Organisational Development

Podcast Episode 39: Vision, Mission, and Purpose – What’s the Difference?

27th January 2020

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Resource: Vision into Action facilitation outline

This Episode: Vision, Mission, and Purpose – What’s the Difference?

This week, Lucinda talks about a topic that’s been requested by a member of the HR Uprising Community; namely Vision, Mission, and Purpose – what do they mean, and how can we make sure we’re using them correctly?

Certainly, there’s an overwhelming amount of information out there on this topic, most of which are contradictory, as Lucinda has discovered herself. Therefore, in this episode, she sifts through the confusion and provides some much-needed clarity!

Valuable Resources

Host of The HR Uprising Podcast, Lucinda Carney, is also the founder and CEO of Actus Software, where you can find additional free HR Resources: https://actus.co.uk/free-performance-management-resources/
Actus Software resources particularly relevant to this podcast episode:
- Download: Vision into Action Facilitation Outline
- Blog: What do we mean by Vision and Mission?
Join the HR Uprising LinkedIn Group

Key Takeaways

A vision statement is typically defined as a long-term aspirational future vision. Ideally, this is concise in order to make it memorable and easy to grasp.
A mission statement is almost a bare-bones roadmap statement of how we plan to achieve our vision statement. The two become confused when we employ the word “purpose”.
Having a mission that is centred around competition and adversarial thinking can be useful, but tends to be a side-mission that runs along parallel to the main mission statement.
Certainly, a commercial mission statement has three essential components:
- The market – who is it for?
- The product – what does the business do?
- How it is distinctive – how does it do it and how is it different?
Above all, Values should underpin and surround the vision and mission. Values describe the core ethos or principles that the company will abide by while achieving its vision.

Best Moments

‘The Disney Vision Statement is apparently “To Make People Happy”’
’The mission was what went on the wall, but the vision was for internal consumption’
’These very specific visions have a place, but we need to be very careful with them’
‘Values describe the core ethos or principles that the company will abide by no matter what’

About The Host

Lucinda Carney is a Business Psychologist with 15 years in Senior Corporate L&D roles and a further 10 as CEO of Actus Software where she worked closely with HR colleagues helping them to solve the same challenges across a huge range of industries. Certainly, it was this breadth of experience that inspired Lucinda to set up the HR Uprising community to facilitate greater collaboration across HR professionals in different sectors, helping them to ‘rise up’ together.

“When we look up we rise up”