The Real Worth of Vision, Mission and Values Statements (Collected)

When we think of an organization, we immediately feel the need of Vision, Mission and Value statements. Vision creates meaning and purpose, which drives both individuals and organizations to higher levels of achievement. Always true in future, vision provides direction and keeps on driving the organization. While vision is the purpose for the very existence of the organization, the mission gives you a more concrete goal to achieve. Many people advocate the opposite. That should not confuse us; so long there is a clear and common understanding within the organization. The Values are guiding principles to lead us towards the mission. 

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Interestingly, while we keep on reviewing our mission as we achieve them or even otherwise, the values are independent of the current environment and hence time proof. Values never change. If we ever feel the need to change our values, it simply means that in the first place, the values were chosen only as a fashion statement and are not the real values of the organization. Also there is a rule of thumb which helps us to test the efficacy of the value statements.

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It states that “If you cannot identify one training initiative and one performance management initiative that supports each principle in the value statement, the statement is nothing more than ink on paper.”

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Ah! Should we really be wasting some ink, some paper and lot of management time to adopt nice sounding statements which are not absorbed by the people all across organization? Skillscape has been helping organizations to clarify the basics and start living their statements. However, there are many organizations, which can just shuffle their statements, redistribute the same amongst themselves and would find the new one equally good looking. That is, because they have really not gone deeper than the good looking, good sounding surface level.