Values & Your Organisation

You wouldn’t travel for your holiday without a destination! So what about in business? Do you have a vision for the future of the business and a mission that outlines how you are going to get there? Has the business explicitly identified its core values?

Developing vision, mission and values statements for your business are the foundation for long term success. Just look at Collins & Porras in Built to Last for the Disney organisation and Dee Hock at Visa.

If the vision, mission and values of your business are recognised by all stakeholders and they affect every decision related to hiring staff, strategic direction and communication, its effect can be magic!

Mission and vision statements play three critical roles:

1. communicate the purpose of the business to stakeholders
2. inform strategy development, and
3. develop the measurable goals and objectives by which to gauge the success of the business strategy.

Vision statement

A vision statement helps unite your employees to work towards a purpose. Creating and living a vision is your role as leader of your business. You have to champion it and help others to believe it. The vision statement creates a picture of success from the view of your customers/clients. According to Disney, a successful vision accomplishes six goals:

• gives a sense of the future
• guides decision making and strategy
• creates a shared purpose
• provides guidelines that determine behaviour
• inspires emotion
• connects to values

Mission

The mission statement should be a concise statement of why the business exists. Going back to the holiday analogy above, once you decide on a destination, you then have to work out how you are going to get there. Similarly, a mission statement describes how you are going to achieve the vision statement of the business and should answer three questions:

1. What do we do?
2. How do we do it?
3. For whom do we do it?

Values statement

Values are the beliefs of an organisation, the expression of what it stands for and how it will conduct itself. Values are the core of an organisation’s being and are manifest in everything the business does. They underpin policies, objectives, procedures and strategies because they provide an anchor and a reference point for all things that happen.

Generally speaking, there should only be three or four core values for the business. Articulating those values provides everyone with guiding lights, ways of choosing among competing priorities and guidelines about how people will work together.