Building a Great Mission Statement

It is the time of year when many organizations are doing their strategic planning for the year ahead.  In the spirit of the season, here is a strategic planning tool for revising or building anew a mission statement for any size or scope of organization.  The approach is simple and effective.  It originates from the management discipline known as Hoshin Kanri.  I have used it very successfully for many years in numerous environments including telecommunications, product development, defense, and information technology.

The method is very simple.  It begins with a mad libs (remember those?) style fill in the blanks.  The template is shown below.

The mission statement building process will take from one to four hours depending on size and complexity of your organization.  Bring your team together, include a representational cross section from leadership, management, and staff and make sure you have a good facilitator.  Building the mission statement if fun and easy from this point.  Using a large white board, the facilitator should solicit answers to each blank line, beginning with purpose.  Get everyone to participate and throw out some stimulating ideas.  For example, you can propose to the team that the purpose of the organization is “to put all competitors out of business” or “to dominate the world.”  These are not likely realistic or productive as a true purpose, but they stimulate discussion and get people to loosen up and participate.

I like to begin the process with an example mission statement built using the process.  I often use a mission statement leveraging my past as a landscaping business owner, back when I was in college.

In this simple and effective mission statement, we identify that our ultimate goal is to be the regional leader that protects its customer base and that we recognize our most important capabilities are with our crew chiefs and our equipment.  This creates both operational and strategic focus for the organization.

I regularly see mission statements from multi-billion dollar corporations that are less concise and less meaningful.  Yet, those mission statements typically take months to develop.  This approach can develop a great mission statement in hours.  Even if your mission statement is not open for revision, going through this exercise is a great early phase tactic for your strategic planning team.  It helps to get everyone focused and often exposes strategic gaps or lack of alignment.  If you choose to give this method a try, please send a comment to let us know how it worked out.