How to align your team around vision, mission, values, principles and strategy

The nesting dolls of vision-mission-strategy.

I have written in the past about how to think about developing a startup idea and how to manage effectively.

This isn’t about those topics. This is about how do you get your team aligned?

Context

Specifically, what set of documents do you need to generate, with what clusters of your team (presuming you lead a team), to get the team focused on your north star?

I am going to use a made-up startup that makes mobile phone holders for cars as an example for the process steps below, which follow this order:

1. Vision
2. Mission
3. Values
4. Principles
5. Strategy
6. OKRs

Vision

You should start with your vision statement. That statement is nigh-unattainable, and represents the absolute north star for the team. Let’s use the startup example from above, and suggest that a sample north star vision is “selling a mobile phone holder to every car owner in the world.”

Mission

The next step in the process is outlining your mission, which is typically a 18–24 month goal, and it is a subset of your vision, but attainable in that time frame if everyone works according to your values and principles (I know, I know, I haven’t described those! They are next! ;)). In the case of our startup example, a sample mission statement is “owning 5% of the mobile phone holder for cars market in the United States” through the innovative approach that you have taken to reducing the bulk of the device and its likelihood of falling off of its perch, as concrete mission goals.

Principles

Supporting the mission and the vision are principles and values. Principles are a description of how decisions are made and who makes them. I have found that there are typically four types of decisions that companies make:

1. Bottom-up decisions by those closest to the work
2. Consensus-driven decisions by a leader and his or her team
3. Consensus-driven decisions by a leader and his or her peers
4. Top-down decision by a leader

You can control what decisions happen where, or at least be intentional about them. Understand that no company operates completely in one state or the other: there is a blend of all four taking place. Intentional leadership asks that you think about and set up structures and communications that make it clear which models are used, how frequently, and in what situations.

At a previous employer of mine, roughly 70% of decisions were bottom up, 20% were consensus-driven either by my peers or my team, and 10% were decisions I made solely (which are top-down.) I tried to reserve the 10% either to tie-breakers where consensus couldn’t be reached or for organizational structure decisions, which are hard to make by consensus.

Being explicit about how decisions are made, and by whom, is helpful to the team, especially if they have a vision, mission, value and strategy to align against.

Values

Next are values. They are the cultural component of both how work gets done and how you align against principles. They are things like leading an organization where the best ideas can come from anywhere, leading an organization that is inclusive, and leading an organization where team success and individual success are aligned. Lastly, I have found great value in a culture where “how” work is done is as important as “what” work is done. In my, ahem, values.

Strategy

What follows is a strategy. This is a fraught word, as some people conflate it with a vision, with a mission, or something else. For the purposes of this discussion, it is derived from your mission, and covers the next half (six months) of work. A strategy could also occur over a quarter, if your team uses quarterly OKRs (objectives and key results) instead of six-month OKRs.

Your strategy should absolutely push the team, but it is confined to measurable outcomes from, say, July to the end of December, in the six-month scenario. To bring it back to our fictional startup, it would be a shorter-term goal of “Manufacturing a phone holder that has more attachment options to place the phone in the safest place for a driver, (compared to competitors) and lobby for regulation on phone holders that benefit our model.”

That may be too ambitious for a half-year, but you can recalibrate what is possible after the first half is over.

OKRS

With this strategy in place, and the values, principle, mission and vision that it ladders into, you can now go through the creation of OKRs that are derived from the six-month strategy.

OKRs without a strategy don’t mean much, and a strategy without a mission and vision is also hard to execute against. Using this approach has yielded superior results for me, and I hope that you find value in the approach for your own work.

The OKRs are the “how” of how you achieve your Strategy.

In Conclusion

As a recap, the flow is:

1. Vision is an unattainable goal over the longest horizon;
2. Mission is what you can do to practically achieve that goal over an 18-month to two-year horizon. It should be durable over that time frame, but can change if market conditions, competitors, the regulatory environment or funding/topline revenue/net income/EBITDA dictate;
3. Principles are how you make decisions and by whom those decisions are made;
4. Values are the “how” as opposed to the “what” of your org. The short-hand way to think about this is your company culture;
5. Strategy is a quarter- or half-topline framework for what steps you will take to measurably move forward towards your mission;
6. OKRs are objectives and key results that measure those objectives, derived from your strategy.

For clarity, I am not working on a mobile phone holder for cars!