Exit interviews are theater. People say "better opportunity" because it's safe. It doesn't burn bridges. It doesn't require explaining the slow erosion of meaning that actually pushed them out the door.

Every leadership book talks about trust. Be authentic. Keep your commitments. Lead with transparency. You know the script. And you've also watched trust erode in organizations that checked every box.

Your recruiting AI screens out candidates who would have been perfect. Your engagement surveys generate reports that gather dust. Your talent management platform has great data and zero adoption. These aren't implementation failures. They're values collisions.

You've done the culture work. You identified your values. You rolled out the posters. You trained the managers. And somehow, the culture feels exactly the same, or worse, now it feels hollow because the gap between stated and lived culture is more visible than ever.

Your front desk staff keeps going around the AI tools. Your guests keep asking to speak to a real person. These aren't bugs. They're features of human nature that your tech stack ignores

Your bonus structure is generous. Your recognition programs are elaborate. Your carrots and sticks are carefully designed. And somehow, the people you most want to motivate remain stubbornly unresponsive while the behaviors you're trying to encourage actually decline.

Yes, I’m being cute here, but it’s true:  your best housekeeper won’t stay for the employee of the month award. Neither will your best front desk agent, your best night auditor, or your best groundskeeper. The plaque on the wall, the photo in the break room, the gift card to a restaurant they’ll never use. It’s all a nice gesture. But it won’t stop them from looking around for a better job that feels like more of a fit. 

There's no one-size-fits-all solution for leading teams through mergers, layoffs, or rapid growth. Every organization is different. But after analyzing nearly a million survey responses, we found three values that consistently matter to people working in large American corporations. This article gives you a practical tactic for each one, something you can actually use on Monday morning.

Every creative person knows this feeling: you put your work into the world and wait. Will it be loved, ignored, or torn apart? Creativity is a leap of faith that requires you to show who you are inside, and that leap takes courage.

 I was hurting. For over a year, my back was telling me something wasn’t right. I tried everything: acupuncture, massage, stretching, all the usual suspects. Nothing worked. Until I met a physiotherapist who did something unusual. He looked at the front of me. He pressed around and said, “You don’t have a back problem. You have a front problem.”

Turns out, he was right. After a few minutes working on the aftermath of an old surgery, the pain vanished. Just like that.

When you think about the future of cities, think about What Matters Most to the people who live there. Here’s how.

One of the trickiest—and most important—decisions you’ll ever make in business is choosing who to work with.

It could be a potential hire for your team. Or—on a much bigger scale—if you're part of a franchise brand, it might be about who gets the next franchise opportunity.

This isn’t a small decision. Whatever the situation, you’re inviting someone into your brand family, for years—maybe decades.

So how do you know who’s the right fit?

Not long ago, I stood in front of a room filled with people from across the nonprofit sector in the United States. They were gathered because they care. About people. About justice. About making this world a little more decent and a whole lot more humane. And they wanted tools—real tools—to do their work better.

Let’s start with a moment that landed somewhere between science and magic.

We asked a room full of pension and benefits professionals to raise their hands if they wear fitness trackers. The hands shot up as someone had just offered free chocolate. Now take a second and picture that crowd. On the outside? A wonderfully diverse tapestry of age, gender, ethnicity, job roles, and personalities. On the inside? They all shared one of the three Power Values we discovered for this group: Personal Growth.

Business events have a formula. Registration, exhibit halls, keynote speeches, networking, repeat. Sure, the names change, the banners look different, and the swag bags come and go, but the overall experience? Pretty predictable.

And that’s the problem.

Attendees don’t just want another event. They want an event that speaks directly to them in a way that matters and connects with what they care about. That’s where shared values come in.

Let me tell you a quick story.

A few years ago, I was asked to help solve a talent crisis in the skilled trades. The room was full of business owners who were saying, "We can’t find people. Nobody wants to work with their hands anymore." But when we did the Valuegraphics research on people considering careers in the trades, we found something surprising. What mattered most to this group wasn’t money, or status, or even stability. It was a value we call Service to Others. That one insight changed everything for the people in that room. 

We’ve all felt that spark. A quick grin at the same joke, an instant flash of trust, a sense we’re on the same wavelength. That moment of magic is thanks to shared values. Your insula—a tiny brain region devoted to What Matters Most—flags a fellow traveler who cares about the same things you do.

Walk into any college campus and you’ll see a mosaic of difference. Age, race, background, politics, personal histories. On the surface, it can look like a world full of contrast and division. But underneath all that difference? A set of shared values. 

At the Higher Learning Commission conference this year, I had the chance to talk about that heartbeat—about what really brings people together. And it turns out the lessons aren’t just for universities. They’re for businesses, for governments, for nonprofits, for families, for cities. For anyone who works with people and wants them to move in the same direction.

Gallup's latest polls show that employee engagement has dropped in historic fashion. In 2024, global employee engagement dropped to 21%. That is a two-point fall from last year, and last year’s numbers were already a whisper, not a roar. The result? A staggering $438 billion loss in productivity. That is the GDP of a medium-sized country, gone. Vanished into thin air.

When the ship is leaking, more ping pong tournaments will not plug the holes. You need to find out what matters most to people, and give them more of that. In other words, you need to identify shared values.

That feeling when you step off a plane and everything feels slightly off? It’s more than jet lag. It’s your internal radar picking up on a different values environment. The way people speak, move, interact, and even make small talk—it all runs through their internal operating system, and that system is made up of the values they hold dear. The same phenomenon plays out in every workplace. When departments feel like foreign countries, it’s not just corporate culture. It’s values.