But at what stage in the growth of a business does it become important to articulate a vision, mission or purpose?
At D&D, we think the sooner the better. Whether you are a team of five or five hundred, keeping people motivated and inspired, unified and united will make all the difference to their productivity and your collective success. It will also help you attract and retain the right kind of people in the future: people who are aligned to the culture and become high performing individuals and teams because they believe in the same things as their leaders; people who will be valuable ambassadors for your business.
But how do you set about it and make it a useful exercise that really gets to the heart of what makes an organisation tick?
So often the process becomes a theoretical exercise where a small group of people sit in a room discussing particular words and phrases that they do and don’t like which results in a long-winded platitude with no chance of inspiring, uniting or galvanizing anyone.
Experience tells us that for people to think creatively, involving them and getting their views and engaging them in the process is key. That way you’ll get their buy in. After that, work with a tight team to boil everything down to something succinct, that gets right the heart of what makes you different, where you are going, how you’re going to get there and why you’re doing it.
We’ve developed a particular way of doing this that we call “Day in the Life”.
Having used it to great effect when Clare, our founder, previously worked client-side as a Marketing Director, we were pleased to find that the senior management of our very first D&D client not only embraced it as a concept but also found the results immensely useful. The process allowed them to reveal their different ambitions for growth and then go on to define an agreed vision of the future that they can actively use both to inspire and guide the business.