I was at a large business meeting recently. The speaker was a very well-known business leader. I will keep his name and the name of the corporation which he leads out of the story. My problem was not with the knowledge he possessed, it was with his delivery of the talk he was giving. In the first place, he was boring. He was not just a little boring. He was I-am-going-to-fall-face-first-into-my-salad-plate boring. He had no enthusiasm, no command of the audience, he lacked any kind of engaging stories or illustrations. But there was a bigger problem. He lacked integrity. He was just speaking empty words. After he droned on and on about his business successes (it was actually about 20 minutes, but it felt like 20 years), he finally sat down to polite applause. As I looked around the room, every person who knew this man – I mean really knew how he operated – was thinking the same thing. He could talk for hours about himself, but it would be nice if he had something to really back up all of his talk.

I’m sure you have talked to someone who is an expert in their field; be it a professor, a successful writer, a brilliant doctor, etc. who just lacks any kind of moral credibility. We live in a time that has quashed morals as a thing of the past, be it personal values or that of a corporation. Whenever a halfway effective speaker comes along, someone suggests he or she run for public office, or at least lead the next local meeting of the Kiwanis Club. And too many times, a mediocre communicator thinks he is king of the hill behind a podium, says something he shouldn’t in front of a group of people, it gets posted on YouTube and his organization suffers for it.

The truth of the matter is, if you are a leader of people, you have to stand for something. Let me offer a couple of suggestions for businesses and their leadership. As a first step in communication, you should carefully craft your Vision and Mission statements along with your corporate Core Values. They should make a powerful and credible statement of who you are as a company…and it should be the truth. You should believe every word in those statements and wrap your organization around them. Every time you speak on behalf of your company, you should prepare your speech around your Mission and your Vision statements without violating your Core Values. They should be main points on your outline. Give examples of how these are working in your organization. Be passionate about your beliefs in these two important statements. Don’t let yourself get off track. Always bring your message back to your Mission and your Vision. Think back on some of the most effective speakers you have heard. What made their words compelling to you? Was it not a strong belief in the direction they were leading with a plan to get there within the confines of an ideology that kept them from straying away from their mission?

These statements should be listed on your web site. They should be shown and communicated to your customers. Notice I used two verbs here: shown and communicated. It is not enough just to state your Vision, Values and Mission. You have to live it out to the customer. If you do this, you will be miles ahead of your competition who is just trying to lasso your customers with a cheap price.

What is the difference between Mission statements, Core Values and Vision statements? In his new book Culture and High Performance, Bill Jeffries defines these terms.

(A Vision statement is) a clear, concise, and memorable statement of an attainable, desirable future. As such, an effective Vision Statement is normally stated in positive, language. It avoids the passive voice, inactive verbs, and jargon of all varieties…The language should be compelling and must be memorable.

            The Vision describes the who, what, when, where, and why, but not the "how.”

That is the purview of the Mission Statement…

Enduring success is forged not just by having a clear Vision of what succeeding looks like, but also by having a clearly defined set of Core Values to which we hold one another accountable and to which we can tell our clients to hold us accountable…What often separates a high performing company from one which under-delivers and loses market share is the disparity between the Values of what an organization espouses (its ethic) and what it actually does (its morals).