Mission, Vision, and Values - What Comes First?

If you're like most people, you may have a vague remembrance of your company's mission statement from when you did your orientation. Something about enrichment or compassion or people...I think?

Ah, yes, but the vision of the company. The guiding North Star. The 1,000 mile journey! Everyone in the company knows that one. It's... um... something about being the best in class... wait - maybe that's the cornerstone?

Okay, well - VALUES! I know this one. We talk about them at our stand up meetings. Gosh dang it - there's a handy acronym for me to remember this... are there two C's? One of them is communication for sure. Shoot. Maybe one of them should have been clarity.

Not Chicken or The Egg

The mission feels like the most important one. I get it. The mission is the "why we exist". The mission statement is existential. But the everyday, practical truth is that it feels most important to the founding members of an organization, because they are the ones who wrote the mission statement.

For some it was a powerful exercise that was a culmination of their work to get to this formative state of a business. For others - it literally was something they wrote at some point after the business got started, because they realized the company needed one. (I've witnessed the latter exercise and thought, "oh boy. I don't think this is a mission driven organization.")

Whatever your mission statement is - most employees don't refer to it as a daily guide to their work. I'm not asserting that the mission shouldn't be important. To the contrary. I think it's essential. But practically speaking, it's like you getting a meaningful tattoo and expecting other people to feel the same way about it as you.

Values Are The Inch. Vision is The Mile

Long journeys all start with a single step, yes. But, in today's business environments, few employees are with a company long enough to reap the benefits of the full journey - beginning with business formation and ending on a realized vision.

Mission and Vision are essential to an organization, but they are less impactful day to day to an employee. This is a brutal truth that leaders need to internalize. Saying things like "we're mission driven" (publicly) and "there's just no loyalty in people anymore" (behind closed doors) is like complaining that a guest at your dinner party didn't stick around afterwards to help you install custom built-ins in your master closet to help increase the equity of your home.

Shared values are like the secret handshake between a group of friends. They are the shorthand set of rules of behavior, conduct, and responsibility toward one another. They are applicable to a short-term member of a group, and they are applicable to a 20-year mainstay of the group.

Values are simultaneously a mantra, a decision tree, and a litmus test. Pick your metaphor on this one and apply it accordingly.

Applying This Concept As a Leader

You may not have authority to officially edit or alter the organization's mission. You may not be able to explicitly dictate the vision of the organization - where it is going. And, yes, the company may have developed a set of organizational values.

But every team leader has the ability to develop their team's shared values. Whether you run a small team of 3 people or you manage a cohort of managers who lead their own teams, you have agency to discuss your own team's shared values. If you don't develop, discuss and refer to them, then your team is on autopilot through an obstacle course.

• How does our team work?
• What individual beliefs do people hold about work, life, the industry our company is in?
• What are our personal responsibilities to the team?
• Will our team's values help us make decisions autonomously?

Constantly referring back to your mission and vision without doing the hard work of curating your team's shared values is lazy leadership - unintentional or not. A great deal of a leader's role on a team is to read the tea leaves - help members of a team to articulate the nature of the team they're on. People are okay knowing that they are individual puzzle pieces on a team, but they at least want to know that their teammates are pieces to the same puzzle.

Determining the values are like setting the corners of that puzzle. It's a starting place to define a border, and then you work your way in. Once people are oriented to the puzzle, they know how, where, when and what to contribute.

Reach out to me if you'd like some help on this one. If you have done this exercise for your team, I'd love to read some of the ways you implemented it and/or have seen benefits to it.

Lead well, my friends. Live your legacy today.

James Lee