What Does Your Business Need To Thrive? Values, Vision And A Mission

For any business to thrive, it is important to have a strong set of corporate values, a strong mission and an inspiring vision. In fact, it’s not just important, it’s vital. These documents create a road map for your leadership team to make decisions and ensure all objectives, goals and metrics are aligned. I know it can be tough to create these documents. It takes time, and time is finite. But I can tell you personally that if you want to grow and scale your business, you need to make the time.

I like to keep things simple, so outlined below are the basics. I want to empower leaders at any company — from a startup to a department within a large business — to establish corporate values, create mission and vision statements and then implement them in your day-to-day workflows.

Establishing Corporate Values

Your core values explain to others how your business runs and the reason you make the decisions you do. You might be thinking, “Yeah, Brig, I already know this.” But the reality is that too often, our corporate values are led by marketing and slapped on posters. If you haven’t recently asked yourself how you’re living your company’s values as a leader, then it’s time to review and refresh.

When you sit down to refresh, you don’t have to make it complicated. You can, of course, make this an initiative across your organization and use revising/refreshing/creating your values, mission and vision as team-building and employee engagement, complete with surveys, meetings, events and prizes. But you don’t have to. It can be as simple as an in-person or virtual half-day or one-day event. It can even just be you, as a small business owner, sitting down and making a list of what’s important to you. Whatever you do, keep the following in mind:

• Values should be relevant to your business and reflect your mission and vision.

• Make them aspirational, so they inspire employees to do their best work.

• Make them evergreen. Values should be timeless and not easily outdated.

• Focus on being positive and proactive rather than creating reactive solutions to problems.

• Ensure they resonate with employees across all departments and levels within your company.

Creating Mission and Vision Statements

Your mission statement is a declaration of what you want your business to achieve. A vision statement is more inspiring and shares your hopes for your business in the future. Boiled down, they are each two- to three-sentence summaries of why your organization exists, what its overall goal is and where you see the company going in the future. See why you need those values first? Those, combined with your revenue and operational goals, will guide how you write your mission and vision statements.

• The mission statement should be concise and easy to remember.

• The vision statement should be inspiring and aspirational.

• Both should be aligned with your corporate values.

Keep them simple, make them real and you’ll come up with something memorable and impactful.

Implementing in Your Day-to-Day Workflow

Once you have established your corporate values and mission and vision statements, you need to get them implemented and infused within your culture. This is where those posters typically come into play. I’m not saying don’t make posters; I’m saying that in addition to posters, you need to build time into your normal business processes to promote your mission, vision and values. This might mean internal communictations, town halls, meetings and lunch-and-learns designed around promoting your culture; it might mean corporate events, employee satisfaction surveys and even adding specific requirements to performance reviews. These efforts act like compound interest over time because they help employees understand what the organization stands for and how their work contributes to these goals.

Set Your Team up for Success

Creating alignment between your operations and your values, mission statement and vision statement is an important part of a business’s success. Values and mission and vision statements act as a foundation and road map to help employees understand what they should be working toward and how to navigate the challenges that will inevitably pop up. They also help prospective talent and employees make important career choices. When done well, the synergy between these three tools can ensure your employees and leaders enjoy their jobs, stay engaged and invest their careers with your organization.