Why Values Alone Do Not Change Culture
- Shenandoah Chefalo
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
And How the Five Core Agreements Help You Close the Gap
Most organizations can name their values.
They are written on websites, tucked into strategic plans, and referenced during onboarding. Safety. Trust. Collaboration. Equity. Growth.
And yet, many teams still feel disconnected, burned out, or stuck in the same cultural challenges year after year.
In a moment of high turnover, rising stress, and increasing needs in the communities you serve, many leaders are being asked to “fix culture” without more time or resources.
That is because culture is not created by values alone. Culture is created by agreements: lived, practiced, and revisited over time.
At Chefalo Consulting, we talk about culture as a set of shared agreements about how we treat one another, how power moves, how decisions are made, and how people experience safety, voice, and belonging in everyday work. When those agreements are unclear, inconsistent, or unexamined, people fill in the gaps themselves, often in ways that unintentionally cause harm.
From Aspirational Values to Lived Agreements
A people first, trauma informed culture does not mean everything feels easy or conflict free. It means there is shared clarity about how we navigate challenges together.
The Five Core Agreements offer a practical framework for doing exactly that:
Safety & Respect
Honest Communication
Genuine Collaboration
Authenticity & Fairness
Continual Growth
These are not checkboxes or personality traits. They are ongoing commitments, agreements we make with ourselves and with one another about how work actually happens.
When teams do not slow down to examine these agreements, patterns tend to repeat:
Communication breaks down during stress
Decision making feels opaque or rushed
Certain voices carry more weight than others
Growth is talked about, but mistakes are quietly punished
The work of culture change starts by making the invisible visible.
Why Reflection Is a Critical First Step
Before you can strengthen a people first culture, you need an honest picture of where things stand, not where you hope they are.
That is why reflection matters so much. Not as a performance metric, but as a learning practice.
Recently, a superintendent told me, “We say we value safety and respect, but our staff meetings feel rushed and tense. People leave with more questions than answers.” When we slowed down and looked at those meetings through the lens of the Five Core Agreements, it became clear that Honest Communication and Genuine Collaboration were most in tension. That insight shaped their first 90 day focus and helped them choose specific changes in how they ran meetings and shared decisions.
Individual reflection helps people notice:
Where they feel aligned with stated values
Where they feel tension or misalignment
How stress, roles, and power dynamics shape their behavior
Team reflection helps surface:
Shared strengths that can be built on
Gaps between intention and impact
Patterns that are affecting trust, safety, or collaboration
Without this step, organizations often jump straight to solutions such as policies, trainings, and new initiatives, without addressing the underlying agreements that shape daily experience.
A Starting Point: The Five Core Agreements Assessment Toolkit (Free)
To support this kind of grounded reflection, we created the Five Core Agreements Assessment Toolkit, a free, practical set of tools designed for both individuals and teams.
The toolkit includes:
An updated Individual Assessment to reflect on how you show up and where small shifts could make a meaningful difference
An updated Team Assessment to identify patterns, strengths, and gaps in your shared culture
A How to Use the Five Core Agreements guide to support thoughtful conversation and next steps
A visual Core Agreements Poster to keep the agreements present and accessible over time
These tools are designed to support reflection, shared language, and honest dialogue, not grading, shaming, or forcing disclosure. They can be used in leadership teams, departments, classrooms, agencies, or as a personal journaling practice.
If your organization is asking, “Where are we aligned, and where are we not?” this is the place to begin.
Turning Insight Into Action (Without Overwhelm)
Reflection alone is not enough. Insight has to be translated into behavior, and that is often where teams get stuck.
Many leaders know what they want their culture to feel like, but struggle with questions such as:
Where do we start
How do we avoid trying to fix everything at once
How do we make this stick in real life, not just in meetings
That is where structure matters.
Implementing the Five Core Agreements in 90 Days
Implementing the Five Core Agreements in 90 Days is a practical, trauma informed guide for turning shared values into everyday behaviors your team can actually feel.
Built specifically for busy, mission driven leaders, this guide helps you:
Choose one or two agreements to focus on instead of all five at once
Translate each agreement into clear, observable behaviors
Embed the work into meetings, supervision, decision making, and communication
Revisit and adjust without losing momentum
This is not about adding another initiative. It is about integrating the Core Agreements into what you already do, in ways that reduce confusion, increase trust, and support sustainable change.
If the assessment toolkit helps you see what is happening, the 90 day guide helps you decide what to do next.
Culture Is a Practice, Not a Statement
A people-first culture is not built in a retreat or written into a policy once. It is shaped by small, consistent choices over time, by individuals and teams who are willing to pause, reflect, and recommit.
You do not need to fix everything at once. You need shared language, realistic focus, and tools that support learning instead of perfection.
Whether you are just starting the conversation or ready to move from insight to action, these resources are here to support the work at a pace your people can actually sustain.
Start where you are.
Choose what matters most right now.
And build from there.