Vision & Values: Who You Are as a Business

It is important to recognize that defining values and your vision into the future is an identity driven exercise. It is something that should be connected to who you are as the business family. Here are some questions you can ask yourself as you think about defining your values: Who are we as a business family? And that is as a collective unit. Who we are, what we want to be; so not just who we are right now but where we want to go in the future and how are we going to do that together? How we embark on these exercises together is part of creating the vision together and doing a visioning exercise to recognize that, where we are and have been in the past, isn’t necessarily where we are going in the future and you need to incorporate the voices together in order to commonly define that. Another critical activity for defining values and vision is learning; recognizing that values are not necessarily always readily apparent, especially shared values as a family. If they are collectively defined, part of the process is discovering what they are together. And it takes joint learning activities in order to be able to do that. In the process of learning together as a family, you might discover new points of commonality, new and different interests that unite you. Those are processes that can allow you to strengthen the bonds, the shared agreement and consensus around what those core values really are and how they might lead you into the future.