Operationalizing Your Mission, Vision, and Values
The number one topic I’m asked to speak on is values. Yet, more times than I can count, when I ask organizational leaders about their values I often receive blank looks in response.
Values are not just words up on the wall–they are essential to a nonprofit organization’s operations, along with a mission and vision that speaks to what we’re here to do, how we do it, and how we’ll know when we’ve accomplished our goals.
The three aspects of this issue–mission, vision, and values–make up a “three-legged stool,” according to Rita Sever, author of Leading for Justice.
“When people don’t pay attention to all three components of this stool, things get out of balance. When an organization lacks a clear focus on its mission and vision, its destination can become vague or transitory. When an organization does not pay active attention to values, the organization can lose their integrity and sense of identity–or even become hypocritical.”
So what can you do about this, if the values of your organization are murky, vague, or nonexistent?
Values: Individual and Cultural
I recommend that organizations delving into vision and values work start at an individual level among team members with a small, simple action. Take five minutes to jot down the last five things you did yesterday before leaving work.
Can you connect them to the organization’s mission? Can other people see the throughline of your work to the mission, even if you can’t?
After doing this exercise for a few days (or until you’ve identified patterns that show you a place to dig deeper), here are some other questions for individuals at all levels of your organization.
How do the organization’s values align with my personal values?
How do our values show up during conflict, and how can we use our values to work through that conflict?
Until every individual in your organization has connected with their own personal values and reviewed them against their job description and daily work responsibilities, you will likely continue to experience a disconnect between expectations, policies, and the company mission. Values, once operationalized, can also become woven into the way you conduct your meetings, inform policies, and help elevate onboarding and retention practices.
I explored this idea of values-based culture with Dr. Jaiya John in a past podcast interview and article: The Social Psychology of Workplace Culture: An Interview with Dr. Jaiya John.
“...the way we treat each other in our staff meeting is intimately tied to how we are going to treat each other in the hallways and in the break room, in the cafeteria, at our desks and our offices and how we treat each other via email communications and phone calls and how we treat our clients, how we treat the community. So by virtue of the indelible web of interbeing, if we care for that aspect of the garden that has to do with our staff meetings, we are going to be caring for the garden itself.”
Embedding Values Into Operations
Once you’ve begun to see your organization’s day to day operations through the lens of company values, you’ll likely find that you can streamline processes and decisions based on those same values. Who would have thought?
Budget: When creating your next annual budget, take some time to review how well your values mesh with line items. Do the things your values say that you prioritize match that level of prioritization in the budget?
Client or Community Engagement: Incorporate values into how the organization interacts with and serves clients or communities. This could mean tailoring services to reflect inclusivity, transparency, or empowerment.
Decision-Making Processes: Use values as a guide for key organizational decisions. For instance, when facing difficult choices, ensure that the team discusses how the options align with the organization's core values. Clients who work with me examine power sharing and decision making as a matrix, and this is another prime opportunity to inject values into that intention and effort.
Hiring: Use your values during hiring! Ensure that you list your organizational values in your job description and showcase the areas where you prioritize values in everyday actions. During hiring, at a minimum, choose a value to ask candidates about how it shows up for them in their personal life. Another way to ask would be to ask them to come prepared to share their favorite organizational value and why.
Bonus tip: Share your interview questions with candidates ahead of time, always!
Internal Communications: Include a section in internal meetings (all staff meetings or check-ins with direct reports) dedicated to highlighting how staff and teams are living out the values. This could be a “value of the month” spotlight or sharing stories where values showed up in decision-making.
Learning and Development: Offer professional development and training sessions that align with the organization’s values. For example, if one value is sustainability, offer workshops on eco-friendly practices. Also consider off-sites or immersive experiences where teams can live out the organization’s values in real-world settings. For example, if community or empathy is a value, employees could volunteer in a relevant community setting together, directly connecting their work to those values.
Onboarding and Performance Reviews: Integrate company values by measuring how employees embody those values in their work. Encourage feedback loops that reflect value-driven behavior. I also recommend creating a Reading Guide that shares relevant information about your organization, and sending that to your new employee for their first day. List your mission and values, and if you are really up for the task, create a set of statements that let your employees know how they will know that the values are being lived out.
Partnerships and Collaborations: Select partners, vendors, and funders based on how well they align with the organization's values. Make value-based partnership criteria explicit in memorandum of understanding (MOU), contracts and agreements.
Policies and Protocols: Review and adapt HR policies and your employee handbook, including leave policies or work flexibility, to ensure they align with the organization’s values, particularly if equity, inclusion, or employee well-being are central.
Social Media Content and Communications: Use your list of values to focus your social media content and email newsletter for a period of time. This could look like choosing one value each month, or each quarter, and doing a deep-dive into the WHY of its origin in your organization, how it can be seen inside the work you do, etc.
Values-Driven Workflows and Automation: Automate certain processes (such as approvals or client workflows) to reflect your values. For example, if transparency is a key value, automate regular updates to clients or stakeholders to open lines of communication. For a helpful exercise, ask each team member to identify one or two pieces of their workflow and responsibilities that can be matched with the organization's values.
Making Values Visible in the Workplace
Including employees in the visibility of the organization’s values and long-term vision helps support retention and workplace satisfaction. It all goes back to that three-legged stool–if you’re saying you support a certain mission, vision, and values, but it’s not actually showing up in the day to day of the office, team members will feel that disconnect.
One easy way to make values visible in the office or remote workspaces is to place artwork and messaging tied to values around the building, or even with virtual backgrounds for digital meetings. I’ve also got a few more suggestions on how to bring these newly-refreshed company values to the forefront and encourage team buy-in.
Cross-Team Projects: Assign cross-departmental teams to work on projects that specifically highlight or advance a particular value. For example, if innovation is a core value, create a task force to explore and implement new technologies or processes.
Digital Values Wall: Create a digital wall (e.g., a shared platform or intranet) where staff can post stories, photos, or videos of values in action. This dynamic space can become beautiful content for annual reports, board of director updates, and also serves up ongoing reminders of the power of values.
"Values Challenge" Program: Launch a quarterly challenge where teams or individuals submit projects or ideas that demonstrate how they can advance a specific value within the organization. The best ideas can receive funding or resources to implement.
How Will You Operationalize Your Values?
Any one of the suggestions in this article can help your organization get started on a path toward a vision that is reflected in your daily operations with real, tangible ways to use values as your guideposts.
I speak about company values and how to operationalize them a lot and would be happy to speak with you about values training for your executive team.
If you are an organizational leader, board member, or a curious staff member, take the Leaving Well Assessment to discover your organization's transition readiness archetype at naomihataway.com/assessment.
To listen to a podcast version of this article, listen to Episode 57 of the Leaving Well Podcast: Values and Operationalizing Them in Your Workplace