To kick off the current football season, Brigham Young University football coach Bronco Mendenhall made a bold move. In place of players’ last names, he had the team’s core values—tradition, spirit, and honor—emblazoned on the back of the team jerseys. The goal: “to make them very visible for anyone who wants to know about our program and what it stands for,” Mendenhall told reporters.
The move is part of a trend among organizations, including companies, to capture a set of core values, commit them to paper, and promote them throughout the organization. According to Wayne Brody, senior leader at governance consulting firm LRN and former chief compliance officer for Arrow Electronics, more companies are making a statement of core values or selecting a set of values—words like “integrity, community, and service” to use as guideposts to influence employee behavior.
