More Than Words: Mission/Vision/Values

At the beginning of 2025, PCG held our first company retreat (read about it here) and we walked away with a list of goals. One of those goals was loosely titled "Take Our Own Medicine" with a bunch of bullet points detailing common HR services we sold but hadn't enacted for ourselves. One of those items was to create our company Mission/Vision/Values.

We love to ask our clients if they have their own mission/vision/values (M/V/V) because it's a great starting point to understand a company's goals. M/V/Vs act as a guide to get your team on the right track, top to bottom, and hopefully realize the organization's potential. They can be a really powerful training tool at every stage of an employee's growth. Any client who didn't know their M/V/V or worse, didn't have one at all, usually got a little ribbing from us.

And yet, PCG didn't have them. Ope.

Where We Started

Observation of how you work: During our retreat, we had a lot of conversations that we documented with hundreds of post-its. Those discussions were about many topics, but I paid attention to how we were having them, what held us back, or where we seemed to get confused on the goal. You don't have to sit down and say, "LET'S WRITE A MISSION RIGHT NOW!" I mean, you can. Maybe you are better than us and wrote one right off the bat. But if you find yourself in our boat, start by paying attention to how your team works and how your leader is leading.

At any given time, I'm walking around with at least 10 post-it pads.

Find your flags: When helping our clients, we find that when we engage current employees across levels, the buy-in is a lot better. For that reason, we did a very specific exercise to discuss the commitments we wanted to see with each other. We did this by asking what would be a "green flag" or "red flag" in an employee (or client). We could have just sent Jen, our owner, off to make her own list to pass as gospel, but it's not as fun and it's also not very Jen.

Overthink Everything

Ok, I don't recommend this but it's definitely part of my personal process. I have no chill and have to come up with some special twist on everything. I knew that boring, unspecific words did not make for great M/V/Vs, and that corporate jargon and self-help speak are often chosen because they're just cool words. I want actionable words, words that tell me what to do.

Two things inspired PCG's take. One is my love of all things Danny Myer and Union Square Hospitality. Instead of values, they have behaviors. (And they're really good. Check them out.) Apparently, they started out with simple values but found they were too ambiguous.

The second was Duolingo's release of their "handbook." I use quotes because it's not a true employee handbook as we see them or use them in our work. Sorry, Duo! But I loved how it told employees how the work was done. When I showed it to my team and said I wanted to use it as a structure for PCG's M/V/V, they said it was so cool but doubted that we could deliver something like it.

They doubted me! I cannot even. But here's the thing: I have 16 years in branding and themed entertainment and this is just a creative narrative. I live for tying a story together and I was dying to do some creative work. Luckily they were all too busy to fight me and off I went!

The Final Product

After discussing the outcome with our team and officially crossing it off the 2025 Goal List, we have PCG's first ever M/V/V. Wanna see? Check out our pdf here!

One of our 5 behaviors: Leave Your Fingerprints

We are already talking about how we will use these in our work as well as with clients or any new employees. Can we help you find your voice for your M/V/V? Drop us a line and let us know!