From Mission to Behaviors
Can you name the mission, vision, values, guiding principles and goals of your organization?
My guess is no. Most people can't.
A big part of that disconnect is that organizations don't do a good job of communicating these. They may put them on their website but they don't imbed them into the day-to-day culture.
It's also easier for these things to get lost in translation the deeper into an organization you go. The executive team typically has more awareness around these components than someone on the front line. This is because managers at each level are often translating this framework into a context that they feel is relevant to their team.
This may seem like an innocuous problem at first, but this is one of the things that creates bottlenecks on the frontlines of organizations. Front line employees have less clarity on the company's purpose and end-up consulting their manager on decisions they should be able to make themselves.
There's so much confusion around this that most people can't articulate the difference between their company mission, values and goals. And guiding principles? Those are almost completely absent most of the time.
So let's start with the basics. Understanding the difference between each of these components and how they can fit together to support employee alignment and autonomy. Even if you don't have influence over your company's mission, vision & values, this guidance is helpful for forming a clearer translation to your team…
Mission
Every company has a reason for existing. That reason is your mission. It's the whole purpose of your company and describes what it does today.
To help with team alignment, you want your mission to be specific and concise. Too many mission statements are so generic that they feel like empty corporate fluff. Your team is going to have an easier time remembering one meaningful sentence rather than a short paragraph that goes too broad.
Mission statements also inform what role your company is playing in delivering its vision…
Vision
The vision is the future that your company is trying to help deliver. That future might be specific to your customers or as broad as society in general.
For me, the best company visions are ones that take big swings. Aspirational states that seem almost impossible to reach. These are the ones that compel and inspire.
Often times, the mission and vision are combined into one single statement. I like this approach for team alignment but only if the two can be combined into a single cohesive statement. Whether you combine them or not, they should still be as concise and memorable as possible.
Values
Values represent how your organization brings the mission and vision to life. Think about it as your company's philosophy.
Things can get interesting here as you often start to see cracks forming. While a company's stated values rarely conflict with the mission or vision, there are plenty of examples of corporate scandal where the lived values contradicted all of that.
This is also why so many employees see this framework as just corporate fluff. People have a hard time taking these things seriously when they observe, first-hand, a company contradicting itself.
As an executive team, look at your values once a year and asking two things….
Are our stated values reflected in our day-to-day work?
Do these values support the mission vision?
If the answer to either of those is no, it's time to revisit the framework.
Guiding principles
This is the most commonly overlooked component. Your guiding principles are the framework for turning values into daily behaviors.
Everything to this point tends to be somewhat ambiguous. Guiding principles offer empowerment to your employees to make decisions that align with the mission, vision and values. If your values are your north star, your guiding principles are the map that helps get you there.
For example, one of your values might be teamwork and collaboration. That sounds great, but things are never that easy in practice. Guiding principles to support teamwork and collaboration might be to "prioritize open dialogue" or "address conflict with positive intent before escalating". This would help establish the expectation that employees resolve conflict themselves before bringing disagreements to management.
I've also seen values and guiding principles combined for the sake of brevity. Specificity always helps with application so this is a really effective approach as long as it remains concise.
Goals
Given all the above, what do we want to achieve either this quarter, this year or the next three years that will help us to achieve our mission and vision for the future? Goals are often the most relevant component for teams because they are used to gauge performance.
But achieving goals is not enough. They should also be able to serve as a stress test for everything that comes before it. If you have to break your guiding principles or values to achieve your goals, than something is out of alignment.
This Week's Action Items:
Schedule a meeting with your team specifically to discuss how you align to the company's mission, vision & values.
In that meeting, as your team for examples of scenarios where those values have been demonstrated and when they haven't.
Collaborate with your team to create specific guiding principles that turn values into helpful signals.
Review your teams goals to perform a stress test. Are there scenarios where values and guiding principles are being sacrificed to meet those goals?
