Vision and mission: the horizon that keeps moving and the road under your feet

The company vision: a horizon that keeps moving

Imagine walking towards the horizon. The further you go, the further away it gets. That does not make the walk a failure: the horizon gives you a direction and lets you know whether you are heading the right way.

That is what a company vision is. It describes a desirable future in the long term, one that is never completely reached. If you can tick off your vision, it was a target. That is no flaw in targets, which are indispensable, but they do not play the same role.

A useful vision does three things for a leadership team:

• it gives a sense of purpose that goes beyond this year's results;
• it helps to turn down a tempting opportunity that leads away from the horizon;
• it brings together teams that do not share the same trades or the same language.

The company mission: the road under your feet

The mission answers a much more down-to-earth question: what do we do today, for whom, and with what result? It can be checked. You should be able to look back over the past week and say whether you did what the mission announces.

That also sets it apart from the purpose, a term that has appeared in recent years. A purpose says why the organisation exists beyond profit, so it sits halfway: more lasting than the mission, more concrete than the vision.

For a group with subsidiaries, you also have to ask whether the mission is the same everywhere. Often the group has a single mission and each subsidiary has a local version of it: the same contribution, but for the clients, constraints and teams specific to each country.

How they fit together

Vision and mission complement each other. The mission is the stretch of road you cover this year; the vision is the horizon that lets you choose the right road. Without a horizon, you walk without knowing where. Without a road, you gaze at the horizon without moving forward.

Three questions for expressing a mission

Rather than start from a blank sheet, I suggest that a leadership team answer three questions together, first each on their own:

1. For whom? Which people or organisations benefit from our work?
2. For what problem? What would be worse off without us?
3. With what difference? What do we bring in a way that is our own?

The answers are then compared. The gaps between them are the real raw material: they show where the leadership has not yet agreed with itself.

The translation test for a vision

In an international group, I put the vision through what I call the translation test. Three people from three countries are asked to restate it in their own language, then explain it to a colleague in one sentence. If the meaning changes from one country to another, the wording is too vague or too tied to a cultural expression. A good vision survives translation.

That is also why I prefer plain vocabulary to agency formulas. A very vivid word in one language sometimes has quite a different echo in another.

Five mistakes I often see

• Mixing vision and a numerical target. A number is a stage, not a horizon.
• Writing the mission like a sales slogan. It should describe work, not seduce.
• Handing the writing to an agency. The text will be well written but nobody will recognise themselves in it.
• Having only the chief executive approve it. A team that has not discussed it will not carry it.
• Forgetting to make it a decision tool. A text that is never used to choose is a decorative text.

What this changes for HR

A clear vision and mission make recruitment easier, because they say what the job is for. They help with induction, because a new recruit quickly understands where they fit in. They also give managers a shared language for talking about the meaning of work, which is valuable when teams are spread over several countries.

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Going further

• Organisational culture: putting it into words
• Company values as decision rules
• Executive coaching for senior leaders

This article was written by Marc Prager.