Ask most leaders how many core values their company should have and you will hear a confident number: three, five, maybe seven. Short enough to fit on a wall. Short enough to memorize.
Then someone asks the harder question. Not "what do we believe," but "how do we want people to act." And the tidy list of five falls apart, because values are abstractions and behavior is specific. "Respect" is one value. Practicing respect (how you run a meeting, how you answer an email, how you deliver bad news) is a dozen different behaviors, and none of them fit on the poster.
So, the real question is not how many core values you should have. It is how many core behaviors. And the answer, for almost every company that gets this right, lands in the same range.
Fewer than you think, and it matters less than you think. A company can run fine on four or five core values. The problem is not the number of values. It is that values, by themselves, do not tell anyone what to do on Tuesday.
CEOs tell us this all the time. "I guarantee every employee could recite our four values." And yet culture is still their problem, which is why they are on the call. Values you can recite are not the same as behaviors people practice. That gap is the single most common thing buyers tell CultureWise, in one form or another: we have the values, but we do not have the behaviors that deliver them.
So, keep your handful of values. Then ask the question that moves how people work.
A value is what you believe. A behavior is what you do about it, described so specifically that someone could watch for it. Values are the headline. Behaviors are the operating instructions.
Take a value almost everyone claims: respect. One CEO said it plainly: "Okay, respect. That's one of our core values. But what in the heck does that really mean?" That is the whole issue. "Respect" cannot be coached, because two people will define it two different ways. But "Honor commitments. Do what you say you're going to do, when you say you're going to do it" is a behavior. You can see it, teach it, and hold people to it.
This is why CultureWise talks about Fundamentals, not values. Fundamentals are the specific behaviors that drive success in your company. Not slogans, but actions. And because they are specific, you need more of them than you need values, which is exactly why the count climbs from five into the dozens.
Around 25 to 40, for most companies. That is where teams tend to land when they define real behaviors instead of picking a round number. It is enough to cover how a company operates, and few enough that people can learn them over time. The range is a guide, not a rule. We have clients who run more and clients who run fewer, because the set is designed to your culture: your operations, your people, and the way you actually work. We walk through this question in a short video.
You do not have to take that on faith. In one public example, a company's leadership team defined 31 specific behaviors of their own. Not four values on a wall. Thirty-one behaviors, shaped by the people who lead the company. That is what operationalized culture looks like when you count it.
Because the number is set by the practice rhythm, not the other way around. Our method is one behavior per week: you focus the whole company on a single Fundamental, practice it, then move to the next. At 25 to 40 behaviors, you complete a full cycle in six to nine months, then start over. That repetition, week after week and year after year, is how a behavior stops being a poster and becomes a habit.
Run the math and the logic is obvious. A set that size at one a week is a cycle a company can finish and repeat. Repeat it enough times and people stop thinking about the behavior and start living it. The count is not a decoration on top of the system. The count is the system. It is whatever number lets you practice every behavior often enough for it to stick.
That is the part most DIY efforts miss. They treat the list as the deliverable. The list is not the deliverable. The weekly rhythm is, and the list has to be sized to fit it.
The whole system collapses under its own weight. If you cannot practice a behavior often enough to reinforce it, defining it did nothing. More behaviors does not equal more culture. Past a point, it is less.
The cautionary version is real. One leadership team, mapping out every behavior they could think of, watched the list climb toward 700. It split into arguments about which behaviors were for leaders and which were for everyone else. At one behavior per week, a list of 700 means you would not circle back to any single one for over a decade. Nobody remembers it. Nobody practices it. You have written a very long document and changed nobody's Tuesday.
We hear the early tremor of this often. One CEO asked us straight: "You've seen everything from two to 100. What's the right number?" The honest answer is that the ceiling is not philosophical. It is arithmetic. A behavior you cannot cycle through and repeat is a behavior you cannot reinforce.
You are back where you started, with slogans. Five behaviors cannot describe how a real company operates: how you hire, how you handle a mistake, how you treat a customer who is wrong, how you run a meeting, how you deliver on a commitment. Compress all of that into a handful of items and you are writing values again, just with verbs.
Too few is the more common failure because it feels safe and clean. It is neither. It just moves the vagueness from the wall into the "behaviors" list and calls it done.
You do not pick the number first. You define the behaviors that drive results in your company, and the number falls out. Done honestly, it almost always falls somewhere between 25 and 40.
The process matters as much as the output. These are not crowd-sourced by committee until everyone is happy. The leaders who own the company decide the behaviors they want the company to run on, then shape and refine them into clear, teachable language. That is the first step of Culture by Design: define the behaviors that drive success, create rituals to practice them, roll them out, and reinforce them through coaching. The number is not the goal of that work. It is the residue of doing it right.
And you do not have to do it alone. The reason companies land in the 25-to-30 range instead of at five or at 700 is usually that someone who has done this a few hundred times helped them draw the line. That is the difference between a list you wrote once and a culture operating system you can run.
Stop asking how many values fit on the wall. Start asking how many behaviors it takes to describe how your company works, and whether you can practice them often enough to make them real. For most companies, that is 25 to 40, one per week, on repeat.
The count is not trivia. It is the tell. Too many and you never reinforce anything. Too few and you never left the poster. The right number is the one your system can carry.
If you want help finding yours, see how Culture by Design works. No three-hour talk required.