| Revitalize, Re-envision, Revamp: Redefining Your Business in the New Year
By Megan Martin
Symbolically, the New Year is a time for redefining ourselves and refocusing our energies on our most important goals. We often think of New Year’s resolutions as highly personalized, but it’s the perfect time for organizations to re-envision their purpose as well.
A great way to help you formulate your organization’s meaning and start working toward new goals is to revise your vision, mission and values.
If you think your purpose hasn’t changed at all since you last looked at your mission statement, it likely has, even if only subtly. Here are some tips to help you reconnect with what matters most to your organization.
Revitalize Your Vision
When you first started your organization, you probably created a vision statement that described the goals for your organization, but when was the last time you looked at that vision or even updated it? Vision statements are mostly useful to new firms, but they can also help established organizations determine new goals.
According to the Inc. article, Developing Effective Vision and Mission Statements by Jay Ebben, PhD, “Simply put, the vision should state what the founder ultimately envisions the business to be, in terms of growth, values, employees, contributions to society, and the like.”
If you haven’t looked at your vision statement in a while, now is the time. Review your initial goals for the organization. Which goals have you reached? Has your vision for the company changed as you’ve become more successful?
With these thoughts in mind, revise your vision statement to help you create new goals for your organization.
Re-envision Your Mission
Your mission helps your organization move toward the goals you define in your vision statement. But it does a lot more than that. According to Ebben, “It captures, in a few succinct sentences, the essence of your business's goals and the philosophies underlying them. Equally important, the mission statement signals what your business is all about to your customers, employees, suppliers and the community.”
Ebben notes that many organizations’ mission statements mean less than they once did. “Unfortunately, in recent years vision and mission statements have become watered down in the corporate world to the point where they are essentially meaningless,” says Ebben. But he emphasizes that well crafted vision and mission statements can be extremely useful to businesses, particularly to small firms.
Reread your current mission statement. Does it feel lackluster, vague or outdated? Gather key players in your organization to help you re-envision your statement.
Bring a small group together and discuss some of the following questions that are important to determining your mission:
• Consider your organization’s purpose. Think about what the organization means to customers and clients. How do your services enhance your clients’ lives or help them achieve success? Have you implemented any new services or made major changes recently? If so, how have they expanded your purpose or improved your client’s lives in new ways?
• Revisit your organization’s image. If you haven’t reviewed your mission statement in a few years, it’s possible that your organization’s image has changed. What is the current perception of your company among clients, employees and the public? What is the image you want to communicate to the world and how can you create it? Think about what makes you different from your competitors; if your mission doesn’t currently communicate your desired image, you’ll want to rewrite it so that it does.
• Define your employees’ roles. If you’ve created, cut or redefined certain positions, your employees’ roles may have changed. If your organization’s focus has expanded as you’ve offered new products or services, your employees’ purposes may have changed. Make a list of positions, and for each, define how employees help the organization move forward, satisfy customers, or reach goals.
Once you’ve written down your responses to these prompts, it’s time to rewrite your mission statement. Language is crucial to an effective mission statement.
According to the Entrepreneur article, How to Write Your Mission Statement, “The statement should create dynamic, visual images and inspire action.”
Entrepreneur recommends using strong adjectives that correspond to the image of your organization that you want to project to employees and the public.
Remember that a mission statement does not need to be long in order to be effective. When SALO recently revamped its mission, its statement became quite simple: “Connecting People, Evolving Business.”
Revamp Your Values
If a potential client were to ask you, “what does your organization believe in?” would you be able to tell them? Understanding what is important to your organization is crucial to everything from hiring the right employees to approaching new projects.
Some organizations include their values as part of their mission statement; others separate their values into an autonomous value statement. Even if they exist as separate documents, your mission and values should be deeply connected.
To help you redefine your organization’s values, review your revised mission statement. Ask yourself: what are the underlying values in these statements? Think about how your values have changed over the last year (or longer) as you’ve implemented new projects, positions, technology, or products. Make a list of what you value most.
Try to name at least four to six values that you would like your organization and its employees to live by. Some organizations create values statements that are separate from their mission.
For example, when SALO revised their values statement, their core values included passion, connecting people, professionalism, creating positive energy, self-awareness, intuition, and achievement.
Re-inspire Your Employees
If most of your employees haven’t seen your mission statement or considered what the company values since the day they were hired, they may have lost focus of the organization’s goals and objectives. Even if you didn’t refine your mission this year, it’s still a great idea to offer your employees a refresher on what your organization stands for.
Bring your employees together for a New Year’s meeting where you reiterate your mission, values and vision. Have a conversation and allow employees to share how they believe they can help the organization fulfill the mission. Give each employee time to set goals for the new year and share them with the group. Make copies of your mission for each employee to post near his or her desk to keep everyone aware of what being a part of your organization truly means.
The New Year is a great time to redefine your organization; ring in the future by refreshing your vision, mission and values.
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