Developing Mission, Vision, and Values

The Roles of Mission, Vision, and Values

Learning Objectives

1. Be able to define mission and vision.
2. See how values are important for mission and vision.
3. Understand the roles of vision, mission, and values in the P-O-L-C framework.

Source: Saylor Academy, https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_principles-of-management-v1.1/s08-developing-mission-vision-and-.html
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Mission, Vision, and Values

Mission and vision both relate to an organization's purpose and are typically communicated in some written form. Mission and vision are statements from the organization that answer questions about who we are, what do we value, and where we're going. A study by the consulting firm Bain and Company reports that 90% of the 500 firms surveyed issue some form of mission and vision statements. Moreover, firms with clearly communicated, widely understood, and collectively shared mission and vision have been shown to perform better than those without them, with the caveat that they related to effectiveness only when strategy and goals and objectives were aligned with them as well.

A mission statement communicates the organization's reason for being, and how it aims to serve its key stakeholders. Customers, employees, and investors are the stakeholders most often emphasized, but other stakeholders like government or communities (i.e., in the form of social or environmental impact) can also be discussed. Mission statements are often longer than vision statements. Sometimes mission statements also include a summation of the firm's values. Values are the beliefs of an individual or group, and in this case the organization, in which they are emotionally invested. The Starbucks mission statement describes six guiding principles that, as you can see, also communicate the organization's values:

1. Provide a great work environment and treat each other with respect and dignity.
2. Embrace diversity as an essential component in the way we do business.
3. Apply the highest standards of excellence to the purchasing, roasting, and fresh delivery of our coffee.
4. Develop enthusiastically satisfied customers all of the time.
5. Contribute positively to our communities and our environment.
6. Recognize that profitability is essential to our future success.

Similarly, Toyota declares its global corporate principles to be:

1. Honor the language and spirit of the law of every nation and undertake open and fair corporate activities to be a good corporate citizen of the world.
2. Respect the culture and customs of every nation and contribute to economic and social development through corporate activities in the communities.
3. Dedicate ourselves to providing clean and safe products and to enhancing the quality of life everywhere through all our activities.
4. Create and develop advanced technologies and provide outstanding products and services that fulfill the needs of customers worldwide.
5. Foster a corporate culture that enhances individual creativity and teamwork value, while honoring mutual trust and respect between labor and management.
6. Pursue growth in harmony with the global community through innovative management.
7. Work with business partners in research and creation to achieve stable, long-term growth and mutual benefits, while keeping ourselves open to new partnerships.

A vision statement, in contrast, is a future-oriented declaration of the organization's purpose and aspirations. In many ways, you can say that the mission statement lays out the organization's "purpose for being," and the vision statement then says, "based on that purpose, this is what we want to become". The strategy should flow directly from the vision, since the strategy is intended to achieve the vision and thus satisfy the organization's mission. Typically, vision statements are relatively brief, as in the case of Starbuck's vision statement, which reads: "Establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles as we grow". Or ad firm Ogilvy & Mather, which states their vision as "an agency defined by its devotion to brands".Sometimes the vision statement is also captured in a short tag line, such as Toyota's "moving forward" statement that appears in most communications to customers, suppliers, and employees.

Any casual tour of business or organization Web sites will expose you to the range of forms that mission and vision statements can take. To reiterate, mission statements are longer than vision statements, often because they convey the organizations core values. Mission statements answer the questions of "Who are we?" and "What does our organization value?" Vision statements typically take the form of relatively brief, future-oriented statements - vision statements answer the question "Where is this organization going?" Increasingly, organizations also add a values statement which either reaffirms or states outright the organization's values that might not be evident in the mission or vision statements.

Roles Played by Mission and Vision

Mission and vision statements play three critical roles: (1) communicate the purpose of the organization to stakeholders, (2) inform strategy development, and (3) develop the measurable goals and objectives by which to gauge the success of the organization's strategy. These interdependent, cascading roles, and the relationships among them, are summarized in the figure.

First, mission and vision provide a vehicle for communicating an organization's purpose and values to all key stakeholders. Stakeholders are those key parties who have some influence over the organization or stake in its future. You will learn more about stakeholders and stakeholder analysis later in this chapter; however, for now, suffice it to say that some key stakeholders are employees, customers, investors, suppliers, and institutions such as governments. Typically, these statements would be widely circulated and discussed often so that their meaning is widely understood, shared, and internalized. The better employees understand an organization's purpose, through its mission and vision, the better able they will be to understand the strategy and its implementation.

Second, mission and vision create a target for strategy development. That is, one criterion of a good strategy is how well it helps the firm achieve its mission and vision. To better understand the relationship among mission, vision, and strategy, it is sometimes helpful to visualize them collectively as a funnel. At the broadest part of the funnel, you find the inputs into the mission statement. Toward the narrower part of the funnel, you find the vision statement, which has distilled down the mission in a way that it can guide the development of the strategy. In the narrowest part of the funnel you find the strategy - it is clear and explicit about what the firm will do, and not do, to achieve the vision. Vision statements also provide a bridge between the mission and the strategy. In that sense the best vision statements create a tension and restlessness with regard to the status quo - that is, they should foster a spirit of continuous innovation and improvement. For instance, in the case of Toyota, its "moving forward" vision urges managers to find newer and more environmentally friendly ways of delighting the purchaser of their cars. London Business School professors Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad describe this tense relationship between vision and strategy as stretch and ambition. Indeed, in a study of such able competitors as CNN, British Airways, and Sony, they found that these firms displaced competitors with stronger reputations and deeper pockets through their ambition to stretch their organizations in more innovative ways.

Third, mission and vision provide a high-level guide, and the strategy provides a specific guide, to the goals and objectives showing success or failure of the strategy and satisfaction of the larger set of objectives stated in the mission. In the cases of both Starbucks and Toyota, you would expect to see profitability goals, in addition to metrics on customer and employee satisfaction, and social and environmental responsibility.

Key Takeaway

Mission and vision both relate to an organization's purpose and aspirations, and are typically communicated in some form of brief written statements. A mission statement communicates the organization's reason for being and how it aspires to serve its key stakeholders. The vision statement is a narrower, future-oriented declaration of the organization's purpose and aspirations. Together, mission and vision guide strategy development help communicate the organization's purpose to stakeholders, and inform the goals and objectives set to determine whether the strategy is on track.

Exercises

1. What is a mission statement?
2. What is a vision statement?
3. How are values important to the content of mission and vision statements?
4. Where does the purpose of mission and vision overlap?
5. How do mission and vision relate to a firm's strategy?
6. Why are mission and vision important for organizational goals and objectives?

Mission and Vision in the P-O-L-C Framework

Learning Objectives

1. Understand the role of mission and vision in organizing.
2. Understand the role of mission and vision in leading.
3. Understand the role of mission and vision in controlling.

Mission and vision play such a prominent role in the planning facet of the P-O-L-C framework. However, you are probably not surprised to learn that their role does not stop there. Beyond the relationship between mission and vision, strategy, and goals and objectives, you should expect to see mission and vision being related to the organizing, leading, and controlling aspects as well. Let's look at these three areas in turn.

Mission, Vision, and Organizing

Organizing is the function of management that involves developing an organizational structure and allocating human resources to ensure the accomplishment of objectives. The organizing facet of the P-O-L-C framework typically includes subjects such as organization design, staffing, and organizational culture. With regard to organizing, it is useful to think about alignment between the mission and vision and various organizing activities. For instance, organizational design is a formal, guided process for integrating the people, information, and technology of an organization. It is used to match the form of the organization as closely as possible to the purpose(s) the organization seeks to achieve. Through the design process, organizations act to improve the probability that the collective efforts of members will be successful.

Organization design should reflect and support the strategy - in that sense, organizational design is a set of decision guidelines by which members will choose appropriate actions, appropriate in terms of their support for the strategy. As you learned in the previous section, the strategy is derived from the mission and vision statements and from the organization's basic values. Strategy unifies the intent of the organization and focuses members toward actions designed to accomplish desired outcomes. The strategy encourages actions that support the purpose and discourages those that do not.

To organize, you must connect people with each other in meaningful and purposeful ways. Further, you must connect people - human resources - with the information and technology necessary for them to be successful. Organization structure defines the formal relationships among people and specifies both their roles and their responsibilities. Administrative systems govern the organization through guidelines, procedures, and policies. Information and technology define the process(es) through which members achieve outcomes. Each element must support each of the others, and together they must support the organization's purpose, as reflected in its mission and vision.

For example, in 2006, Disney acquired Pixar, a firm is renowned for its creative prowess in animated entertainment. Disney summarizes the Pixar strategy like this: "Pixar's [strategy] is to combine proprietary technology and world-class creative talent to develop computer-animated feature films with memorable characters and heartwarming stories that appeal to audiences of all ages". Disney has helped Pixar achieve this strategy through an important combination of structural design choices. First, Pixar is an independent division of Disney and is empowered to make independent choices in all aspects of idea development. Second, Pixar gives its "creatives" - its artists, writers, and designers - great leeway over decision making. Third, Pixar protects its creatives' ability to share work in progress, up and down the hierarchy, with the aim of getting it even better. Finally, after each project, teams conduct "postmortems" to catalog what went right and what went wrong. This way, innovations gained through new projects can be shared with later projects, while at the same time sharing knowledge about potential pitfalls.

Organizational culture is the workplace environment formulated from the interaction of the employees in the workplace. Organizational culture is defined by all of the life experiences, strengths, weaknesses, education, upbringing, and other attributes of the employees. While executive leaders play a large role in defining organizational culture by their actions and leadership, all employees contribute to the organizational culture.

As you might imagine, achieving alignment between mission and vision and organizational culture can be very powerful, but culture is also difficult to change. This means that if you are seeking to change your vision or mission, your ability to change the organization's culture to support those new directions may be difficult, or, at least, slow to achieve.

For instance, in 2000, Procter & Gamble (P&G) sought to change a fundamental part of its vision in a way that asked the organization to source more of its innovations from external partners. Historically, P&G had invested heavily in research and development and internal sources of innovation - so much so that "not invented here" (known informally as NIH) was the dominant cultural mind-set. NIH describes a sociological, corporate, or institutional culture that avoids using products, research, or knowledge that originated anywhere other than inside the organization. It is normally used in a pejorative sense. As a sociological phenomenon, the "not invented here" syndrome is manifested as an unwillingness to adopt an idea or product because it originates from another culture. P&G has been able to combat this NIH bias and gradually change its culture toward one that is more open to external contributions, and hence in much better alignment with its current mission and vision.

Social networks are often referred to as the "invisible organization". They consist of individuals or organizations connected by one or more specific types of interdependency. You are probably already active in social networks through such Web communities as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn. However, these sites are really only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the emerging body of knowledge surrounding social networks. Networks deliver three unique advantages: access to "private" information (i.e., information that companies do not want competitors to have), access to diverse skill sets, and power. You may be surprised to learn that many big companies have breakdowns in communications even in divisions where the work on one project should be related to work on another. Going back to our Pixar example, for instance, Disney is fostering a network among members of its Pixar division in a way that they are more likely to share information and learn from others. The open internal network also means that a cartoon designer might have easier access to a computer programmer and together they can figure out a more innovative solution. Finally, since Pixar promotes communication across hierarchical levels and gives creatives decision-making authority, the typical power plays that might impede sharing innovation and individual creativity are prevented. Managers see these three network advantages at work every day but might not pause to consider how their networks regulate them.

Mission, Vision, and Leading

Leading involves influencing others toward the attainment of organizational objectives. Leading and leadership are nearly synonymous with the notions of mission and vision. We might describe a very purposeful person as being "on a mission". As an example, Steve Demos had the personal mission of replacing cow's milk with soy milk in U.S. supermarkets, and this mission led to his vision for, and strategy behind, the firm White Wave and its Silk line of soy milk products. Similarly, we typically think of some individuals as leaders because they are visionary. For instance, when Walt Disney suggested building a theme park in a Florida swamp back in the early 1960s, few other people in the world seemed to share his view.

Any task - whether launching Silk or building the Disney empire - is that much more difficult if attempted alone. Therefore, the more that a mission or vision challenges the status quo - and recognizing that good vision statements always need to create some dissonance with the status quo - the greater will be the organization's need of what leadership researcher Shiba calls "real change leaders" - people who will help diffuse the revolutionary philosophy even while the leader (i.e., the founder or CEO) is not present. Without real change leaders, a revolutionary vision would remain a mere idea of the visionary CEO - they are the ones who make the implementation of the transformation real.

In most cases where we think of revolutionary companies, we associate the organization's vision with its leader - for instance, Apple and Steve Jobs, Dell and Michael Dell, or Google with the team of Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Most important, in all three of these organizations, the leaders focused on creating an organization with a noble mission that enabled the employees and management team to achieve not only the strategic breakthrough but to also realize their personal dreams in the process. Speaking to the larger relationship between mission, vision, strategy, and leadership, are the Eight principles of visionary leadership, derived from Shiba's 2001 book, Four Practical Revolutions in Management.

Vision, Mission, and Controlling

Controlling involves ensuring that performance does not deviate from standards. Controlling consists of three steps: (1) establishing performance standards, (2) comparing actual performance against standards, and (3) taking corrective action when necessary. Mission and vision are both directly and indirectly related to all three steps.

Key Takeaway

Exercises

1. How might mission and vision influence organizational design?
2. How might mission and vision influence leadership practices?
3. Why might a specific replacement CEO candidate be a good or poor choice for a firm with an existing mission and vision?
4. Which aspects of controlling do mission and vision influence?
5. Why are mission and vision relevant to the management of internal organizational social networks?
6. What performance standards might reinforce a firm's mission and vision?
7. What is the role of mission and vision with strategic human resource management?

Stakeholders

Learning Objectives

1. Learn about stakeholders and their importance.
2. Understand stakeholder analysis.
3. Be able to map stakeholders and their level of participation.

Stakeholders and Stakeholder Analysis

Stakeholders are individuals or groups who have an interest in an organization's ability to deliver intended results and maintain the viability of its products and services. We've already stressed the importance of stakeholders to a firm's mission and vision. We've also explained that firms are usually accountable to a broad range of stakeholders, including shareholders, who can make it either more difficult or easier to execute a strategy and realize its mission and vision. This is the main reason managers must consider stakeholders' interests, needs, and preferences.

Considering these factors in the development of a firm's mission and vision is a good place to start, but first, of course, you must identify critical stakeholders, get a handle on their short- and long-term interests, calculate their potential influence on your strategy, and take into consideration how the firms strategy might affect the stakeholders (beneficially or adversely). Table 4.2 "Stakeholder Categories" provides one way to begin thinking about the various stakeholder groups, their interests, importance, and influence. Influence reflects a stakeholder's relative power over and within an organization; importance indicates the degree to which the organization cannot be considered successful if a stakeholder's needs, expectations, and issues are not addressed.

As you can imagine, for instance, one key stakeholder group comprises the CEO and the members of the top-management team. These are key managers, and they might be owners as well. This group is important for at least three reasons:

1. Its influence as either originator or steward of the organization's mission and vision.
2. Its responsibility for formulating a strategy that realizes the mission and vision.
3. Its ultimate role in strategy implementation.

Typically, stakeholder evaluation of both quantitative and qualitative performance outcomes will determine whether management is effective. Quantitative outcomes include stock price, total sales, and net profits, while qualitative outcomes include customer service and employee satisfaction. As you can imagine, different stakeholders may place more emphasis on some outcomes than other stakeholders, who have other priorities.

Stakeholders, Mission, and Vision

Stakeholder analysis refers to the range of techniques or tools used to identify and understand the needs and expectations of major interests inside and outside the organization environment. Managers perform stakeholder analysis to gain a better understanding of the range and variety of groups and individuals who not only have a vested interest in the organization, and ultimately the formulation and implementation of a firm's strategy, but who also have some influence on firm performance. Managers thus develop mission and vision statements, not only to clarify the organization's larger purpose but also to meet or exceed the needs of its key stakeholders.

Stakeholder analysis may also enable managers to identify other parties that might derail otherwise well-formulated strategies, such as local, state, national, or foreign governmental bodies. Finally, stakeholder analysis enables organizations to better formulate, implement, and monitor their strategies, and this is why stakeholder analysis is a critical factor in the ultimate implementation of a strategy.

Identifying Stakeholders

The first step in stakeholder analysis is identifying major stakeholder groups. As you can imagine, the groups of stakeholders who will, either directly or indirectly, be affected by or have an effect on a firm's strategy and its execution can run the gamut from employees, to customers, to competitors, to the government. Ultimately, we will want to take these stakeholders and plot them on a chart, similar to that shown in the following figure.

Figure 4.10 Stakeholder Mapping

Let's pause for a moment to consider the important constituencies we will be charting on our stakeholder map. Before we start, however, we need to remind ourselves that stakeholders can be individuals or groups - communities, social or political organizations, and so forth. In addition, we can break groups down demographically, geographically, by level and branch of government, or according to other relevant criteria. In so doing, we're more likely to identify important groups that we might otherwise overlook.

With these facts in mind, you can see that, externally, a map of stakeholders will include such diverse groups as governmental bodies, community-based organizations, social and political action groups, trade unions and guilds, and even journalists. National and regional governments and international regulatory bodies will probably be key stakeholders for global firms or those whose strategy calls for greater international presence. Internally, key stakeholders include shareholders, business units, employees, and managers.

Steps in Identifying Stakeholders

Identifying all of a firm's stakeholders can be a daunting task. In fact, as we will note again shortly, a list of stakeholders that is too long actually may reduce the effectiveness of this important tool by overwhelming decision makers with too much information. To simplify the process, we suggest that you start by identifying groups that fall into one of four categories: organizational, capital market, product market, and social. Let's take a closer look at this step.

Step 1: Determining Influences on Mission, Vision, and Strategy Formulation. One way to analyze the importance and roles of the individuals who compose a stakeholder group is to identify the people and teams who should be consulted as strategy is developed or who will play some part in its eventual implementation. These are organizational stakeholders, and they include both high-level managers and frontline workers. Capital-market stakeholders are groups that affect the availability or cost of capital - shareholders, venture capitalists, banks, and other financial intermediaries. Product-market stakeholders include parties with whom the firm shares its industry, including suppliers and customers. Social stakeholders consist broadly of external groups and organizations that may be affected by or exercise influence over firm strategy and performance, such as unions, governments, and activist groups. The next two steps are to determine how various stakeholders are affected by the firm's strategic decisions and the degree of power that various stakeholders wield over the firm's ability to choose a course of action.

Step 2: Determining the Effects of Key Decisions on the Stakeholder. Step 2 in stakeholder analysis is to determine the nature of the effect of the firm's strategic decisions on the list of relevant stakeholders. Not all stakeholders are affected equally by strategic decisions. Some effects may be rather mild, and any positive or negative effects may be secondary and of minimal impact. At the other end of the spectrum, some stakeholders bear the brunt of firm decisions, good or bad.

In performing step 1, companies often develop overly broad and unwieldy lists of stakeholders. At this stage, it's critical to determine the stakeholders who are most important based on how the firm's strategy affects the stakeholders. You must determine which of the groups still on your list have direct or indirect material claims on firm performance or which are potentially adversely affected. For instance, it is easy to see how shareholders are affected by firm strategies - their wealth either increases or decreases in correspondence with the firm's actions. Other parties have economic interests in the firm as well, such as parties the firm interacts with in the marketplace, including suppliers and customers. The effects on other parties may be much more indirect. For instance, governments have an economic interest in firms doing well - they collect tax revenue from them. However, in cities that are well diversified with many employers, a single firm has minimal economic impact on what the government collects. Alternatively, in other areas, individual firms represent a significant contribution to local employment and tax revenue. In those situations, the effect of firm actions on the government would be much greater.

Step 3: Determining Stakeholders' Power and Influence over Decisions. The third step of a stakeholder analysis is to determine the degree to which a stakeholder group can exercise power and influence over the decisions the firm makes. Does the group have direct control over what is decided, veto power over decisions, nuisance influence, or no influence? Recognize that although the degree to which a stakeholder is affected by firm decisions (i.e., step 2) is sometimes highly correlated with their power and influence over the decision, this is often not the case. For instance, in some companies, frontline employees may be directly affected by firm decisions but have no say in what those decisions are. Power can take the form of formal voting power (boards of directors and owners), economic power (suppliers, financial institutions, and unions), or political power (dissident stockholders, political action groups, and governmental bodies). Sometimes the parties that exercise significant power over firm decisions don't register as having a significant stake in the firm (step 2). In recent years, for example, Wal-Mart has encountered significant resistance in some communities by well-organized groups who oppose the entry of the mega-retailer. Wal-Mart executives now have to anticipate whether a vocal and politically powerful community group will oppose its new stores or aim to reduce their size, which decreases Wal-Mart's per store profitability. Indeed, in many markets, such groups have been effective at blocking new stores, reducing their size, or changing building specifications.

Once you've determined who has a stake in the outcomes of the firm's decisions as well as who has power over these decisions, you'll have a basis on which to allocate prominence in the strategy-formulation and strategy-implementation processes. The framework in the figure will also help you categorize stakeholders according to their influence in determining strategy versus their importance to strategy execution. For one thing, this distinction may help you identify major omissions in strategy formulation and implementation.

Having identified stakeholder groups and differentiated them by how they are affected by firm decisions and the power they have to influence decisions, you'll want to ask yourself some additional questions:

• Have I identified any vulnerable points in either the strategy or its potential implementation?
• Which groups are mobilized and active in promoting their interests?
• Have I identified supporters and opponents of the strategy?
• Which groups will benefit from successful execution of the strategy and which may be adversely affected?
• Where are various groups located? Who belongs to them? Who represents them?

The stakeholder-analysis framework summarized in the figure is a good starting point. Ultimately, because mission and vision are necessarily long term in orientation, identifying important stakeholder groups will help you to understand which constituencies stand to gain or to lose the most if they're realized.

Two Challenges

Two of the challenges of performing stakeholder analysis are determining how stakeholders are affected by a firm's decisions and how much influence they have over the implementation of the decisions that are made. Many people have a tendency to fall into the trap of assessing all stakeholders as being important on both dimensions. In reality, not all stakeholders are affected in the same way and not all stakeholders have the same level of influence in determining what a firm does. Moreover, when stakeholder analysis is executed well, the resulting strategy has a better chance of succeeding, simply because the entities you might rely on in the implementation phase were already involved in the strategy starting with the formulation phase. Thus, you now have a good idea of how to engage various stakeholders in all the stages of the P-O-L-C framework.

Key Takeaway

Exercises

1. What are stakeholders, and why are they relevant to mission and vision?
2. Are stakeholders equally relevant to all parts of P-O-L-C, or only mission and vision?
3. What is stakeholder analysis? What are the three identification steps?
4. How does stakeholder analysis help you craft a mission and vision statement?
5. Which important stakeholders might you intentionally exclude from a mission or vision statement?
6. What are the risks of not conducting stakeholder analysis as an input to the formulation of your mission and vision?

Crafting Mission and Vision Statements

Learning Objectives

1. Learn about the basics of the mission and vision development process.
2. Understand the content of good mission and vision statements.

Communicating and Monitoring Mission and Vision

At this point, you have an understanding of what a mission and vision statement is and how creativity, passion, and stakeholder interests might be accounted for. The actual step-by-step process of developing a mission and vision might start with the mission and vision statements, but you should think of this process more broadly in terms of multiple steps: (1) the process, (2) the content of the mission and vision statements, (3) communicating mission and vision to all relevant stakeholders, and (4) monitoring. As shown in "Process, Content, Application, and Monitoring in Mission and Vision Development," Information Week contributor Sourabh Hajela breaks out one way you might manage your mission/vision development checklist. Let's dive in to the development process first.

Mission and vision statements are statements of an organization's purpose and potential; what you want the organization to become. Both statements should be meaningful to you and your organization. It should be shared with all of the employees in the organization to create a unified direction for everyone to move in.

Mission and Vision-Development Process

Mission and vision development are analogous to the "P" (planning) in the P-O-L-C framework. Start with the people. To the greatest extent possible, let those people responsible for executing the mission and vision drive their development. Sometimes this means soliciting their input and guiding them through the development of the actual statements, but ideally, it means teaching them how to craft those statements themselves. Involve as many key stakeholders as possible in its development; otherwise, they won't consider it theirs. Assign responsibility so that it's clear how each person, including each stakeholder, can contribute.

Key Takeaway

Exercises

1. Who should be involved in the mission and vision development process?
2. What are some key content areas for mission and vision?
3. Why are organizational values important to mission and vision?
4. Why is communication important with mission and vision?
5. To which stakeholders should the mission and vision be communicated?
6. What role does monitoring play in mission and vision?

Developing Your Personal Mission and Vision

Mission and vision are concepts that can be applied to you, personally, well beyond their broader relevance to the P-O-L-C framework. Personal mission and vision communicate the direction in which you are headed, as well as providing some explanation for why you are choosing one direction or set of objectives over others. Thinking about and writing down mission and vision statements for your life can help provide you with a compass as you work toward your own goals and objectives.

Your Mission and Vision

Note that the development of a personal mission and vision, and then a strategy for achieving them, are exactly the opposite of what most people follow. Most people do not plan further ahead than their next job or activity (if they plan their career at all). They take a job because it looks attractive, and then they see what they can do with it. We advocate looking as far into the future as you can and deciding where you want to end up and what steps will lead you there. In that way, your life and your career fit into some intelligent plan, and you are in control of your own life.

Key Takeaway

Exercises

1. How does a personal mission and vision statement differ from one created for an organization?
2. What time period should a personal mission and vision statement cover?
3. What are the five steps for creating a personal mission and vision statement?
4. What type of goals should you start thinking about in creating a personal mission and vision?
5. How are your strengths and weaknesses relevant to mission and vision?
6. What stakeholders seem relevant to your personal mission and vision?