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Business Management: How Clear Is Your Vision?

Written by: Michael Stanleigh

Article Overview: Vision, mission and values are supposed to be the beacon by which organizations set their strategic direction but how often do they align with everyday priority setting? Does your team share the same definitions for your organization’s vision? If you operate at a departmental level, does your departmental team share your department’s vision? If the answer is, no, then it’s not going to be easy to achieve the results you expect. Here are some helpful suggestions.

Business Management: How Clear Is Your Vision?

Make sure the team shares the same definitions.
To make sure your team shares the same definitions for vision and mission you may want to spend a planning day or two together to set your own stamp on the results. Here are some suggestions to move things forward:

Vision Statements
Convey a larger sense of organizational purpose, so that employees see themselves “building the dream” rather than “laying the stones.”
· Describe an ideal future of the business and reflect the essence of the organization’s mission and values.
· Answer the question; what impact do we want to have on society?

Mission Statements
The nature of a business is often expressed in terms of its Mission. Mission statements indicate the purposes of the business to meet the identified needs of specified customer groups.

A mission review gets an organization back to basics. The essential activity of determining whom you serve can be a wake-up call for organizations that may have started to skew their activities to meet the needs of other stakeholders.
· Describe the overall purpose of the organization: what we do, who we do it for, and how and why we do it.
· Set the boundaries of the organization’s current activities

Values Statements
Reflect the beliefs, principles and standards of the organization. They provide guidance for decision-making. Consistency and alignment between organizational values and individual behaviours is vital.
· Answer the question, what are the guiding values that will govern the operation of the business and its conduct or relationships with society at large, customers, suppliers, local community and other stakeholders?
· Make sure that you are also able to describe the specific behaviours that employees must exhibit to be consistent with the values you define as core to your organization.

Get the job done
To get the job done it’s important to work cohesively with purpose and application in mind. Consider the following suggestions to help get the job done as effortlessly as possible:


Don’t get hung up on semantics.
The goal when developing your vision and mission is to understand what you do (and don’t do) and what you are working toward. If a future-oriented mission statement works for your organization as both its mission and vision, go for it! Gaining consensus on this and being able to communicate it to stakeholders clearly are huge achievements.

Don’t tie yourself in knots with wordsmithing.
Take the process as far as you can go and then delegate a group to finalize your words on the basis of the discussions. Your meeting time is better spent moving forward then to wordsmith or polish the statements after consensus has been achieved.

Ensure inspirational and practical results
Research indicates that paradoxically, companies with a higher purpose were more financially successful than companies strictly focused on profits.

Go for higher ground in your mission and vision.
All board members and employees gain a sense of pride in working for an organization that stands for something and are united by a common sense of purpose. Creating meaningful, reflective statements that shine beyond your organization’s annual report and web pages is a compelling and guides everyone towards the common goal. Consider the idea of addressing “higher” goals then simply making money. Answer the question; how is your organization “adding value” to society?

Make sure your value statements are meaningful to your everyday operations.
Spell out what you mean explicitly in stating your values. This means avoiding single words and explaining what we mean. After all, we all believe in integrity, don’t we? So what does this mean for our organization and how we wish employees to demonstrate it?

Learn it, live it, align it.
If you want to ensure that your organization’s vision, mission and values are more than just a framed statement on the wall, you will need to spend time making sure that your organizational goals and objectives are aligned with them. Ask yourself, are you serving your customers in all your activities? Are you being true to the intent of the organization’s vision and mission? Are your departmental objectives and strategies supporting your vision/mission and in line with your values? Are your employees demonstrating, in their actions and behaviours, a belief in the organization’s values and principles?

For more information about this article contact: mstanleigh@bia.ca

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Article Tags: alignment, behaviours, boundaries, building the dream, consistency, current activities, customer groups, definitions, guidance, job, local community, mission statements, organizational purpose, organizational values, relationships, team shares, vision statements, wake up call



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