Talk to anyone who’s worked at a company that has gone through the process of identifying its vision and mission, and I can nearly guarantee that at some point you’ll hear the same sentiments I’ve encountered: I don’t really know the difference between the two, or, perhaps more sinister, I don’t know why they made us do this.
Many startups go through the drafting process as they scale, wanting to both appear like a more serious company and have something to point to as their raison d’etre. To board members and executive teams, it feels necessary. To the average worker chugging along and completing their work to help run the machine, it can feel like a confusing waste of time.
Swing and a Miss 🏓
One of my early companies took up the task of identifying its mission and vision. As a member of its steering team, I was involved in countless regular meetings where we were asked to come up with words and phrases that described what we did, and why we did it. None of us, including the founder, had ever gone through the process before, and we followed their lead as to how to brainstorm and come up with material. Weekly, we’d return to the conference room, spread out the categorized post it notes from our previous sessions, and pick apart the things we’d thought seven days before but now second-guessed. This went on for an entire quarter.
It was exhausting.
When we unveiled the chosen mission and vision to the entire company, all sitting in one room, the founder asked for feedback…and got very little. It’s okay, sure. If you say this is what we’re doing, I’m onboard. The disconnect between the people who were leading the team and the team workers who directly served customers and the product had never been more apparent to me.
Later, at a different company, leadership tried to account for this by starting the process with a survey sent to the entire team. They asked for three words to describe us, with a brief explanation for each choice. When mission and vision were unveiled soon after, they could point to the survey responses as their inspiration. But they failed to properly introduce the difference and reason between the two. Time and time again in the weeks after, I heard employees say Aren’t they the same thing? How does this even affect my work?
If you’re a small company going through this exploratory process, here are the steps I recommend for how to craft, evaluate, and roll out your guiding statements with both executive and worker bee buy-in.
Step 1 – Why Are We Doing This? 🤔
Leadership should have a clear understanding of what they hope to gain by having these standardized statements. The answer to this will differ depending on what your company does. It could be that you want to make a clear banner for everyone to point strategic goals and objectives toward in your planning process. Or, more simply, it could be that you want a concise statement of who you are and what you do to attract potential new hires. Some leaders feel like having these statements will fix whatever organizational defects are already built into their structure and work habits. If you’re relying on these statements as a panacea for your dysfunction, I urge you to consider practical solutions and better management instead.
Step 2 – Involve Your Worker Bees 🐝
If you want your mission and vision to be something that speaks to your team, have the team provide you with data on how they feel about your company and their jobs. What is it that they do on a daily basis? What counts as success, considering how the product or service is used? And what kind of language does the majority of the team use to communicate–more buzzwordy business speak, sports metaphors, nerd culture? If you want people to be invested in what you have to say, it’s essential that you speak their language, and meet them on their level. Presenting something you deem so serious in terms and phrasing that doesn’t fit your culture will come across as disconnected and out of touch.
Step 3 – Draft, Iterate, and Prepare to Educate 🍎
Using your whole-team feedback, leadership should take on the duties of drafting out final statements. This must include preparations for educating your entire company on the differences between mission, vision, and values statements. If you can’t clearly explain that difference, how can you communicate the importance of each to the people you want to adopt them?
TL:DR: A vision statement describes where the organization wants to be in the future, and a mission statement describes what the organization needs to do now to achieve the vision. Note that values sometimes come up in explanations of mission and vision. They’re tangentially related, but separate, and honestly deserve their own individual post.
I like to take example statements from large, well known companies, and compare them for the team.
Google Mission: To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
Google Vision: To provide access to the world’s information in one click.
Patagonia Mission: We’re in business to save our home planet
Patagonia Vision: Build the best products, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis
Each is different. Each makes sense given our own experiences with their product(s). If you now try to craft a mission around your own product, you can also compare that to these examples to see how your attempt stacks up.
Step 4 – Display, Mention, But Don’t Overdo 📖
You have finished statements. Congrats! Now what?
One odd thing I’ve seen companies do is try to make every action, every day, point back to their statements. That’s not what the statements are intended for and, more importantly, that kind of bureaucratic overkill will create resentment towards your statements and your culture. Point to them when necessary, and consider revision as necessary after significant periods of time.
Mission and vision aren’t rocket science. Unless you’re NASA or SpaceX. Then, maybe it is 🚀.
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