7 Ways You Should Be Using Your Mission, Vision, and Values
You put an off-site on the calendar for you and the team to work out your mission, vision, and values statements. Everyone starts out with energy and enthusiasm. People are excited to collaborate about the “what”, the “why”, and the “how” of your business. But an hour or two in, that energy starts to fade, and you realize that team members don't have the same ideas about what your organization does and why it really exists. You spend an hour brainstorming synonyms for the word "create", which is a great start for a thesaurus, but not helpful for your purposes. The wordsmithing is tedious, but eventually you get somewhere acceptable, and everyone agrees to something just so they can be done. You pat yourselves on the back for a job well done, and make some posters for the walls. Then no one refers to your mission, vision, or values for months.
Creating effective, authentic mission, vision, and values statements is hard, but worthwhile. The writing of these guiding statements is important, but the most common mistake isn't in the writing. It's the failure to use them as a real guide to business activities you engage in every day. If you don't know how to get mission, vision, and values off the posters and into your culture, you're missing opportunities
Here are 7 ways organizations should be using mission, vision, and values statements.
Strategic Planning
If you just engaged in a strategic planning session and didn’t visit your mission, vision, and values statements, you might want to re-think how you do strategic planning. Mission, vision, and values statements can guide your strategy to make it consistent with who you’re trying to be. And if your strategy is inevitably deviating from your mission, vision, and values, it could be an indicator that times have changed, and you need to update those statements to reflect where the organization is today.
Decision Making
Leaders in every organization have to make hard decisions. Sometimes you’re trying to choose the best option from a list of good ideas, and sometimes you need to choose the “least bad” option from a list of less palatable paths. When it comes to making hard decisions, values statements in particular are an excellent guide. Plus, if the culture of the organization is such that people use the company’s values to make decisions throughout, you’ll see increase cohesion and consistency from decision makers.
Prioritizing
The number of important things you could do will always exceed the number of hours you actually have to do them. This is why prioritizing is so important. Prioritizing effectively amidst a slew of different opinions about what is important can feel nearly impossible. If mission, vision, and values are absent, priorities often become reactive and inconsistent, or even worse, arbitrary.
Accountability
You get more of the kinds of behaviors you support. When you notice and praise behaviors that are in line with your mission, vision, and values, people are more likely to engage in behaviors that embody your mission, vision, and values. In turn, those will be represented in your reputation in the outside world and in your customer service.
Culture Engineering
Workplace culture doesn’t engineer itself. A great place to work isn’t just about people being nice to each other and having opportunities for development. It’s also about having a clear and consistent purpose. Why do we do what we do? Does our “why” show up in our culture?
Hiring Practices
Using your mission, vision, and values statements can help you hire the right people. Let’s say you have two candidates. One has above-average technical skills, but mediocre fit with your mission, vision, and values. The other is technically average, but strongly embodies the organization’s mission, vision, and values. Great fit with sufficient technical skills often ends up better than poor fit with above average technical skills. But if you don’t use your mission, vision, and values in your hiring process, you’ll likely overvalue technical skills and end up paying for it later.
Branding
Think about how you use your mission, vision, and values when you communicate your story and identity to your customers. Imagine the experience your customers would have if your mission, vision, and values showed up consistently when they see your branding, use your products, and experience your customer service. The reputation you develop with your customers will spread into the community. People will want to work with you, and your employees will be more inspired to embody that positive reputation.
To sum it all up, mission, vision, and values statements create consistency and credibility in how organizations operate, how you strategize, how you show up internally to employees, and how you show up to your customers.