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Mission, Vision, and Values: But First, Executive Alignment

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Start with Executive Alignment

Vision, mission, and values give a company direction. They describe what a company stands for and what it doesn’t. Solid mission, vision, and values statements give guidelines for a brand’s behavior, help distinguish a company from its peers, and serve as a foundation for the brand’s ultimate personality. Without them, a company is rudderless.

So, when’s the right time to write these statements? Some companies don’t launch before they have a mission, vision, and values. Others develop them when time allows. With COVID-19 changing so many things from the way we show up to what gives us meaning in our work, now is a perfect time to embark on this exercise.

Though timing varies, the most important element in creating your mission, vision, and values is executive alignment. I promise it will be the hardest part of the process, but if you miss it you’ll end up with meaningless fluff. Start with alignment and the wording of the mission and vision almost takes care of itself.

Here are the steps to get you there:

1. Get your executive team on board

Include your executive team from day one. Yes, another project that takes time away from your “real work”. We get it. Mission/vision work doesn’t feel as urgent as launching a new product on time or making this quarter’s sales goal. But the longer you delay, the longer you have to wait for the impact. And if executives don’t take ownership of the project, they won’t have respect for the work that comes out of it.

2. Put it all out in the open: one-on-one interviews

Once you’ve got your executives’ attention, gather feedback from each exec individually. When we work with clients on mission/vision projects, we start by interviewing the key internal players. (If you are doing this project on your own, someone on your team, preferably a neutral player, could handle this step.) Big picture, you want to know where they think the company should go in the future and how it will get there. Again, 2020 has likely thrown a wrench in what you had previously planned for the business.

You also want to gather opinions on the current business and service offerings, market and competition, trends and regulations affecting the market in the short and long term, and current and future target customers.

3. Tackle the big issues and hot topics: executive alignment

Coming out of the interviews, you’ll have a list of statements that cover the kind of future that people in the organization desire for the company, how comfortable they are with change, and where they want to focus first.

For example, in a recent engagement, these were a few of the statements we generated for our client:

  • “We need to change the status quo.”
  • “Our vision should be internally vs. externally focused.”
  • “We’re more comfortable as an ingredient brand than an innovator.”

4. Expect disagreement

If you are like most companies, people won’t always be in agreement. So rather than be frustrated by this, see it as your opportunity to find alignment.

Bring everyone together into one room—even virtually. Remember, people own what they build. Put each statement on a poster with an “agree/disagree” scale and ask individuals to use a post-it to show how they relate to the statement. When everyone is done, it’s time to discuss. (Pro tip: Google Jamboards combined with Zoom are a great way to do this virtually.)

Second, pull out from the interviews the “hot topics”, the issues that are holding the company back. If the team doesn’t address these issues, they’ll destroy the company.

We recently worked with a disability insurer. Their hot topics included things like the following:

  •  “Startups have already moved into term life and car insurance and erased the middleman. How will we prevent this from happening to us?”
  • “We’re in the midst of digitizing the underwriting process. How does this project and that one overlap?”

 5. Follow the Critical Path

Get everything out in the open before you start building a vision and mission. It can be painful and frustrating to hash out these topics but it’s an essential step in the process. You learn where people sit on every important issue and you figure out the hurdles you need to jump over to get to the mission and vision development stage. Only then can you decide together where the company is headed.

Speaking of the critical path, don’t focus on marketing before you have set your vision and mission. People get excited when they hear about a new strategy. They want to get started. We recently worked with a company that lacked a strong, energizing strategy. The marketing department recognized this more than any other part of the organization. They realized that the company was moving in a new direction and was so eager to communicate a new mission and vision that they put something in place before the executive team reached alignment on the mission and vision.

When we talked to the executive team about the mission and vision work we planned to do for the company, though, many felt uncomfortable with the marketing work communicating the new strategy. Misalignment all around.

Alignment Drives Business

Put in the hard work to get everyone around the table aligned on the path you’ll take. Focusing on alignment will pay off in the end. It will save you time, frustration, and energy, and allow you to better focus on what really matters—what will drive your business and brand into the future, with everyone on board.
If you need help building alignment, please reach out.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California

Branding for Internal Alignment

Posted on by Imri Larsen

Much has been written about the power of brand and its role in successful businesses. Brands can help a business build relevance and loyalty, but the process of brand building has value in and of itself. One of the most overlooked advantages of the process is how it can create internal alignment along the way.

Uncovering Difficult Truths 

Whether we are creating a new brand or refreshing an existing one, our first step is to gain a deep understanding of its dynamics among both internal and external audiences. We examine the various perspectives that exist within an organization through stakeholder interviews. We then talk to customers, read analysts’ reports, and dive deep into the reality of the product experience. Based on the learnings from this process, we land on a diagnosis.

This research often uncovers previously unknown and difficult truths that need to be faced about a business’s brand. Most of the time, the learnings will give voice to issues that everyone knows but no one has found a way to properly address. Recognizing this misalignment is where the real work begins.

Reconciling Differences 

A crucial part of creating a powerful brand comes from clearly articulating what your company does, how it provides value, and why it should matter (to customers or the world)… Sounds like it should be a pretty simple task, right? If it is easy for you, consider yourself lucky. For the rest of us, the branding process highlights different, opposing perspectives.

As organizations grow and mature, it is natural for groups to become laser-focused on their own unique view of the company. Recently we were working with an international company that creates software for project management and visual collaboration. As we talked with the cofounders, head of marketing, and other key stakeholders, we noticed something wasn’t matching up. We quickly realized that there wasn’t a clear mission statement that employees could point to when asked about their purpose as an organization.

Before moving forward with articulating their positioning in the market, we worked with the CEO to express the company’s mission in a way that would help unify efforts across departments. Despite everyone’s best efforts to do their job and build success for the company, teams were getting caught in our own echo chambers. Sometimes it can be helpful to get an outside perspective.

A well-known case study of a brand with internal misalignment is Uber. In 2016, the ride-hailing company launched a new visual identity that left many users scratching their heads. The new design system had different app icons depending upon whether you were a driver or a passenger. Every city had its own system of colors, patterns, and photographic style. For those of us who were watching from the sidelines, it looked like they were saying nothing by trying to be everything.

In 2017, Uber’s dirty laundry was exposed for all to see. The company was accused of misleading regulators and taking advantage of customers with surge pricing. At the heart of the problem was a culture where mismanagement and competing interests threatened the future of the company. After purging leadership and thoroughly improving their culture, the company signaled its change by introducing the clean, simple, and transit-informed visual system they continue to use to this day.

Alignment Fosters Empathy

Once you are able to identify the different views that contribute to the misalignment, the first result is increased empathy. Maybe executive leadership didn’t understand how the broader organization was resistant to their vision for the future. Maybe product teams felt uncomfortable with claims being promised in-market. Whatever the case may be, this newfound understanding creates an environment where teams can start creating a better path forward together. Empathy proves to be the most effective way to communicate and foster change.

Once teams are on the same page, work like brand positioning, messaging, visual identity, and other programs can come to full fruition. More importantly, aligned teams create a singularly-focused brand that gets expressed consistently on the outside. And the more consistent the brand is externally, the more powerful it becomes.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency in Oakland, California.

Photo Credit: https://icons8.com

Unifying Vision, Mission, Strategy, Brand, and Culture

Posted on by Chris Ames

It’s very difficult to work hard when you don’t understand what you’re working toward. We’re all capable of putting our heads down and grinding it out – but that behavior generally leads to burnout, apathy, and updating your LinkedIn.

A recent study from Reward Gateway, a global employee engagement company, which surveyed 1,500 workers and 750 senior decision-makers across the U.K., U.S., and Australia has revealed that only 25% of employees feel completely informed about their employer’s corporate mission and only 32% of employees feel completely informed about the values of the organization they work for.

When you compare that to the fact that 89% of employers say it’s absolutely critical to the success of their business that employees understand their mission, vision, and values, it’s clear there’s a major disconnect here. So, where is the divide and how can we close it?

The False Divide

In hiring and HR, we often talk about the difference between hard skills and soft skills. Hard skills are the concrete, measurable skills that make you a great fit for a specific position: coding, budgeting, IT. Soft skills are harder to measure – they’re the interpersonal skills like communication, empathy, and leadership that would make you a great fit anywhere.

Some companies make the mistake of dividing their work into these rigid categories. They think, “Hard skills drive real growth: our business strategy, our R&D and M&A roadmaps, our sales playbooks. Soft skills are merely nice-to-haves: our culture, our brand, our employee engagement.”

The truth is, a company divided cannot stand for long. Vision, mission, strategy, brand, and culture are inextricably connected, and all parts must work in concert to drive growth for your business. These strategic pieces must be thought of as one moving piece. Sales needs strategy to sell, marketing needs brand to have an impact, culture is the bedrock upon which all strategy lives or dies, mission keeps us grounded, and vision keeps us inspired. Beyond paying the bills, people need to understand why they get up every morning to come to work. There’s nothing soft about soft skills.

The numbers speak for themselves. A strong, well-defined, and positive culture increases employee engagement, job satisfaction, and well-being. A Business 2 Community report stated that companies with engaged employees outperform those without by 202 percent. Yet, only about 25% of employees said their organization has a strong culture based on core values and a similar amount said they trust their leadership at the executive level.

Unite Your Communications

On a very basic level, employees need a singular and regularly updated “space” to access communications about mission, vision, and the future of their company. That could be an intranet, a newsletter, or an in-person town hall. Ideally, this is a place where they can also voice their opinions and contribute to the shared meaning of the company.

Whatever the medium, the key is consistency in timing and aesthetic. Too often, employees are bombarded with irregular and disparate communications from different departments. Because they receive the communications in a silo, they think about them in a silo. There’s real power in bringing everything together in an integrated, holistic way.

Taglines vs. Tools

The fun thing about marketing is that everyone hates it – unless it’s really good. The distance between a mission or vision statement that feels like a “useless tagline” vs. a “useful tool” is a deadly gulf. There’s no surefire formula for bringing strategy to life in a meaningful way, but there are a few best practices that any company can glean:

Keep things human. If the goal is for every employee to be able to see themselves in the mission, then it needs to be written in a simple way. For example, the mission of TED is refreshing in its purity. It’s simply: spread ideas. It’s a perfect demonstration of how they serve, and their vision elevates this through the belief that ideas change attitudes, lives, and the world at large.

Be as transparent as possible. Mission and vision statements tend to be crafted by a small executive committee – and that makes sense. But even if all employees can’t actively participate in the shaping of the strategy, providing transparency into the decision process creates emotional buy-in for the end result. People are curious. They want to know the driving forces behind decisions and how they ladder up into something bigger. If you hand them a new mission statement with no context or transparency, it doesn’t mean anything.

Reward and model good behavior. If you’re asking people to make shifts in how they think and act at work, there should be systems in place to encourage those behaviors. Everyone wants their team to be more innovative and think beyond daily cycles – but nobody wants to allot the free time it would take to make that a reality. Some of Google’s most iconic products started off as side projects, a fact realized by their 20 percent rule, which states that employees should be able to devote one day of their work week to any project they like. Everyone wants their employees to engage more with internal communications – but it’s difficult to produce fresh and engaging content on a scheduled basis. After all, you can’t fault employees for not being up to date if things are regularly updated.

Vision, mission, strategy, brand, and culture are different blocks of the same blueprint. Creating the perfect house to hold these elements together can be difficult, but it’s critical if you want to drive growth home.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design firm in Oakland, California.

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Do a Company’s Vision and Mission Statements Have Expiration Dates?

Posted on by Sara Gaviser Leslie

Vision and Mission

We probably don’t need to convince anyone that having a vision and mission matters. They give you a North Star, help you focus on a goal, and act as a check for your strategic decisions. But how long should a vision and mission stay intact? At what point should you change your mission and vision?

Like many brand strategy decisions, it depends. At Emotive Brand, we believe a company should update their mission when it doesn’t match their strategy. Few would argue with this point, right? What’s more difficult than deciding if you should change your mission, though, is how it should change. When we work with clients, we develop missions that are inspirational, aspirational, and can stand the test of time.

Let’s talk first about the definitions. A mission is a tangible goal that can be used to organize teams around products and services to meet the goal. A vision, in contrast, is a company’s destination and unifying principle.

We like to share NASA’s vision and mission with clients because they both map so well to these definitions:

NASA Vision: “To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”

NASA Mission: “Lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and bring new knowledge and opportunities back to Earth. Support growth of the Nation’s economy in space and aeronautics, increase understanding of the universe and our place in it, work with industry to improve America’s aerospace technologies, and advance American leadership.”

NASA had another mission previously – one we actually prefer to share for its simplicity: “To pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery, and aeronautics research.” So why the change? The latest mission statement was updated after the 2016 election. The new administration likely wanted to take ownership over the strategy and reflect the Trump Administration’s pro-business stance and an America-first agenda. The vision has evolved, too, but isn’t so far away from what NASA stated as their vision in 2004, “To improve life here, to extend life to there, to find life beyond,” and also similar to what NASA stated in 2014, “We reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.”

While a vision – like NASA’s – usually remains stable for a long period of time, missions change more frequently.

How long can a mission last? Three years is likely too short of time, but 20 years may be too long to keep the same mission. Of course, when your mission no longer describes your business, isn’t believable, or doesn’t reflect the current management’s goals, you’re ready for something new. Changing a mission is acceptable and common. And as the NASA example shows, strong organizations change their missions all the time.

Ready to get started?

Here are some tips to make sure you aren’t revisiting your vision and mission exercise too soon:

Make it Aspirational

We recently worked with a company that wanted to move from a product focus to a solution focus. Even though the shift was still very much in progress, the company already knew the direction where they were headed. Changing their mission allowed them to be more aspirational and communicate their new focus both internally and externally.

Give Yourself Some Runway

It’s a balancing act to pick a mission that can work for today and tomorrow without cutting off possibilities or narrowing your focus too much. A great mission flexes with the future. For instance, we developed a mission for one of our clients, a new company offering food allergy treatment. While the company eventually may offer its services to adults, today they focus on children. We made sure their mission statement didn’t tie them to a specific audience and kept the door open to a broader market.

Do More than Describe – Create Excitement

Your mission’s goal is as much about describing your company’s reason for being as it is about firing up your employees. Missions that are solely descriptive fall flat. You want to communicate the role you will have – be it the industry leader, the market’s convener, or the company creating the most sophisticated technology. When you put a stake in the ground, you create excitement externally and among your employees.

Keep it Simple

Your mission should always be on the minds of your employees and well-understood by the rest of the world. If it is too long or complicated, it’s hard to remember and support. (Read NASA’s current mission above again if you don’t believe us.) Simplicity isn’t easy. In the process of writing your mission, you’ll likely throw away many, many options but, trust us, it is worth it.

Vision and mission development is hard work. While it is an interesting process and can bring a company together, it requires significant investment. When you create your vision and mission with its utility and longevity in mind, you ensure you don’t repeat the process again too soon. And if you are looking for help, do let us know.

 

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy agency.