Crafting Company Vision & Mission Statements that Actually Matter
Let’s be honest. How many people in your organization can recite the company’s vision and mission statement from memory? Feel free to ask the next person you see in the hallway. If your organization is like most, research shows about 60% of your employees will give you blank stares. More importantly, though, how many people who know the mission/vision can point to a recent decision they made influenced by those mantras?
All too often, corporate executives leave for an offsite retreat, hire a consultant to facilitate, and come back touting a brand new company vision and/or mission. They host a company-wide meeting to share the impressive-sounding new statements, and maybe even invest in some office signage or team swag. And then a few weeks later? Everything is back to business as usual. Having been both the consultant facilitating the executive vision workshops, as well as the team member receiving news of a new organizational vision, I’ve compiled 3 Do’s and Don’ts to craft company mission/vision statements that make a tangible and ongoing impact on the culture of your organization.
Do I even need mission and vision statements?
Defining why (vision) and how (mission) your company operates is important because how employees and customers view your company impacts every aspect of the business. A strong vision and mission should be used in marketing, recruiting, and sales to align with stakeholders’ values. Most importantly, though, these statements will be operationalized in team member decision-making.
Actionable vision and mission statements should be one of the best decision making tools for an organization.
A leader cannot advise every team member's decision throughout the day, but an actionable vision statement remaining top of mind for team members can provide a leader’s recommendation by serving as a decision framework.
What’s the difference between missions and visions?
Your corporate vision is why you exist. An inspiring why is an aspirational outcome you never fully complete but always aspire to, regardless of how business evolves. A quality vision statement is like a happy marriage; it’s not a goal you set, achieve, and then move on from. It’s a constant pursuit you can experience in the process of the pursuit.
Your mission is how you are pursuing your vision. It’s an audacious but achievable goal to quantify progress toward your vision. Think of a mission like a retirement savings goal. You know the number you’re trying to reach, but it’s still a long-term goal to achieve, and based on your family and career changes, that goal may evolve.
Missions will be completed and new, different ones set as the business adapts to changes in the marketplace, but visions should remain consistent. Both statements are important to motivate your team toward an ultimate impact bigger than themselves, and both serve to ground your team in what success looks like.
Let’s consider some generic examples to start, and we’ll highlight real-world examples in the following sections.
A sports franchise:
Vision — build a dynasty attracting the best talent, Mission — win the championship
A software startup:
Vision — democratize a product/service, Mission — IPO
A non-profit:
Vision — Eradicate a specific injustice globally, Mission — fund a community facility to combat a specific injustice
Ground rules for vision & mission statements:
Do not …
1. Do not include the words ‘premier’, ‘best-in-class’, ‘leading’, etc
None of those words mean anything because there are a variety of ways to measure them and the measures can change outside of your control based on what competitors are doing. To different demographics, best could mean cheapest or most expensive, fastest, handcrafted, all-encompassing, or niche.
Intent to be the best at what you do should be self-evident; if your organization needs to clarify that it is not defined by mediocrity, the vision and mission aren’t compelling enough to inspire people to bring their best to work.
Example:
LinkedIn vision: Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.
With over a billion users, LinkedIn is the global leader in professional networking. But becoming the best in their market is a byproduct of their vision focused on creating economic opportunity for the world’s workforce. Increasing app users isn’t an inspiring vision to overcome the inevitable challenges of their global scale, but creating opportunities for individuals is worthy of LinkedIn employees' full effort.
2. Do not include compound sentences, commas, dashes, or semicolons
For a vision/mission statement to be actionable, it must be memorable. For it to be memorable, it must be concise. In the words of Mark Twain, brevity is the soul of wit. When it comes to corporate statements, compound sentences are often just laziness disguised as thoroughness. No company is too complex or multi-faceted for this standard. If there are truly completely unrelated business units within a conglomerate, then it may be worth questioning the veracity of the conglomerate’s vision.
Example:
TED’s mission: Spread ideas.
Of course, there are a lot of details involved in curating quality speakers, hosting world-class events, and organizing digital databases of past talks, but everything TED does is in pursuit of the same simple objective to spread ideas. By creating clarity through simplicity, TED has started a global movement attracting the world’s top thought leaders who don’t need corporate onboarding classes or company culture training to contribute to the mission of spreading ideas.
3. Do not isolate yourself to your current way of doing business.
If you want to build an enduring business, recognize that technology is changing (and creating entirely new) industries faster than ever. Who buys what from you, and when and how they do it will change drastically from year to year, so an enduring company vision must transcend how a company does business to why it is in business.
Regardless of your views on American politics, the US Constitution is the oldest national constitution in existence, despite America being a relatively young country in the scope of human history. This is due in part to the timeless principles (establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, etc) framing the document and allowing the pursuit of those consistent principles (via amendments) to adjust with the times.
Example:
Tesla’s vision: To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
What started as selling cars expanded into car charging stations, and then home solar paneling to power the chargers which power the cars. As technology continues to accelerate the world’s rate of innovation, Tesla will undoubtedly continue iterating and building complementary products to pursue the same vision. With their vision focused on why instead of how, they have the flexibility to adapt without having to rebrand.
Do …
1. Make goals audacious
No one is motivated by mediocrity or inspired to produce their best work by maintaining the status quo. To be clear, a global impact goal is not a requirement to be audacious. Impacting a community may be just as bold for a small, family-owned business as impacting a country would be for an enterprise organization. The point is for your statements to communicate that your organization is creating forward momentum toward a better destination that others will want to arrive at with you.
If a vision or mission is something that’s already been accomplished by the organization, then there’s no need for innovation, and a company that doesn’t innovate will not remain competitive.
Example:
Google’s mission: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
Few companies can pursue such an audacious, global goal. But for Google, universally organized, accessible, and useful information is an aspiration worthy of their scale. This mission helps inform everything they do. They make money through ads, which (hopefully) help make useful marketing easily accessible, and their Google Workspace suite of products (Google Drive, Google Slides, Google Docs, Gmail, etc) helps organize, share, and make meaning from information within individual organizations.
2. Make goals specific
Changing the world is too undefined to chart a specific course for achieving it. However, changing a law, creating an industry, curing a disease, or funding a worthy non-profit make for great missions because progress toward them can be tracked, and they can contribute toward aspirational vision statements.
It’s natural to default to revenue when thinking in terms of specificity, but progress and impact should be tracked beyond just dollars. For example, part of a mission can involve evangelizing a new concept to a specific group, creating a critical mass of momentum by a specific date, or donating _____ assets to a worthy organization. Of course, helping customers will make money, but only having a monetary goal is not a sufficient long-term motivator (more on that here).
Leveraging the 5 journalistic questions (who, what, when, where, why) is a helpful tool for driving specificity, as seen below.
Example:
Sweetgreen mission: Building healthier communities by connecting people to real food.
This mission communicates who they’re serving (communities) and how they serve them (connecting people to real food) in one simple phrase. The specificity of this mission drives decisions around locally sourcing produce, becoming hubs for community engagement, and supporting other health-related initiatives. Everyone can get behind building healthier communities, but Sweetgreen does that specifically by connecting people to real food. And while the methods of accomplishing their mission may change (Sweetgreen meal kit delivery from local farms would be interesting), they can still measure how many people they’ve connected to food, and how their community has become healthier.
3. Make goals consistent
Goals should be consistent with your core values, with your team composition, and with your past messaging. Mission and vision statements should reflect the DNA of the organizations they represent. If the company was founded to support targeted philanthropy efforts, include it in your statement formulation. If employees and customers are passionate about a specific aspect of value your company delivers, focus on that.
Whatever your message is, though, have it permeate every part of your organization. Marketing, recruiting, promoting, investment decisions, etc. For mission and vision statements to inform team member decision-making, it must be the metric by which decisions are measured. Over-communication is good communication when it comes to mission and vision statements.
Example:
Patagonia mission: We’re in business to save our home planet.
Patagonia happens to sell outdoor apparel, but that’s not the point. Customers can buy fleece vests from Target, but Patagonia can charge 3x more for a vest because it represents environmental sustainability, which is a cause buyers of outdoor apparel generally align themselves with. There are plenty of worthy goals, but finding one that resonates with your specific customer demographics will drive sales beyond the value of the product you sell.
Where to start:
Now you understand how to format your mission and vision, but formulating what your mission and vision should focus on is dependent on what’s important to you. Some questions to consider in contextualizing your organizational priorities include:
- What are we known for / what do we want to be known for?
◦ Ask employees and customers for their perspectives - Where are we going? Where is our market going?
- Why do we exist beyond making money?
- Why did we first join/create the company?
- What companies do we admire/aspire to and what are their visions?
- What are the innate human needs/desires we help solve?
- What are global problems we can positively impact?
- Why do our customers buy our products/services over our competitors?
There’s no one set of mission and vision statements that work for every organization because each company is setting out to solve unique problems in unique ways. But every organization should keep its mission and vision specific, audacious, and consistent, without flowery language or constricting how they go to market.
High-performing teams want to do work that matters, and customers want to partner with brands that believe what they believe. Intentional mission and vision statements are the foundation for building loyalty with both internal and external stakeholders, and they are a powerful leadership tool to empower team members to make organizationally aligned decisions.
