VISION, VALUES, CULTURE & GOALS
Setting a Vision for the business.
In life people need to know where they are going. What the destination is and most importantly why they are going there. This is the same within a business. If you want people engaged, motivated and willing to go the extra mile, they need to not only understand where the business is going but also why.
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It is the role of the leader to map out their journey. This starts with a Vision for the business. The Vision is a picture of what you want the business to be in the future. I tend to build it up from the constituent parts of my Business Facets (see Delivering Performance) but it doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be something that everyone can understand, buy into and all push towards.
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Living by your Values
In any family there are a set of values. They are the beliefs and standards by which that family live. In any business there should be the same. Just as you cannot criticise your children from not behaving as you expect unless you have told them what you expect, so is it in business.
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To have a fully function business with teams and individuals who interact, you need to set your values. These cannot just be a company mantra that is written in the handbook and on a poster in the kitchen.
They must permeate through all formal and informal communications. They must form the basis of your recruitment strategy, your reward and recognition programme, your performance management programme and how you interact with each other and your clients. They must be set, communicated, and lived from the top and bought into throughout the business.
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Culture is King
Culture is the result of the company’s values being applied and lived. Culture manifests itself in how people behave when they interact with each other. A good culture can take a lot of effort from Leadership to build and can be destroyed very quickly by a few small acts that break the culture/trust.
Bad company culture can be deep rooted and institutionalised. So much so that even a change in leadership can fail to change the culture if it has been ingrained in people. It can become a corporate myth that is handed down from staff member to staff member even after the leader has changed, the myth can remain.
Business Goals
If Vision Values and Culture are the softer side of shaping your business, setting business goals is the more tangible side. A vision sets the medium-term objective, the business goals are shorter term, more tangible targets that take you down the road to your vision.
They should be set by the Leadership/Senior Management Team and cascaded down to a departmental and individual level. Your Performance Management process should then take over to see that progress is regularly monitored and reviewed.
