Why a strong vision and mission is important for any business

Why a strong vision and mission is important for any business

“Vision is not enough. It must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs.”
— Vaclav Havel

“Vision without execution is hallucination.”
— Thomas Edison

Every business has a vision, and their performance would depend on how clear they are about their vision. The main function of a business leader would be to motivate his team leaders to deliver more and keep the customers busy. In order to motivate his employees, he has to communicate the vision of the business clearly, so he must be good at communication skills as well.
The effects of having a strong vision for your business:

• When you indulge in strategic planning of your business, it means you have a strong vision
• This vision must be strongly shared by the rest of the team members so everyone is clear about the goals of the company.
• Having a strong vision is the best way to motivate the employees
• A vision is the future of how your organization will look in the long run, so your mere existence depends on it
• Having an effective vision would help people recognize you from a crowd; the chord that you can strike with a strong mission would be that effective

Here is what you can talk about having a strong vision to your employees

When you inculcate the following values in your business endeavour, you must motivate your employees by doing the following things:

• With a good vision, you can help identify the direction and purpose of the company
• It would help you develop brand loyalty among employees too
• A good vision would be persuasive and motivational in itself
• It should fit in with the business values
• It would channelize the entire team in your office to work for a common purpose
• There would be shared commitment among team members
• A good vision would be well articulated and easy to follow
• A unique vision would reflect the sense of integrity followed by the company

If you have a dream and that dream is to make your venture as successful as can be, then you must reveal your dream to your team because they must feel equally passionate. A strong vision would pull you all forward and you would want to work relentlessly until you feel you have achieved your dream.

Here are some mistakes that you can make this your mission statement

• Just ensure that you don’t make them because a bad mission statement can ruin that you have built up over the years:

Please don’t contradict what you said. Here is an example of a Barnes & Noble’s mission statement
“Our mission is to operate the best specialty retail business in America, regardless of the product we sell.”

Now look at their third sentence…

“To say that our mission exists independent of the product we sell is to demean the importance and the distinction of being booksellers.”

• Do not be pompous and self-praise is a turn off. Your mission must talk about what you aim to be, not why you are great. Look at this mission statement of a prominent resort company and you will know why.

“ABCD Resorts is the leader in entertainment & hospitality–a diverse collection of extraordinary people, distinctive brands and best in class destinations.”

Here are a couple of examples for good mission statements. Such statements would really catch the eye.

1. If you have a B2B company, then you must make yours look uniquely different. Here is an example of that. InvisionApp is just like any other B2B company, but what makes them noticeable in their mission statement. You can see a small part of their mission statement by doing a mouse over, over their icon.
2. Have you observed IKEA’s mission statement? Here it is – “At IKEA our vision is to create a better everyday life for the many people. Our business idea supports this vision by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.”

This mission statement is certainly attractive and appealing to the reader because it uses the words “we”, “together” “our” and so on. Being a furniture company that deals everywhere in the world, IKEA’s mission statement have always brought success to them.

Conclusion

Why your business must have a strong mission

Great mission and vision statements will help your organisation focus on what it really means to achieve; it would also help your employees focus on their target audience. It would also help your competitors get a snapshot view of what your company is all about. Your customers would read your mission statement in your letterhead and learn more about your organisation. Keeping these points in mind, you must really understand how to create a great mission statement:

• It must include the business of your organisation and your goals as well
• It must name the needs of its prospective customers
• The principles upheld by the company
• level of service provided
  Once the vision and mission statement is completed, you must ensure whether it is inspirational, motivational and ‘aspirational’ enough for your employees to achieve the company’s goals. Also check whether it is clear enough so the public would be able to gauge its meaning at first reading itself. So brainstorm with everyone connected to your business to chart an innovative vision statement that would remain in memory forever.

Interesting links about the topic:
Importance of strong Vision
Importance of vision and mission in any organisation

Pictures: Flickr.com/ Lu Lacerda/ Liberal Democrats

The author: Reema Oamkumar is engaged as a thought leader at Software-Developer-India.com which is a part of the YUHIRO Group. YUHIRO is a German-Indian enterprise which provides programmers to IT companies, agencies and IT departments.