IN OUR EVERYDAY BUSINESS lingo, the phrases vision statement, mission statement, and company values are well known. But are they well understood? And equally important, are they well used?
Let’s start with the meaning and purpose of a vision statement. Your company’s vision statement should embody an ideal future state of your organization and attempt to describe what your organization is trying to accomplish. Understand that a vision statement sometimes gets confused with a company slogan or motto. To provide some clarity here, I’m going to use Nike’s slogan, vision, and mission statements to help you develop a deeper understanding.
We’re all familiar with Nike’s slogan “Just Do It!” But it’s not their vision. Their vision statement reads, “Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.” (By the way, Nike defines the term athlete as follows: If you have a body, you are an athlete.) You can see their vision statement attempts to tell you exactly what they envision their company to strive to accomplish each day. This is a great example of what your company’s vision statement might look and feel like.
A mission statement helps you define how you will accomplish your vision. It serves as a road map helping you achieve your vision along the way. Using the same example, Nike’s mission statement reads as follows, “Our mission is what drives us to do everything possible to expand human potential. We do that by creating groundbreaking sport innovations, by making our products more sustainable, by building a creative and diverse global team, and by making a positive impact in communities where we live and work.”
A mission statement is more complex and will typically have more components than a vision statement. Additionally, your company mission statement may have more of a specific call to action included and could also identify issues important to your company culture such as social responsibility, sustainability, diversity, inclusion, etc.
Just as your mission statement differs from your vision statement, your company values also serve a separate purpose. Your values set the standards and guidelines for your company behavior and culture. They outline your core ethical principles that serve to guide your behavior. One company states “their values serve as a compass for our actions and describes how we behave in the world.” Signs.com’s core values are integrity, passion, serve, and respect others; accountability, exceed expectations, safety, wellness, facilitate happiness, communication, humility, and gratitude; teamwork, and personal growth. We happen to have 12 values in our business, which may seem like a lot, but it works for us. Coming up with four or six or eight core values to help guide your business is perfectly suitable. There is no magic number here. Do whatever fits with your company.
The most important aspect of this is the process you and your employees will go through. In early 2019, we merged our traditional wide-format printing company, Ferrari Color, with our online company Signs.com. To characterize the transition as a culture shock to our organization would be a significant understatement. We immediately set out to establish a brand-new vision statement, mission statement, and company values. The exercise of creating these with our senior team, and then introducing and integrating them with our entire team, was one of the most valuable events we have ever done. Although we need to be better, we continually refer to our vision and mission statements and values in our new employee onboarding, our monthly staff meetings, our annual reviews, and even disciplinary meetings. I encourage you to consider the value this process will provide to your business as you move forward in achieving your goals.