to seven, and closer to three than seven.
The constraint is memory. If your leadership team cannot recite the list without looking, nobody in the company can, and values nobody can recite cannot be used in the moment a decision is being made — which is the only time they matter. Five is a good target; three is better than eight.
Using Core Values in Hiring, Reviews, and Firing
Hiring. Write one behavioural question per value and ask it of every candidate. For a value about directness: "tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager's decision — what did you actually do?" Score before discussing as a group, so the first opinion voiced does not anchor the rest.
Reviews. Score values separately from performance and say the scores out loud. Someone hitting their numbers while scoring badly on values is the most important conversation in the company, and the one most often deferred. Deferring it teaches everyone watching that results buy exemption.
Firing. Values give the conversation a shape that is about behaviour rather than personality, which is both fairer and more defensible. It still needs specifics — dates and incidents, not scores — and it should never be the first time the person has heard the concern. Take employment decisions with proper HR and legal counsel in your jurisdiction; nothing here is legal advice.
All of this lands in the leadership team's weekly meeting as issues to work, which is what the sixty-minute problem-solving segment of the Level 10 meeting agenda exists for.
Keeping Values Alive
Values decay quietly. Three habits keep them in use.
Open the weekly meeting with a values moment. Thirty seconds naming someone who visibly lived one this week, with the specific thing they did. It costs nothing and it keeps the vocabulary current.
Use the words when you make decisions. "We're not doing that because it fails the second value" is worth more than a hundred posters. If a full quarter passes without a value being cited in a real decision, they have gone dormant.
Re-score people annually. Not to catch anyone out, but because seats and standards move. The grid in the People Analyzer is the instrument; the values are what make it discriminate.
One thing not to do: revise the values every year. They should be genuinely stable, because they describe what the company already is. If they change annually, you are still writing aspirations. The parts of the plan that should change quarterly are the priorities — see EOS Rocks — and the annual planning arc in our EOS implementation guide.
Getting Help
This exercise is genuinely runnable in-house, and plenty of teams do it well. The one situation where an outside facilitator changes the outcome is when the honest answer implicates the founder's own behaviour — a room rarely surfaces that on its own. An EOS Implementer can hold that conversation without a stake in the outcome.
Trinity One runs values discovery with founder-led leadership teams as part of a wider operating rollout. Book a discovery call if your current values live on a wall and nowhere else.