I once attended a conference, where at post-conference drinks, a participant asked the speaker’s opinion on how to replicate Google’s culture in their company so that they could be more innovative. While they were coming from a good place, their choice of solution was rather dangerous. An organisation’s culture and its values do not sit in isolation. They are shaped by the reality of the workplace and by the product or technical requirements of its business. In turn, they shape the workplace and the organisation’s product and technical direction in a virtuous or vicious cycle.

A company’s culture and values represent your—the leader’s—voice when you cannot be physically present for your team. They force your teams to think whether their decisions or behaviour would be valued by you or your company. When copied blindly from outside, they can have unintended consequences. If you blindly apply Amazon’s frugal culture to your organisation in an attempt to inspire innovation, you may demotivate a workforce that has been used to a certain lifestyle at work and achieve the opposite. Amazon does not carry that culture to save cost for itself. It carries that culture so that employees make frugal decisions by habit and lower the cost for their customers. Unless that is your objective, you are better off trying other strategies in your company.

At the other extreme, I see some companies documenting their values in a long list to either inspire their people or make them abide by those values. I rarely read these long documents when I was on the ground and so I caution those leaders who may be tempted to write such lists. First and foremost, culture is not what you write on your company’s wall but what you do day to day. The curse and the boon of leadership is that whether you want it or not and whether you are aware or not, you are always under a spotlight. You work with smart people at all levels who will quickly spot hypocrisy when you act against what you document in your values. And because signals available to leadership are always few and always biased, you have little hope of learning that you have been spotted. If you believe in some values, act them. If you don’t, then there is negative value writing them down as people will start questioning the intent behind every decision you make.

But that does not mean that you should not write your values on a company’s wall. After all, while it is true that you are being observed, not everyone is observing you and you need to reach every single person in your organisation. So how do you choose what to write and what to leave unwritten? I offer a practical suggestion. Choose at most six values. Cognitive research suggests that most people can hold around 4 chunks of information easily and exceeding that by one or two is unlikely to diminish retention significantly. Then, like a mathematician, distill your long list into the base axioms that imply what you choose to omit and write only those axioms on your wall. Prioritise ruthlessly to shred the axioms that do not, by themselves or by their implications, help the organisation meet its most important objectives.

Like a language learnt in January after a new year’s resolution and rarely practised thereafter, your values, if read at all, will be forgotten the moment your team gets back to work. Therefore, ensure the axioms you put on the wall are used by your people almost daily as they go about their jobs. They must refer to them when they make prioritisation decisions, when they collaborate with their colleagues, when they engage with customers, when they assess their team’s and team members’ performance, when they debate strategies, or pretty much do anything in the work setting.

To achieve this, act your values visibly and often. Call these values by their name when you apply them yourself. When making decisions, make your thinking known and highlight the values that you used to inform your decision. Reward people and processes publicly when they exemplify those values in real work whilst privately correcting those who do not. You need not make an example of people except in the most severe of transgressions but keep that option reserved nonetheless. And last, apologise publicly when you fail to follow those values yourself — do it even if no one has noticed your slip.

Coming up with these values will be hard and often frustrating work. But the reward will be an organisation that scales beyond your wildest dreams in carrying your values to every aspect of work that gets done in or by your company.