Do You Know Your Mission, Vision, and Strategy?
If you don’t know each one, you might end up driving aimlessly
I learned how to drive before smartphones with GPS were commonplace. If I wanted to go somewhere new, I needed to do a little homework first. Do you remember the routine? Find the address, look it up on a map (or later, MapQuest), and then either plan your route or print out the directions. It was laborious, but it was a necessary process if you wanted to arrive at your destination.
Imagine hopping into your car, planning to visit a friend who had just moved 8 hours away. You’ve never been to his new house, and you didn’t get directions from him ahead of time. You decide, “I’m just going to start driving and see how close I can get.” That’s a pretty ridiculous way to approach driving, right? You’d never end up finding his house.
As crazy as that sounds in a car, too many people unintentionally lead their organizations in the same way. Leading your team without a clearly defined mission, vision, and strategy means you’ll end up driving aimlessly, likely failing to reach your destination. Taking the time to articulate each of these, however, creates energy and momentum around your organization’s direction.
A fair amount of ambiguity exists around these buzzwords, so it’s helpful to clarify each one before seeking to define them for your team. Your mission is a short statement or idea about why you exist; it’s your purpose. A vision is an exciting picture of a future reality for your organization. Finally, the strategy is the means by which you plan to achieve the vision. With that understanding in hand, let’s explore each in more depth.
Your mission is your purpose
As you think about your mission, consider what author and consultant Joey Reiman says about it: “Purpose is where your company’s distinctive gifts intersect with the needs of the world.”¹
What is unique about your organization’s skills and passions? And then, where does that intersect with the needs around you? Your mission will be more powerful as you can more clearly define this intersection.
Mission statements are notorious for being vague. They tend to be filled with catchy buzzwords that don’t really mean anything significant. This type of statement might sound good on your website, but it won’t serve as a guiding priority for your team. Make it clear and unique. When you know why you exist, you can orient your decisions around that.
Vision is a picture of a future reality
Once you know your unique mission, which isn’t going to change from year to year, you can start clarifying your vision. This is a picture of the destination you’ll be pursuing for the next 6 months, 1 year, or even 3–5 years. Michael Hyatt describes vision as an imagined future reality.
Defining your vision entails crafting a story about the future. In this imagined future, what will be true of your organization? Your staff? Your impact? As you fill in the details of this story, you get to invite people to live into it and pursue it. This should be an inspiring, hopeful picture of your destination, a vivid picture of a reality that isn’t real yet.
Crafting your vision story is the fun part. Telling it, and then re-telling it, and then telling it again is the hard part. Too many leaders share the vision once a year at the staff retreat or in an annual report and then fail to keep it at the forefront of people’s minds. The excitement surrounding that vision fizzles quickly.
Most visions fail not because of the vision itself but because it gets too quickly forgotten. If you can make vision conversations a regular part of your weekly meetings, you will see greater progress toward your vision than ever before. One way to keep it front-and-center is by asking your team at the beginning of each week, “What will you do this week to move our us closer to achieving our vision?”
The strategy is your plan to achieve the vision
Asking that question of yourself and of your staff moves you from vision into the last category. The strategy is all about the practical steps you plan to take to achieve your vision. Author Daniel Coyle, in his book The Culture Code, lays out a process called mental contrasting that helps think through strategy.
The first step is to think about a realistic goal you’d like to achieve, specifically related to your vision. Which component of your vision are you currently pursuing? Reflect on that goal and imagine it has come true. Now, imagine the obstacles standing in your way that you’ve had to overcome in order to achieve that goal. Overcoming these obstacles creates the fundamental framework of your strategy. They’re the things that are most likely to prevent you from achieving your vision, so they’re the most important things about which to formulate a strategy.
Coming up with good ideas isn’t a problem for most leaders. The problem, though, is actually thinking about strategy too early in the process. Many leaders are great at coming up with ideas. Unfortunately, if these ideas aren’t closely linked to a specific vision, they can send the organization moving in different directions, failing to be effective in any of them. The strategy should always serve the vision, not the other way around.
Clearly defining your mission (why you exist), your vision (where you are going), and your strategy (how you’ll get there) will align your team and increase your success. Whether you lead the entire organization, or a team, or just yourself, your success will be closely linked to your clarity and repetition of each of these key ideas.
- Quoted in Know What You’re For, Jeff Henderson, p. 51.
