Your Vision and Mission
Do you know your business destination?
Your company’s vision is the destination you want to reach. Having a solid vision helps you define what success looks like for your company, your team, and even yourself as an individual. When you know your company’s vision and mission, you can build goals based on a big-picture understanding of where you’re going.
Without a definition of what success means in your context, you will inevitably reach a place where your effort is wasted on initiatives that don’t serve your career or your business. You trick yourself into believing that all things are worth chasing, as long as they add to profits or seem meaningful.
The company’s vision and mission generally comes from the CEO. If you’re a leader or manager, consider applying the concept of a vision and mission to your team instead. It will help you to understand your team’s purpose, and how that fits into the company’s larger vision.
The Vision is the Destination
What is your company vision? Where are you aiming for at a high, public-statement level? Using a sports analogy, are you playing football, or table tennis?
Defining your vision can be surprisingly difficult. I see it all the time with entrepreneurs and leaders who are just starting out: they haven’t defined what success means to them. One way to define success is to envision the future of your company (or your team). For example:
- What do you want your business to look like in the near future?
- How many employees do you plan to have?
- What's the organizational structure?
- How much are you doing in revenue?
- How do you treat the people you work with?
- How do you treat your customers?
- How do people talk about your company?
The answers to these questions underpin everything you does. They create the picture of where you’re going, the address to plug into your GPS. Without knowing your destination, you will continue to see small successes, but you’ll never grow into something more.
Your vision is established by you, the leader, but you also need to get feedback from the rest of the organization or team. It is critical to get this right, because your vision is going to carry forward into everything you do. You will share your vision with everyone from employees and business partners to clients and contractors.
Bird Rock Systems’ vision, as of this writing, is:
Our team is truly world class! We partner with customers to help them achieve greater business success. Our organization is focused on value creation for enterprise and commercial clients. We are known in the business as being the best strategic and technically skilled solution provider in southern California.
Every team member grows with a challenging work environment, attending top leadership programs and stretching their professional limits. The team celebrates success through our profit-sharing program, goal-based bonus payouts, and travel experiences of a lifetime. Our people become accustomed to a lifestyle that provides them top-tiered opportunities that create security and happiness.
As you can see, your vision should be both specific and overarching, capturing exactly where you want the business to go. We internally share specific financial numbers from our vision with the entire team.
Once you know where you’re going, the next question is: how will you get there?
The Mission Statement
Your mission provides purpose and direction to employees and customers, vendors, and advisors. It takes the high-level vision and drills down to the ‘how’ of it all. In a nutshell, your mission is how you show up, every day. You should be able to sum your mission up into a succinct sentence that illuminates the destination you’re aiming for. This is your mission statement.
Here are some company mission statements from world brands.
- Google: To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
- Starbucks: To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.
- Tesla: To accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.
- Bird Rock: To be a true business partner to customers and better enable them to achieve their goals.
Putting the Pieces Together
Knowing your vision and mission is a first step that sets your company up for success. But it doesn’t stop there. Once you have this foundation, you can use it as the basis on which everything else is built. If you have a business goal, you should be asking yourself how it aligns with your vision and mission. If you bring on a new client, does that work align? If you hire an employee, are they sharing in the vision of the company?
With this guiding principle, everything else you do will come into alignment. You’ll be set up for greater success in every aspect of your business.
If you need help defining your vision and mission, contact me about coaching you on The Turbo Playbook--A high-performance business operating system for growing faster, winning as a team and developing leaders. I’ll get you driving toward a clear North Star, so that all of your effort goes toward your vision of success.
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