The corner of the frame catches the light just so. A glare across the word ‘Transparency.’ You notice it every time you walk down this hall, a little flicker from the cheap overhead lighting that makes the expensive, heavyweight paper look momentarily holy. It hangs there, perfectly level, between the fire extinguisher and the door to Conference Room 6.

Today, the flicker feels more like a taunt. In precisely 46 seconds, you will walk into that room, and the first item on the agenda will be explaining the delayed project timeline to the junior team without revealing that the budget was reallocated to a senior executive’s pet project six weeks ago. You are to be transparent, but not about that. You are to embody the company value, but only in the ways that are convenient for people you don’t report to. This is the daily communion of corporate life: a silent acknowledgment that the words on the wall are for visitors, for new hires, for the universe, but not for us.

I used to think this was a harmless corporate ritual, like awkward icebreakers or birthday cakes with the wrong name on them. I even helped design one of these posters once. I know. I spent a week arguing over fonts. I advocated for ‘synergy’ because I thought it sounded dynamic. The cringe is real. We spent more time debating the kerning of the word ‘Integrity’ than we did discussing what would happen to someone who actually demonstrated it by reporting a manager falsifying expense reports for the last 6 quarters. He was fired for ‘not being a team player.’ The poster, however, got a new frame.

The Never-Ending Buffering

It’s like being promised a finished movie and watching the progress bar stick at 99% indefinitely. The promise is there, tantalizingly close, but the delivery never comes. The buffering icon just spins. That frustration, that low-grade, constant betrayal, is the emotional wallpaper of a company whose stated values are a fantasy.

They are revealed. They are the sum total of the behaviors that are rewarded, celebrated, and promoted. They are also defined by the behaviors that are punished, sidelined, or quietly ‘managed out.’ That’s it. That’s the entire operating system. Anything else is just marketing copy.

I met a building code inspector once, Dakota R.-M. She had this incredibly calm demeanor, the kind you only get from seeing things fall apart on a regular basis. Her job wasn’t to read the architect’s beautiful mission statement about ‘creating safe and inspiring spaces.’ Her job was to check the wiring. She’d tap on walls, measure joist spacing, and run water to see if the plumbing leaked. She told me, “The blueprint is the dream. The building is the truth.”

– Dakota R.-M., Building Code Inspector

The Dream vs. The Truth

Companies have it backwards. They print the dream and hang it in the hallway, hoping the truth will magically follow. But Dakota didn’t care about the blueprint once the walls were up. She cared about the load-bearing columns. What are the load-bearing columns of your company? Is it hitting the quarterly number, no matter the cost? Is it protecting a high-performing but toxic manager? Is it shipping a product with 26 known bugs because the release date is sacred? These are your values. They are not ‘Excellence’ or ‘Innovation.’ They are ‘Hit The Number,’ ‘Protect The Rainmaker,’ and ‘Ship It Broken.’

There’s a subtle arrogance to the values poster. It assumes that without its Helvetica-laden guidance, employees would be lost. It’s a top-down declaration, not a bottom-up reflection of reality. Think about it. Have you ever seen a poster that says, ‘We value cautiously navigating a complex political landscape to protect your budget’? Or ‘Our culture champions looking busy between 3 and 6 p.m.’? Of course not, but those are often the operational truths. I used to work with a team in Brazil, and the amount of documentation we had to get through was staggering. Every report was hundreds of pages of this dense corporate-speak. People would try to get through it by using some kind of texto em audio tool just to absorb the information while doing other tasks, because the written words felt so disconnected from the actual work that needed doing.

The Tax on Energy

That disconnect is exhausting. It asks you to perform a lie, every day. You have to praise the poster in the all-hands meeting. You have to nod along when the CEO talks about ‘customer obsession’ right after your team was denied the $676 budget for a critical software update that customers have been begging for. This performance is a tax on every employee’s energy and spirit. It’s the friction that slows everything down. It’s why change is so hard. It’s why everyone is so tired.

Imagine a system where reporting a problem is rewarded more than hiding it. Imagine a promotion process that actively filters for collaboration instead of internal competition. Imagine a budget meeting where the first question is “What is the true cost of not doing this for our customers?” rather than “How can we shave another 6% off this?” You don’t need a poster for that. You just need to do it. Consistently. The stories people tell about those decisions become the real, living values of the company. It becomes lore. Dakota doesn’t need a poster that says ‘Build Safely.’ The code is the code. Her inspection is the inspection. The consequences of failure are real.

The Unvarnished Truths

So, take a good look at the poster on your wall. Then take a better look at who got the biggest bonus last year. Look at what happened to the last person who brought up an inconvenient truth in a big meeting. Look at the stories that are told about heroes and villains in your company’s history. Somewhere in the gap between the glossy paper and those raw, unvarnished truths, you will find your actual corporate values. They might not be as pretty. They might not be inspirational. But they are real. And unlike the poster, you can’t just take them down.