Mission, Vision, and Values — What Are They For?
If you’ve worked in any sort of corporate environment, then odds are that you’ve been exposed to the concepts of mission, vision, and values statements. Typically, these are ideas that you’re introduced to when you’re newly hired and, as is often the case, they’re not really brought up again.
To me, this is an unfortunate fate for mission, vision, and values statements. In the wrong hands, these statements just take up space in an employee handbook, never reaching their full potential.
But when carefully considered, succinctly written, and regularly discussed, mission, vision, and values statements have the potential to drive your organization to reach new heights.
And I understand that some of you might be skeptical. Can a mission statement really help a business create more revenue? Well, it depends on who you ask.
What I can tell you with confidence is that having these statements defined and making them a part of your culture is better for your organization than not having them at all. Why? Because they are constant reminders of why your business exists, where your business is headed, and the principles that guide your day-to-day decision making.
Internally, we use these statements to keep ourselves focused on why we’re here, where we’re going, and what matters to us as we serve our clients.
Understanding where our clients are coming from in terms of their mission, vision, and values helps us better understand their goals and create better campaigns for them.
These statements are distinct from one another, but they’re also closely related.
Your Mission Statement
Your mission statement is all about why your business exists. What is the purpose of all of this?
Why are we devoting our time and energy and resources to this? Commonly, mission statements are internal-facing statements, but they can be outward-facing as well.
In my experience, great mission statements are difficult to achieve. They need to encapsulate the purpose of the business clearly and concisely — in a single sentence, ideally.
Your mission statement should also inspire team members to do their best work and emotionally connect with the client base they intend to serve.
That’s a lot of information to pack into a few words. Here’s our current mission statement:
Our mission is to help you achieve your goals by providing you with the medical marketing strategies you need, the personalized service you deserve, and a level of partnership that you’ve always wanted from your marketing team.
Here’s Ikea’s:
To offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.
And here’s Microsoft’s:
To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Now, I like our mission statement. It’s not perfect, and I’ll forever be tinkering with it, but I do think it encapsulates what we’re about and it communicates everything it should to our team and to our clients.
That said, I wish we could make ours as succinct as Microsoft’s. However, it’s not exactly appropriate to compare ourselves to a decades-old global company. Did you notice that they don’t even reference products or services or software? But that’s the strength of their brand. How they empower depends on the experience the user has with Microsoft itself.
We’ll get there. But that’s because we have vision.
Your Vision Statement
Your mission statement dictates why we’re here today, and your vision statement is all about where you’re going in the future. Typically, we like to tie our vision statement to something we want to achieve in the next five years to make our goal more tangible.
Formada’s vision statement is “To be the Pacific Northwest’s premier digital marketing agency for medical, healthcare, and wellness organizations.”
McDonald’s vision statement is “To be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience.
And Visa’s vision statement is “To be the world’s best way to pay and be paid for everyone, everywhere.”
You can add revenue goals to these statements, too — whatever you want, but you have to remember that you’re creating a vision, not just daydreaming.
And what I mean by that is you need to connect the dots between your mission statement and your vision statement by creating a series of goals that will make your vision a reality in the next five years.
Formada doesn’t just want to become the premier agency for medical, healthcare, and wellness organizations. We have a series of goals in place, driven by our organization’s mission, that will ensure we get there.
Be big with your vision. Be bold. But never forget that your ambition requires carefully planning and incremental goal setting in order to turn your sketches into a masterpiece.
It can be very easy, especially in a business setting, to get distracted from your day-to-day mission and your long-term vision. There are so many variables at play: client attrition, employee turnover, economic unpredictability — you name it, it could (and probably will) happen.
That’s why we’ve established a series of values to help keep us focused on the task at hand.
Your Values Statements
How do you make decisions in your business? What are the ethics that guide you? How do you want your employees to conduct themselves when dealing with their peers, with vendors, and with your clients?
Some businesses call these guidelines value statements, others call them beliefs, and at Formada, we call them mandates.
They are, in our opinion, simple directives that remind us not just why we’re here and where we’re going, but what matters to us as our team, our client-base, and our business grows.
These values can be very different, depending on the business that you’re in and depending on what matters to you. You could have one. You could have three. Or you could have ten. Again, it depends on what matters to you as a business.
We have three. Here they are:
Autonomy — We believe that Autonomy creates a sense of accountability that encourages action.
Transparency — We believe that Transparency leads to the best recommendations for your business.
Simplicity — We believe that Simplicity is always worth the hard work it takes to make things easier.
Our leadership team thought a lot about these values before committing to them. In fact, one of our earliest blogs was about how we landed on these concepts and why they mattered to us.
Point being, these were core ideas behind how we operated from the very beginning, and no matter how much we grow, we want to do our best to maintain the perspective that these values have given us.
They have helped align our mission, and they certainly have guided our vision.
Formada Can Help You With Your Mission, Vision, and Values Statements
Creating these statements is a useful exercise, but actually using them in the business will give your team focus, motivation, and direction in the short and long-term actions of your business.
Don’t underestimate the power of a team who understands its purpose and goals.
We love to partner with businesses as strategic consultants, helping them uncover the opportunities that already exist in their businesses — to offer an objective voice that can help you achieve your next level of growth.
For some, that means a new approach to paid media, or a different way of pursuing content, and for others, that might mean taking a closer look at how the brand is being leveraged.
Bottom line: We’d love to help you achieve your goals. If you want to experience a more personalized approach to your digital marketing, then we just might be the agency for you.