Eleven mistakes teams make with mission, vision, and values

Transcript

Mission, vision, and values should be the clearest expression of why you exist, where you’re going, and how you behave. When they’re wrong, it exposes deep issues with alignment, strategy, and leadership.

I’ve written an article called The 11 Pitfalls of Mission, Vision, and Values and How to Avoid Them. It’s an easy read, and I recommend that you dive in. But if you just want a summary, this is for you.

So—mission, vision, values—we’re all super familiar with them. Where do they go sideways?

The first thing is language itself. Sometimes it gets in the way. Lengthy, ambiguous mission statements are really common. If your mission statement reads like a paragraph, it’s too long. People won’t remember it, or worse, they’ll cherry-pick the parts they like and discard the parts they don’t.

Here’s an example: Our mission is to leverage cutting-edge technologies and a diverse set of strategic partnerships to deliver innovative customer-centric solutions that holistically transform industries and create sustainable value for stakeholders across the globe. Oh my word—what a train wreck. But this happens. I mean, we’ve seen it hundreds of times.

Long, meandering, ambiguous mission statements are useless. I understand how these end up coming about, but they’re not helpful. Mission statements and vision statements need to guide daily action, and when they’re broad and ambiguous, they won’t.

And then there are mission statements stuffed full of marketing jargon. Remember: mission, vision, values—these are internal tools. They are meant for your team. It’s really easy for them to end up sounding like marketing hype, especially when they’re driven forward by people with a marketing background. And here’s the problem: you’re missing out on a chance to tell your team the truth about how your company actually operates.

Sometimes the work is incomplete or rushed. Somebody takes a stab at it, calls it good, and then everybody’s surprised that it’s not truly guiding the business. It’s not informing or providing clarity to people.

And then there are words and concepts that are simply table stakes—values so ubiquitous that they’re meaningless. Values like honesty and integrity are important, yes, but they’re important to every business. Show me one business that says, “Nah, integrity? Not for us. Honesty? No, not here.” Yes, this is important, but it’s important everywhere. By leaning into ubiquitous table-stake values, you’re losing out on a chance to provide real clarity. If the words you’re using could apply to pretty much every company, get rid of them.

All right, so the second group of problems is about perspective and accuracy. Sometimes this happens because the work has been delegated to somebody who’s not really running the company. If the owner or CEO is not involved with this work, then whatever is written down is not real. As a leader or CEO, you can delegate a lot of stuff, but you cannot delegate this. It’s core to the function of the job.

I’m going to say this again because somebody needs to hear it: these things cannot be delegated. Collaboration? Absolutely. Delegation? No. If ownership isn’t driving this—if the CEO is not driving this—it is wrong, and the gap will become evident. Or worse, the gap doesn’t show up quickly, and you’re just drifting for years. We’ve seen it.

Let’s talk accuracy. Now, vision is all about the future. These are the things we’re going to do. This is what we’re going to accomplish. But mission and values need to be grounded in reality—what is real, not what you want to be real. If your mission or values are rooted in a hope of what is real, not in what actually is real, everybody will smell that quickly. Mission and values—they’re not dreams.

That said, something that we’ve found to be very helpful is layering an aspirational mission or aspirational value into your actual mission or your core values. Diversity as a value is a great example of this. We see this all the time, and most of the time it’s not a core value. Many companies state diversity as a core value and in reality—you just look around—it’s not a core value. This is a perfect time to declare it as an aspirational value.

“Hey, it’s not a core value, but we want to be more diverse. We’re aspiring toward diversity. It’s something we need to work at.” That’s perfect. It communicates to your team: “We know who we are. We know what’s embedded, we know what’s inherent to the organization, and we also recognize there are these other things we want—but we’re just not there yet.”

This is one of the most insidious mistakes that organizations make: declaring missions or values aspirationally as reality. It just doesn’t work. It disenfranchises people. Calling something a core value or a mission when it’s clearly not communicates to your team that we either don’t know who we are or we’re lying to ourselves. We’ve all been at places like that, and we don’t want to work there. You’re much better off calling it aspirational and being real about the distance you have to cover to get there.

Old or outdated foundations are another signal. If your mission, your vision, or your values were developed ten years ago—if you’ve gone through massive change, if you have different leadership—this stuff needs to be updated. It’s just not correct. Shifts in your business put pressure on foundations that were built for another moment. The cracks are probably already showing.

The third set of pitfalls is about alignment and follow-through. Collaboration is critical, but purpose built by compromise and committee usually ends up being word soup. I’m 100% positive that we’ve all been there, trying to include everybody’s input and feedback and opinions. You don’t want anybody left out, and you end up with this insane manifesto that says nothing at all.

And then there’s the simple problem of not communicating it well. I’ve learned—and personally experienced—that CEOs need to communicate ten times more than they think they need to. If you think you’re saying it too much, you’re still probably not saying it enough.

And if your directional strategy is spread out betwixt Google Docs and PowerPoints, and you’ve got a bunch in the founder’s head—well, it might as well not exist at all.

Of course, no plan to bring it to life is another failure point. Mission, vision, values—they only matter if they’re referenced and used. They should show up in planning, hiring, product decisions, daily conversations. They should just be the air that everybody breathes. Parliament’s mission: to “find the truth and make it rad”—and everybody knows it.

You would not believe (or maybe you would) how many organizations treat this stuff like some sort of conceptual exercise. But in practice, it never sees the light of day. And by the way, if these things are not alive and embedded in your operations, they were probably never accurate to begin with.

Finally, sometimes there’s just a real lack of leadership commitment. And again, if the leaders won’t commit to it, it’s not real. If the senior leaders treat this as a checkbox exercise—if they skip meetings or they’re completely disengaged—that sends a clear signal that this stuff’s not important, and the team will follow their lead.

All right. Mission, vision, values—these things can be powerful north stars, but only if they are clear, accurate, and actually aligned with how the company really operates. Maybe some of these pitfalls feel too familiar. If you think your organization might have fallen into one of them, read the article. Not only does it talk about these in greater detail, but it also talks about some fixes. Use it to rebuild your directional strategy on truth, clarity, and conviction.

Thanks for doing this with me. I’m out of here. Be brave. Stand up art.