Vision and Values

Alignment of a company's vision and values with its strategies, policies and management controls is the foundation of high performance. Organizations without this alignment will create friction between management's desires and the actions of employees and, there-by, inefficiency.

Think of vision as the statement of what you aspire for your company to be, and values as the yardstick for its behavior. Now think of strategies, policies and management controls as causing the daily decisions and actions of your employees. Based on these definitions, you can see what might happen to your company when there is not alignment versus when there is.

Let's look at a mobility company that had been in business for more than two decades, but whose vision and values were not aligned.

The company's vision was to find solutions to mobility issues for people in its market. Its values statement focused on teamwork, sympathy, understanding and respect in employee relationships. The company was accredited, and the accreditation had been renewed once.

But sales had declined for three consecutive years by a total of 25 percent. In the meantime, the market had grown 18 percent, so there had also been significant loss of market share. The income statement reported losses in three of the five previous years. The owners were loaning money to the company and not taking salaries.

Management also pointed out that: different people processed orders in different ways; customer opinion was that the company did not deliver what it promised; service techs were wasteful with tools and parts; and the company had just disposed of two 45-foot trailer-loads of stale inventory. Financial analysis showed the company still had about nine months' inventory.

These results could have been blamed on bad marketing, employee turnover, insufficient management information, excessive overhead, jealousy over who gets paid what and what they contribute, and increased competition. Each condition would have been correct.

But the root cause of this company's distress was lack of alignment on two levels. First, the company's vision and values were not pointed in the same direction. The vision was customer-focused, and the values were focused on employee relations. How could they deliver solutions to mobility issues when they most valued good employee relations? Both the company's vision and its values should have been customer-focused.