It's common sense that a company, wether big or starting up, should have a well established triad mission-vision-values. It sets up the company's culture, aligns it across the board, guides recruiting towards success and, if it's well enforced, it'll hone decision making and make management's lives easier.

Still, there's a lot of culture happening outside of this confines — and more often than not teams within the company have their particular flavor. You know how it goes — "marketing folks are very outgoing", "the growth hack team meets every week for a lunch & talk", "people ops now have a book club of their own!", etc.

While every team should make the company's core values their own, it's great that they develop an angle on them — an extension, even. This will allow your team to be more aligned, workout faster towards goals and put less of a burden on management. All of this compounds to better performance, better results and, ultimately, happier people.

Have you ever asked yourself this? What your team's mission? What does it aim to achieve, in the grand scheme of things?

I'm not talking about what is its quarterly goal, or it's yearly even. We're going deeper: I want to know why your team exists. What is its purpose.

Operations teams may want to "efficiently deliver purchases in order to assure a WOW experience for the customers". Data science could be in looks to "support decision making with high quality data analysis and real-time algorithms". CS maybe thinking that they exist to "make sure customers are promoters, no matter what happened".

All of the above examples are applicable, but rather shallow. Your team will have a unique view on their purpose, as your company is unique and has its own unique purpose, and you'll have all these unique people composing it. Embrace the difference.

I've always found the values to be the most important part of the triad. While they exist to support the purpose, my experience shows me that the same set of values could support different missions. This is because a company's target might change through the years — but usually what makes people great for that company, changes way less.

For this I have one simple rule to add on top of general guidelines to craft values:

That's it.

When mission and values are in place, use them to think about the following question:

Note I'm talking about the company here — not the world, as it's usual with vision statement exercises. Here, it's important to materialize the world in the company you're in, and the vision you devise should support the company's vision to impact the world.

When you do it, test it: if you get to a result that is satisfactory, you have a vision — and you likely have great mission and values in place.

If you didn't like the result, either the mission needs adjustment, or how you're tackling the mission needs more care. So iterate — bring the discussion alive, get input, brainstorm, sketch, throw the ideas around for comment, you name it.

The secret here — as it should be with every aspect of the journey outlined above — is to have the whole team deeply involved and deeply committed to create their identity. Otherwise, you'll get a worse result than you could've, and likely to have a team that won't engage with their own identity. Who would want that?

Having a team's company mission-vision-values can be transformational, as it can better align teams and bullet-proof execution with simple and effective guidelines. I've seen it work tons! What do you think? Is this too much? Have you also seen it work? Let's chat!