When I ran into a former client at the grocery store, and asked him how things were going, I expected some polite small talk. Instead, what he said blew my mind.

The guy (let’s call him Jim) was an employee of a company that our agency, Blueprint Creative, had worked with a few years back to improve their employee experience program. One of our main brand interventions included articulating and documenting the company’s core values: the nonnegotiable principles that would provide their employees with guidance on what on-the-job behaviors would be encouraged and rewarded, and what behaviors simply would not be tolerated.

During our conversation, I asked Jim how things were going at the company after our brand intervention. He said (and this is a direct quote), “Things are going well for the company, but they are going even better for me. I decided to adopt the company’s core values in my personal life and I feel like I’m now a better husband and a better father.”

Wait, what?

What we were aiming for during our brand intervention was for the organization to have core values that every employee could embrace and use as a compass to guide their actions in the workplace. But, clearly, by integrating his company’s core values into his outside-the-workplace routine, Jim had become not just his best version in his professional life, but also in his personal life.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case at many companies around the world. After all, one of the core values of Enron, the company at the center of one of the U.S.’s biggest fraud and accounting scandals, was “integrity”—a core value that employees had violated with impunity.

But, at Jim’s company, their core values were so “sticky” that they stuck with some employees even after they left the office to go home. This is pretty extraordinary, considering that........

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