The Extraordinary Power Of Mission, Vision, And Values Statements

Aligning your organization for success

Most of us know that compelling mission, vision, and value statements are critical to business success. Yet even when companies take the time to craft them, these statements are often stuck in a drawer, filed away where no one can see them. Other times, companies plaster their statements all over their walls, where they are usually ignored by longer-term employees who know it’s not how the company actually operates. In the following article, I discuss why and how to create effective statements that will help motivate leaders and employees to work together to achieve shared goals and outcomes.

The Role of a Mission Statement

Let’s start with the mission statement. Done correctly, a mission statement is a succinct, eloquent description of the soul and purpose of a business—not just what it does, but why it exists in the first place. A good mission statement answers two questions: what is the purpose of the company, and why does the company exist? Mission statements are often aspirational and designed to never be fully realized. They give everyone a shared goal and codifies why the organization does the work it does and the reason for its existence.

Most importantly, mission statements align expectations between upper management and the people who make up the heart of the company. They set the direction and offer overarching guidance—especially over time as a company grows or its leaders change. A mission statement doesn’t dictate decisions, but it helps inform what decisions should be made and how to make them.

Here are some examples of effective mission statements from real companies:

PayPal: “To build the web’s most convenient, secure, cost-effective payment solution.”

Google: “To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Apple: “To bring the best user experience to customers through innovative hardware, software, and services.”

Southwest Airlines: “Dedication to the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and company spirit.”

The Vision Statement

In addition to the mission statement, developing a clear vision statement is essential. It articulates a vision of where you want your company to be in the future. The vision statement gives a clear, specific, and compelling picture of what the organization will look like one, two, or even five years down the road. It often includes a few key metrics that define future success for the company.'

The vision statement answers these types of questions: “What problem are we trying to solve?”, “Where are we headed?”, and “If we achieved all our goals, what would we look like 10 years from now?”

A vision statement looks into the future to create, for everyone in the organization, a mental image of the ideal state that your organization wishes to achieve. It is both inspirational and aspirational and should be designed to challenge employees.

If the mission statement of Southwest Airlines, as seen in the example above, is “Dedication to the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and company spirit,” then look at how the company’s official vision statement focuses instead on its ideal future vision of itself: “To be the world’s most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline.”

The Values Statement

Once you’ve defined your company’s mission and vision statements, the final piece of the puzzle is creating your company’s values statement.

For any company to accomplish its mission today and achieve its vision tomorrow, leaders and employees will have to make decisions, take action, and conduct ongoing business operations. But what decisions, actions, and operations should be permissible? More importantly, which should not be permissible?

The boundaries within which an organization allows itself to operate in pursuit of its goals define that organization’s values, the core principles that guide and direct the organization as it does business.

Setting down your company values in print helps to create a kind of “moral compass” for the organization, your leaders, and your employees.

There are two types of values that are important to an organization:

Core values: Core values are those values upon which the organization will never, ever compromise. When put into a situation that might compromise a core value, the organization instead will pay a price to avoid it. The organization would allow itself to fail rather than compromise on a core value. “The organization will never manufacture the product overseas” is an example of a core value.

Aspirational values: Aspirational values are those values that the organization believes are important and even critical, but may not always be possible to meet. The company aspires to hold true to these values but occasionally may fall short. “The organization wants to be eco-friendly when building its products” is an example of an aspirational value.

To be meaningful, all values—core or aspirational—must be described unambiguously and clearly communicated to the entire organization. The core values are an internalized framework that is shared and acted on by leadership. The aspirational values work with the company vision to describe what the organization desires and guide the decisions needed to get there.

In my years of working with different companies, I have seen scenarios in which the values statement of a company was well defined, and yet the company rewarded people who achieved business goals that seemed to go against its stated values. Your company decides your values, but it is critical that you promote and celebrate people who live your values.

Taken together, mission, vision, and values statements provide a template for everyone to follow, making sure you are all moving in a consistent direction to reach your company’s goals. Trying to run a business without them is like trying to reach an unknown destination, blindfolded or in the dark, with no map, markers, or guidance along the way.

Author Bio

Ken Gavranovic, the co-author of BUSINESS BREAKTHROUGH 3.0, is the COO of Blameless and a board member and private equity advisor to several companies. While still in his 20s, Ken started Interland, now web.com, growing the company to $200M and leading its IPO. Since then, he has been responsible for hyper-growth at unicorn businesses, gaining experience across multiple industry verticals and leadership positions. Visit www.kengavranovic.com