Mission, Vision, and Values: The Rock Every Business Should Be Built On for Success Today and Into the Future

Are you wondering how to improve your employees’ performance, boost your bottom line, and build a rock-solid foundation for your business to run on? Developing robust mission, vision, and values (MV&V) statements can help you to realize your company’s potential.

What is MV&V?

MV&V statements serve as the foundation for an organization's strategic plan. They convey the purpose, direction, and underlying values of the organization. Together, the three statements guide everything that happens in the organization. These documents keep everyone focused on where the business is going, what it is trying to achieve, and how people are expected to behave.

These statements aren’t intended to restrict or inhibit initiative and innovation, but to guide decisions and behaviors to achieve results that benefit all stakeholders. They’re the rock you should be standing on when you formulate your business plan.

Mission vs Vision vs Values

A company’s mission is the purpose it was established to achieve. Usually, this follows the service or product offered, rather than the fact that it was founded to generate revenue for the owner.

Identify what your offering is to develop your mission statement. For example, a life coaching consultancy’s mission may be to help people realize their full potential. A financial services organization’s mission could be to provide safe, reliable banking, loans, and investment services for a specific target audience.

A vision statement is a business document that states an organization's current and future objectives. Company vision represents the direction your company is heading in. Your vision must align with the company's mission, strategic planning, culture, and core values.

Your organization’s values are, in essence, the beliefs, philosophies, and principles that drive the business. Values affect your business strategy because they help to create purpose, improve your team’s cohesion, and develop a sense of commitment in the workplace. They impact the employee experience you deliver, the relationship you develop with your customers, partners, and shareholders, and they shape the culture of the company.

Unsurprisingly, company values also play a critical role in talent attraction, with 46 percent of job seekers citing culture as “very important” when choosing whether to apply to a company.

Reasons to Develop MV&V

There are many reasons why your company needs to develop a well-thought-out MV&V.

Defining your organization’s purpose can instill a sense of belonging and identity in your employees. This gives your team the mindset to grow your business and motivates them to work harder to succeed.
Comprehensive MV&V statements provide direction for your company and the goal or destination you aim to reach by following that direction.
A clear mission gives company executives guidance for making decisions, and the vision statement ensures all decisions taken align with your organization’s intended goals.
A detailed MV&V provides a focal point that helps to align everyone with the organization and ensure they are all working towards a single purpose. This increases efficiency and productivity in the workplace.

To a large extent, a company’s success depends on having robust MV&V statements in place. Having the mission, vision, and values is one thing, but if they aren’t clearly defined and made available to all, you won’t find it easy to implement them.

A top priority is to create detailed statements for your business that apply to your trade and work areas.

How to Create Your MV&V Statements

Though it takes a lot of brainstorming sessions to draft a vision and mission statement, creating them is more straightforward if you follow these steps.

1. Define your purpose

Before you attempt to draft your statements, you should define the purpose of your organization clearly and identify how it relates to the values.

2. Note your strengths

To become successful, you must know your strengths. Here’s how to discover what these are:

Conduct a SWOT analysis,
Consult with/survey customers, staff, and supply partners,
Monitor common customer complaints and your company's responses,
Compare your operations to the competition, and
Identify external factors influencing your business.

Knowing your strengths allows you to develop a vision that builds on these strengths and set your targets accordingly.

3. Develop a 5-Year Plan

It’s difficult to draft a vision statement if you don’t know where you’re headed. Developing a long-term business plan will give you a sense of where you’d like to be in five years, then you can include that information in your vision statement. Incorporate any plans for business expansion or start-up ideas based on this information.

However, a five-year time horizon is seldom predictable. Creating a more general and less detailed plan for that period is the initial step. You’ll create a new 5 year “look ahead” plan each year so it’s not a forever document. Its value is to give you a planning direction from which to develop a detailed annual business plan that gives an action plan for this year.

4. Draft your Statements

Just as you can’t draft statements without knowing your plans and values, you can’t implement your mission, vision, and values without having them explicitly outlined and accessible to everyone. Draft MV&V statements that are clear, specific, attainable, and easy to understand and remember.

Make sure your statements consider the feedback from your customers, employees, and suppliers. Otherwise, you won’t get their buy-in. It’s equally crucial for the statements to be uplifting and inspirational, or they won’t get any traction.

Implementing and Practicing Your MV&V

Once you’ve developed sound MV&V statements, it’s time to implement them. You can get your stakeholders to adopt and practice them in several ways:

Communicate the statements and their contents throughout your organization. Do this regularly and often, using different media types to ensure all team members are aware of them. You could hold public talks, put up posters, send electronic reminders, write internal news articles or blog posts, or produce branded promotional materials.

Conduct training sessions focused on sharing the MV&V with all employees or include some aspects in your regular work training activities. Create training materials to distribute throughout the company that explain the different parts of the MV&V and introduce quizzes or exams to determine whether workers have read them.

Incentivize the implementation by incorporating “living the values” of the company into performance management. Start an awards program to recognize those who exhibit company values or achieve outstanding examples of the company’s mission or vision. Offer financial incentives for workers who deliver large sales or cost savings opportunities.

Review the MV&V statements and the company’s performance against them frequently to track the effectiveness of the principles and their uptake among staff.

The Bottom Line

This planning might sound like a lot of work for very little tangible return, but that’s not true. For one thing, any number of business consultants and coaches can help you to develop your MV&V statements.

Research shows that such statements do, in fact, drive corporate value, even though they are intangible assets. Despite the skepticism surrounding them, mission statements have proven tremendously helpful, both as offensive and defensive tools.

For example, the mission statements of companies such as TOMS and Warby Parker helped drive sales and momentum far beyond what both companies' products initially suggested.

In its first five years, TOMS grew to a $300 million revenue business without raising a dime, and Warby Parker grew into a $1.2 billion company on the back of its founding principle of "Buy a Pair, Give a Pair."
Similarly, LEGO's $6 billion turnaround story from 2004 to date is another excellent example of rallying mission statements in motion.

This evidence proves MV&V does matter. MV&V statements can significantly impact a company’s value, not to mention improved employee motivation, performance, and ROI.

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