How to Develop your Vision, Values & Mission Statement

Can you imagine being fired your first week on a job because you were trying to be proactive? That’s what almost happened to me during my first week working at Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers in 2001. Learning the vision, values, and mission statement was essential to me understanding where I went wrong.

How the value vision, values, and mission statements of your restaurant can provide for your team & business

You see, Raising Cane’s Founder, Todd Graves, was the chairman of a fundraising event. The team from Raising Cane’s was helping create perfect event space by setting up dinner tables, auction areas, etc. The fundraiser was happening at night and I was tasked with setting up an outdoor bar area. But, a co-worker specifically told me not to place tiki torches in this area until Todd arrived. He would then direct me on where the torches needed to be placed.

Being twenty-something, I thought the notion that I couldn’t place tiki torches independently was ridiculous. I had ten tiki torches and about 100 feet of a parameter on the patio. So, being the logically-brained person that I am, I placed a tiki torch about every ten feet keeping them distanced from the building. Imagine the fear that ran through my body when Todd arrived and exclaimed, “Who put out these tiki torches?!”

Explaining the Why

Todd went out to the patio and re-arranged the tiki torches in a pattern that, honestly, made no sense to me. I went over and apologized, acknowledging that I had been told to wait. Then, I asked him, “Why?” To that question, Todd explained that he moved the tiki torches to be clustered in the view of windows looking onto the patio.

Todd’s vision for the patio bar area was that people inside would be drawn outside by the light and ambiance created by the lit torches. It was my first run-in with his brilliant ability to see things from the eyes of the customer and the experience he wanted to create for them.

Keep reading to understand the How & Why of Vision, Values, and Mission Statements along with some helpful insights to draft your own..

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What are Vision, Values, and Mission Statements?

A vision statement describes what the future will look like when you accomplish your mission. The vision statement provides leaders and team members with clarity about the future. A restaurant’s values are enduring core beliefs or guiding principles to adhere to no matter what!  Values guide behavior, especially in making strategic and operational decisions. A restaurant’s mission statement explains what your company stands for and what purpose it serves. Mission statements create a strong sense of purpose, focus, and direction.

Signs They Don’t Exist or Aren’t Being Used

Here are a few signs that a business either doesn’t have vision, values and mission statements, or isn’t using their developed statements:

• The leader(s) and team lack strategic and operational clarity. Without strategic clarity, the business goes the path of least resistance and chases every opportunity like it’s the best opportunity.
• The team isn’t aligned working in one direction with the same values. Everyone might be working hard but not getting much accomplished. Team members’ decisions might frustrate restaurant owners/leaders because their values and priorities lack alignment.

Develop Your Vision, Mission & Values using
Consult to Grow’s® Complete Guide
Includes How & Why for Creation, Evaluation, and More
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Begin Clarifying Your Vision, Values and Mission Statement Today:

To help you develop, evaluate and refine your vision, values, and mission, I’ve put together an eight-slide presentation that expands on the content shared in this blog post. This document, available for immediate download, includes the following content:

• Clearly outlines the what & why of organizational vision, values, and mission statements.
• Describes five ways to make your statements and values compelling.
• Provides step-by-step directions to create, evaluate and refine your statements with compelling examples.
• Gives you dozens of sample company values to draw from in your brainstorming.

6 Ways to Reinforce Your Vision, Mission & Values

1. Communicate Them. Once you set or reset the vision, mission and values, create a plan to roll them out through an interactive training session and identify how to integrate them into the company’s handbook, onboard, and operations.
2. Live and lead by example. Leaders are always being watched. Setting core values and then failing to abide by them is worse than not establishing core values at all.
3. Teach the values. It’s unrealistic to send out an email or a document listing organizational pillars or post them on a wall and think that everyone will adopt them. Formal training communicates that the values matter.
4. Reinforce them in all communication, including all-hands meetings, pre-shifts, etc. Make sure you’re referencing your organizational pillars at all-hands meetings and pre-shifts. At the Ritz Carlton, for example, team members are invited to describe how they lived into company values at each pre-shift meeting or alley rally. 
5. Recognize and reward values-centric behaviors. There are many ways to recognize and reward values-centric behaviors, including spot-bonuses and peer-voting opportunities that allow team members to nominate co-workers to live the values successfully.
6. Incorporate the values into your hiring process and recruiting collateral. Selecting candidates that culturally align with your organization is just as crucial as finding candidates that match your required experience level and skill set.

About Consult to Grow

Need an outside facilitator, help with more detailed strategic planning, or want to host a planning retreat but don’t know where to start? Reach out to us today. Consult to Grow® is a business advisory firm focused on helping small-to-medium-sized businesses and restaurant chains improve, scale, and grow through strategy, people, systems, and processes. 

Consult to Grow® provides various tools and services to help you develop people strategies to grow your team.  We can expertly assess your HR infrastructure, develop custom Employer of Choice strategies, facilitate leadership meetings and retreats, help you design bonus and incentive programs, and design managing partner programs.  Ready to get started?  

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