What is the value of a mission and vision statement? It’s difficult to put that on a balance sheet, just as workplace culture is difficult to put on a balance sheet, but both of them can affect your bottom line. Mission and vision statements are part of the core identity of any business. In previous episodes, we talked about core values and how they operate. Today, we will look at mission and vision statements. Now, both of these statements can play a role in shaping the culture and the future of an organization as it continues to grow and change. It sets a theoretical standard for behavior, a rubric for actions and goals for the future. Mission and vision statements allow for shared meaning that can also be referenced as an anchor in the turbulent seas of business. Shiny options might come by to distract, and disruptions in the marketplace can happen, may try to change your path even, and personnel can change your capabilities. But these strategic statements can be help to put your eyes on a North Star during all those changes. I think a mission statement is the focus of a business that shouldn’t be moved away from. It can keep us focused from distractions and gives us a rubric to judge whether we are being successful and really should be true for a 10 to 20 year long time horizon. The mission statement for Adelsberger Marketing is to make creative work that grows our clients’ businesses in a culture that values our team and community. Our mission incorporates several elements that I hope will be true of us for the future of this company. First of all, We don’t just make work, we make creative work, and we believe that creativity is important. Also, we don’t just make creative work. We’re not just artists. We make creative work that grows our clients’ businesses because there’s a commercial into our work. All of that is done in a culture that values our team and community because we recognize that our people are not just robots on an assembly line. They are real humans with feelings and feelings and thoughts. Our community allows us to exist, so we want to be good members of our community. All of those things are things I think are important for us to remember as we grow and change. As a business, it’s all so short enough that hopefully our team can think about it and digest it easily. We’ve operationalized it by going over it in detail in onboarding. We generate cool stickers with it to make the idea sticky and visible in our team members’ lives. And then annually, we do a year-end review where we use it as a rubric to see if we accomplish these things throughout the course of the year. We go through each point as a team to make sure that everybody can see that we’ve accomplished these goals. Vision statements, in my view, are what would happen in the distant future if you were successful in pursuing your mission statement. That’s the big picture accomplishment. And so for us, our vision is to be the best place for creatives to work in West Tennessee. Now, I know you can’t define that with a set of scores, and there’s no authority giving that grade out, but I have worked by operationalizing it and making a list of things that make a great place to work and have worked on including those in our strategic planning. Additionally, I think it’s helpful for the team to know that that’s the vision that I’m pushing towards. It’s very important that companies work on operationalizing these things. And when I say operationalize, I mean make it relevant to their operations. As a business, how do they make it more than just a statement that lives on a piece of paper in a three-ring binder in HR’s office? How do they make it alive and relevant to the people that work there? So we work as mentioned, including it in orientation, but not just saying it and explaining it, showing what it means. We include it in our annual reviews, and our core values are in our quarterly reviews with team members. We’ve also done our best to make the idea visible and available for our team to review. And ultimately, it’s on my plate as the leader of the company to ensure that these ideas are visible and active. And so I need to return to the practice I used to do, where once a week I’d review a core value, a mission or vision statement with the team so they can remember what it means to be successful beyond our monetary metrics. What’s your favorite mission or vision statement that you’ve ever come across? Send me an email. I’d love to hear about it, kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to this edition of the Content Machine podcast. Stay tuned for future episodes where we talk about marketing, culture, and leadership in the small business environment.
