In 2014, CVS made a decision that surprised the business world.
The company announced that it would stop selling cigarettes and other tobacco products in every one of its pharmacies across the country.
CVS estimated that the decision could cost approximately $2 billion in annual revenue.
Why would a business voluntarily walk away from that much money?
Because CVS had declared that its purpose was to help people on their path to better health, and its leaders recognized that selling tobacco products was inconsistent with that purpose.
More than a decade later, CVS Health remains the only major national drugstore chain in the United States that does not sell cigarettes, e-cigarettes, vapes, or other tobacco products.
This is a perfect example of a stated value becoming a lived principle.
From Stated Values to Lived Principles
Most organizations have values. They appear on websites, office walls, onboarding materials, strategic plans - and perhaps even the occasional coffee mug.
But values are easy to claim when they cost us nothing.
The real test comes when honoring them requires us to give up something we want: revenue, convenience, approval, influence, a high-performing employee, or an easier path forward.
That is when we discover whether a value is merely something we say or a principle that genuinely guides us.
For a stated value to become a lived principle, it must be translated into two things:
Behavioral standards: What living that value looks like in practice.
Decision principles: How that value guides us when priorities compete.
Without that translation, words such as integrity, collaboration, innovation, and respect are open to interpretation. People may agree that a value matters while holding very different ideas about what it requires.
That ambiguity makes consistent leadership and accountability nearly impossible.
A lived principle clarifies what people can expect, which behaviors leaders will reward or address, and what the organization will prioritize when two desirable outcomes cannot coexist.
Most importantly, it gives employees a reason to believe that leadership’s actions will align with its words.
Principles Build Trust
Trust is not built by what leaders say when leadership is convenient. It is built through what they consistently do when the pressure rises and the stakes become real.
That difference has measurable consequences. Recent Gallup research on trust found that among employees who do not find their leaders trustworthy, just one in twelve is engaged. It also found that employees who trust organizational leadership are 61% more likely to stay.
Organizations keep asking how to engage people and retain their best talent.
Perhaps one of the questions we should be asking is:
How are we developing leaders into the kind of people others choose to follow?
Trust needs something sturdier than good intentions and situational courage. It needs leaders whose principles do not buckle under pressure.
But even principled people can disagree. Shared values do not automatically create shared understanding.
When Good People Interpret Principles Differently
Principles operate across three interconnected parts of organizational life:
Organizational principles: What the organization says it stands for and how those principles are embedded in its culture.
Leadership principles: What leaders actually prioritize, model, reward, tolerate, and address.
Individual principles: What each person needs to honor to feel authentic and invested in their work.
The challenge is not simply establishing principles at each level. It is creating enough clarity and alignment among them.
Imagine an organization that names collaboration as a core value.
A leader may believe collaboration means making a decisive call and then communicating the outcome clearly. An employee may believe it means being invited to share input before that decision is made.
Both value collaboration. But because they interpret it differently, the leader may see the employee’s questions as resistance, while the employee feels dismissed because their perspective was never invited.
Who is wrong?
Possibly no one.
Both may be acting with integrity. They are simply acting from different understandings of the same principle.
This is why organizations must do more than name their values. They must create honest conversations about what those values mean, how they shape behavior, and what people should be able to expect from one another.
Alignment does not mean everyone must value precisely the same things or approach every decision identically. It means there is enough shared ground for people to work together without continually compromising what matters most to them.
Connecting Individual Principles to the Work
Organizations spend a great deal of time defining their North Star.
But you cannot hand someone your North Star and expect it to become theirs.
Employees arrive with compasses of their own - the deeply held principles that shape who they are, what they care about, and where they are willing to invest their energy.
When an employee’s internal compass and the organization’s North Star point in the same direction, work becomes more meaningful and energizing. People can see not only how they contribute, but also how their work allows them to live what they value.
A meta-analysis of 21 studies on person-organization fit found that greater alignment between employees and their organizations was associated with higher job satisfaction and organizational commitment - and lower intentions to leave.
But that connection cannot be left to chance.
Organizations need to help employees clarify the principles that matter most to them, understand what the organization’s principles look like in practice, and see how their roles allow them to express what they value while contributing to the larger mission.
Your most principled employees may be the first to leave if staying requires them to repeatedly compromise who they are. If their internal compass continually tells them they are heading in the wrong direction, eventually they will change course.
Turning Principles Into Practice
To determine whether your organization’s values are truly guiding how people work, ask:
What does each value look like in observable behavior?
How should it guide decisions when priorities compete?
What would violate it - even if that behavior produced results?
Are leaders consistently modeling and reinforcing it?
Can employees see a connection between what matters to them and the work they do?
CVS removed tobacco from its shelves. In doing so, it put something far more important on display: what the company was willing to stand for.
Your organization’s next test may not carry a $2 billion price tag. But it will come.
When it does, your people will be watching - not to see what is written on the wall, but what your leaders are willing to do.
That is where values become principles - and where the future of your culture is decided.
