Tying Your Mission, Vision, & Values to a Definite Purpose

When we’ve accepted the responsibility for leading, be that of a team under our authority or an organization made up of volunteers, having a crystal-clear definite purpose and understanding that we will always need to go beyond what’s expected to achieve it is a must! But to carry this forward throughout our organizations and with the team members we lead, there will need to be just as much clarity. In most cases, this is articulated through mission and vision statements and core values - often hanging in a nice frame on the wall in the company’s main lobby and occupying the first few pages of the employee policy manual. And while I respect the intent behind this (usually), it’s all too often where things come to a grinding halt.

Cindy and I have shared a keynote presentation called Building Buy-in Around a Clear Mission & Vision with owners and executives of several hundred companies at this point where we openly challenge them to consider how they’ve been able to not just share a beautifully crafted mission or vision statement with their teams, but how they’ve been able to tie the tasks any team member performs on a daily basis back to whatever it is they have hanging in a frame or printed in a handbook. For close to twenty years, I knew where to find the mission, vision, and values that had been rolled out from the corporate office. To that end, I shared those things with new employees in their initial orientation session for close to half of those years! But if I’m being completely honest, I would have struggled to explain how anything they would be doing day to day tied back to what I shared - mainly because no one had ever given me that kind of clarity around what we were all supposed to be working to achieve.

Please don’t miss my point here, I truly believe that having a rallying cry is critical in getting folks engaged; in the for-profit world and especially in the public service arena! When we can explain what we’re working to provide through the work that we do, we paint a picture of direct and immediate results; the mission… Detailing the longer term impact we’d like our work to have on the community around us or the world as a whole casts a vision showing the importance of what we do. Our values play a key role in defining what behaviors are and are not acceptable as we work toward the mission and the vision. But let’s be honest, even those of us leading will struggle to fight a good fight if we’re unable to tie each of them to the kind of definite purpose that gets us out of bed each morning! We’ll dig into how we can do that soon enough. 

Before that though, I think it’s important that we’re on the same page about what we’re sharing as our mission, vision, or values. I’m convinced that even the most wonderfully wondered statements aren’t worth the paper they’re written on if the team can’t see a connection to what they’re doing so we’ll look at that in detail next time.