Forget Your Mission Statement and Do This Instead

For decades mission statements have been perceived as the bedrock of any organization – setting the purpose, vision, and goals of a company.  

Except they don’t.

If we are honest, mission statements are usually convoluted and filled with jargon. They all declare excellence, great value, and high quality.

Mission statements rarely inspire or provide an accurate description of what an organization does. They don’t create alignment or cohesion. How could they? They are filled with the same generic phrases that are found in any number of other companies.

Except alignment and clarity are needed, in a more rigorous and less artificial way.

Patrick Lencioni, author of The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, suggests six simple but critical questions to create clarity in organizations. None of these questions are novel, as he openly admits. What is new is that they must be addressed as a unit, not as individual questions.

The six questions are:

1.       How do we exist?

2.       How do we behave?

3.       What do we do?

4.       How will we succeed?

5.       What is most important, right now?

6.       Who must do what?

If the leadership team can provide clear answers around these key questions, without using those generic aspiration phrases, they are more likely to create a healthy organization. Failing to create alignment around these questions will prevent the clarity that all organizations need.

Do not be tricked by these deceptively simply questions. Answering them isn’t the challenge. Creating cohesion among the leadership team is the challenge.

I tried this activity myself. It seemed simple at first glance. And then I continued reading the book, following the steps on how to answer these questions. It became more challenging. I could imagine it being even more difficult if there were more than two people brainstorming the answers.

It did a few hours of time, but it was worth it. This activity deepened our thinking about our consulting firm and I found it to be a very worthwhile activity.

It was also helpful to know that there was no right answer. It was more essential that we had an answer that we could both get behind and carry out in next 3-12 months.

It isn’t perfect. Nothing is. There have been right decisions and wrong ones too. We’ve learned and changed course as needed. Most important is the willingness to rally together, formulate a collective vision, plan accordingly, learn from the results, and to do it all over again in a few months to a year’s time.

Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, is a great resource that will walk you through the steps. We can help too.

Feel free to book a free consultation to find out how we can help you strategically plan the vision for your organization.

Best wishes, Lauren