Almost every company in the world has a mission statement or some core values. The idea of having a shared goal is a good one, the problem is that sometimes the goal isn’t good enough for people to jump in and make their best effort to attain it. Yesterday I posted about how the KPIs and processes need to be aligned with the mission statement, but i deliberately left out the thought of what the mission should say so I could expand a bit more in this post. Sometimes I feel the mission statement is really written so there is one or so the board can see a fancy piece of paper and decide that in fact the upper management deserves their high paying jobs. We usually see mission statements as:
”Putting clients first by putting employees first, immediately after prioritizing fiscal responsibility and leveraging profitability toward exceeding by empowering our employees to pu clients (and themselves) first, in a diverse and respectful environment of only those that come first, first” (From Harvey Birdman Attorney-at-law)
This mission statements are hard to remember, not related to any goals people have in life and meaningless to most employees and customers. Having your organizational structure, processes and KPIs aligned with the mission statement isn’t enough, the mission has to be meaningful.
The Evolution of the Mission Statement
As startups grow their mission statements need to evolve as the company culture is created, but they need stay true to the values that originated the business. I like Guy Kawasaki’s approach to stating a mission for an starting company. He suggests of building a mantra. A mantra are three or four words that state what the business wants to give to it’s customers and no it’s not “Big Hamburgers” is as Guy says “Healthy Fast Food”. If you notice the mantra specifies what the company does and gives a broader definition of it’s values. The mantra should tell any employee what they need to do and solve any problem or doubt they have while performing their services.
Let’s go on with the fast food example. If the product development team has decided to add pasta to the menu because every customer seems to like it they evaluate if it’s fast enough to qualify as fast food. The evaluation shows it’s slightly off the limit of time to qualify as fast food. The team thinks it should go because it’s healthy and customers want it. On the other hand the kitchen team says it shouldn’t be approved because it’s not fast food. While in this debate the mantra or mission says “Healthy Fast Food” so if it’s healthy and it’s not fast the restaurant shouldn’t sell the product at all.
The mission shouldn’t evolve in extension but in consistency with the culture that’s being created. As a company grows it’s very important to be a guard of the culture that is forming around it. For example, Google’s mission is organizing the world’s information and they do everything to accomplish it. If you study every single product Google launches you will notice each of them is aligned with the mission in some way. So as the company grows the mission could evolve, but never grow in number of phrases or shift towards something that won’t inspire action in the team working for it. In our example the mission could change to be “providing correct nutrition at a fast speed”, which could lead to the company launching a nutritional supplements branch.
A mission statement should reflect a higher purpose, the intention to make a change on the status quo that will impact the life of people. A higher purpose has to bee fulfilling and make you achieve a certain state of flow. For example, focusing on providing the best quality of service could be a fulfilling challenge for a customer driven person or for a person that loves to take care of the little details. The higher purpose chosen needs to make sense to every party involved in the company and needs to be discussed and understood perfectly as this will guide any future action of the organization.
Values …Values …..Values
The core values of an organization are usually built as the goal the management teams has for them. This leads to the values being very corporate (made to impress the board of directors) and dehumanized. This type of values rarely make it into the teams head and are never used. Finally, this values alienate the upper management in which KPIs they will measure and what are the results they wan’t to achieve which creates a vicious circle of frustration and lack of productivity in the teams.
The values need to emerge from the group of employees and upper management, not just from the upper management. They need to be human and the team needs to be able to integrate them to their everyday life. To define the core values on a startup it’s important that the founders gather together and define which values they think will make a difference in a company and which values will they be comfortable living everyday. Then these values need to be aligned with the mission or mantra and if the alignment isn’t perfect they need to check if a change could be done to the mantra or a value needs to go. While writing down and thinking of the core values of a company you need to have in mind what kind of culture you’re creating.
Always keep in mind that a value that ends up not being well defined could make your culture go away from the goal as many others will start to define it in their own terms. The definition of the values need to be long enough so that they don’t let anything off and yet broad enough so that people can add a bit of their personality to it. For example, in the Delivering Happiness Book, Tony Hsieh shares the definitions of Zappos’ values and they describe what are the limits of the values as to what they include and not, but still give employees a margin where they can express their own essence.
Culture
It is important to stress out how key the culture is in building a successful business in the long term. Rather than losing the main goal or higher purpose as more people come in culture needs to guide growth and make the company seek their mantra always. If the mantra of FedEX is, as Guy Kawasaki proposes, “Peace of Mind” then one of the values should be “awesome service”. This will create a culture of awesome service where all the company revolves around it and caring about the customers (internal or external is centric). As this value defines the culture the others will do the same making a unique combination possible where people can be themselves while pointing towards a higher goal.
What’s the importance of company culture to you? What is your business’ mantra? Or what it should be? What kind of culture will you create with that mantra?
