It’s that time of year. People scrambling to return a last few holiday gifts, to sneak in a few more holiday treats, or to squeeze in those last few days of break before revving the engines to start their new year. A few of us will be clinging to New Year’s resolutions a bit longer — especially those devilish ones related to eating better and exercising more. (But trust me here, those diet resolutions are so overrated!) For startup companies this is the time of year when we reassess our “plan” and how we aim to scale our businesses towards the next level of growth. “Where do we need to be a year from now?” is a common refrain entrepreneurs are asking in these first few days of January.
A critical part of the process of updating your startup’s strategic plan at the beginning of a new calendar year should include revisiting your company’s vision, mission, and values. These three elements represent the powerful guardrails that align everyone on the team around “why” we’re all here together, “what” we do that is so important for our users and customers, and “how” we strive to work with each other as well as with our users, customers, and partners.
So as you settle into early January, take the time to revisit — or draft for the first time? — your company’s vision, mission, and values to ensure they reflect what you want your organization to stand for in the years ahead. In that spirit, below are a few thoughts on how we have approached this important exercise of defining our “VMV” to guide our work at Remind. Best of luck to you and your team in the new year!
[Editor’s Note: Two books sit high on my shelf and remain constant referrals when it comes to thinking about how to tie the important layers of vision, mission, and values to the goals, strategies, and actions that round out how a startup iterates on its “plan” over time. The first is Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” and the other is Patrick Lencioni’s “The Advantage”. Both books offer deep, unique perspectives on company building and I have come to lean on them both in framing the simple layout below for how teams might approach crafting visions, missions, and values that endure.]
Vision: The Why
A simple way to articulate the vision of a company is to succinctly describe in a statement an answer to the question “why are we here together?” It’s that simple. Why are all of us coming together day after day in this office, communicating via our dozens of Slack channels, and slogging through hundreds of meetings? The vision outlines your team’s ultimate goals and aspirations for the future. It’s why you get up and do this every day. It’s bigger than you, your colleagues, your investors, and even your customers and partners. It creates a mental picture of a specific longer-range (i.e. a few years or more) target and should serve as a source of inspiration for you and every single one of your team members.
Microsoft’s vision in it’s early days was “A computer on every desk and in every home.” Audacious, powerful, and simple. At Remind our vision is “To give every student an opportunity to succeed.” We can’t imagine a more audacious, powerful, and simple way to describe “why” we show up every day at Remind. This is a vision that’s much bigger than “what” Remind does today — and that’s the point. As Sinek says, start with “the why” to define your company’s vision that then becomes the North Star your team aspires to reach daily.
Mission: The What
If your company’s vision is your “why”, then your mission becomes the answer to the simple question “what are we building together for our users and customers?” The mission outlines the purpose of your company. It describes the here and now of the company. It becomes the clear statement you use when asked by your spouse, mom, friend, or person on the bus reading your company’s name on your t-shirt, what your company does. It should drive a stake in the ground where you stand today as a company, but leave a clear impression that it’s a work in progress evolving rapidly towards the vision that your company aspires to achieve in the future.
At one time, Google’s mission crafted back in 1998 simply read “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Pretty clear, powerful, and on a path to its stated vision today “to provide access to the world’s information in one click.” At Remind our mission describes what we do every day as “Remind is building a communication platform that makes it easy for teachers, students, parents, and administrators to work together.” Our core strength is communication and what communication then enables between the important people working together in education. Further, you can see how how our mission can continue to evolve to support our vision “to give every student an opportunity to succeed.” Indeed, a year ago our mission described what we do as “building a messaging app that makes it easy for teachers, students, and parents to work together.”
Values: The How
The third layer of establishing your companies core identity comes when you define your core values. Core values — per Lencioni — are those that “…lie at the heart of the organization’s identity, do not change over time, and must already exist. In other words, they cannot be contrived.” That last sentence is key and a big reason why defining your values early on is so important. Why establish values early on? Well, it’s often the early days at a company when the true ethos becomes established, so spend time with the team laying down your core values as soon as you can. Oh, and one more thing, core values should inflict pain. This means that there should absolutely be times in your company where you and your colleagues feel pain that comes from making difficult decisions that remain true to your values versus making decisions that, while more expedient and less contentious, stray from the values that define your company’s core.
It’s also critical that these core values not be aspirational — what Lencioni describes as “…the characteristics that an organization wants to have, wishes it already had, and believes it must develop in order to maximize its success in its current market environment.” It’s great to have aspirational values, but they should be defined as such: values that your company hopes to achieve someday, but that today aren’t authentic core values inherent in your organization. Nor can your core values be conflated with “permission-to-play values” — what Lencioni defines as the values that are “…the minimum behavioral standards that are required in an organization.” A classic permission-to-play value is integrity. Integrity isn’t a core value, it’s a universal behavioral value that shouldn’t be defined as unique to any company’s identity.
Looking again at Google, we see examples of their stated values (in fact, about seven or eight too many according to Lencioni) in their famous list of “Ten things we know to be true”. A few of the 10 stand out:
#3. Fast is better than slow. A good, unique value for a search company, but probably not an appropriate core value for a hospital’s surgery department.
#6. You can make money without doing evil. This is the famous Google “do no evil” value. I suspect this core value has created a fair amount of pain within Google recently as we’ve seen how advertising has evolved in the digital domain.
#10. Great just isn’t good enough. I love the powerful statement embedded in this core value: “We set ourselves goals we know we can’t reach yet, because we know that by stretching to meet them we can get further than we expected.” Amen.
At Remind, we hold three core values close. And these values have endured for many years, with some subtle modifications about a year and half ago. Our values are:
#1. Be teacher obsessed. We view everything we do through the lens of the most important person in the life of a student — the teacher.
#2. Create simplicity for others. Education, learning, communication should be simple to provide. The services we deliver should make it easier for students, teachers, parents, and administrators to work together so every student has an opportunity to succeed.
#3. Find a way. This is the soul of Remind. This value reinforces the reason why we are here and the notion that what we do is too important to not be successful. Thus, we believe that no obstacles truly exist for us in building the Remind that becomes the communication platform where learning happens.
Two final thoughts on vision, mission, and values.
First, in some cases combining your vision and mission statements can yield a powerful and simple way to describe your company to those around you — even, dare I say, to become the basis for a memorable tag line. At Remind the following strong yet simple statement eloquently synthesizes the dual path represented within our vision and mission:
“Remind becomes the communication platform where learning happens.”
Second, be sure to refer to and repeat your vision, mission, and values often. Refer to them in your meetings when you are discussing difficult topics and tradeoffs that your company needs to make as it grows. These statements must become guardrails that keep you and your team true to “the why”, “the what”, and “the how” that has brought this group together to do the important work you do.
And repeat these statements often. Bring them out periodically at all hands, in emails or Slack messages you send to the team, and while highlighting examples where people on your team have exhibited your vision, mission, and/or one of your values. Given the pace of a startup’s journey, there’s always a constant tug that pulls us away from our core and that therefore makes repeating these statements more important than ever. Vision, mission, and values represent the core strength for your startup — you can never do enough to support your company’s core!