Writing a Mission Statement

What your mission statement is supposed to do and how to build one that'll inspire and guide your organization.

Hi! My name is Erica Olsen, in this white board session we are going to talk about Mission Statements. So what is a Mission Statement? Your Mission Statement answers the question, why you exist as an organization or more importantly, what is you organization's core purpose, okay? So most of the time Mission Statements don't necessarily focus on the core purpose and we are looking at putting a great Mission Statements together, so your Mission Statement needs to answer the question why you exist. And you will have a great Mission Statement if you follow these characteristics, is to be short, memorable, inspiring, market focused. What do we mean by market focused? We mean, who are we serving, what value we are providing, why do people even do business with us? So market focused, and what do you want to be remembered for? I just love that and we have great example of these characteristics in play. Here is one on the board, to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful; one guess on that? It does happen to be Google, world renowned, as we know. So what's great about this Mission Statement is it really says what Google wants to be remembered for. It really says -- I think it's inspiring, its market focused and it's short. What it's not? It's not fluffy. So you know you have a great Mission Statement, when you read the statement and we can read the statement and know that it's Google without actually having the organizations name in the statement. So another great sign of a Mission Statement. How do you create a Mission Statement? Well, we have broken it down into three areas here, people, info and process. So who needs to be involved? I highly recommend getting staff input. Now, clearly not everyone of your staff members can be at the table when you are putting our Mission Statement together, but at minimum send out a survey, have a little informal conversation maybe via E-mail maybe in person about why -- ask them the question again, why does your staff think you exist as an organization. You will get great feedback, I promise. Staff input and of course your management team -- somebody else, who will be great to help, clear Mission Statement together, a copywriter. Now, maybe you have a copywriter on staff, maybe you don't. But I think it's great to pull a copywriter and you have your key ideas together and we will talk about that, your key ideas together so they can actually help you put a great statement together. Info, so what info do you need? Well, you need input from your staff; you might get some other great Mission Statements together, so you can use them as an example, so how about some other Mission Statements as well as your current statement to use that as a basis. Let's bring it into the process. So we have got our people, we have got our info, get into a room, maybe in an hour or two hours with your management team, possibly that copywriter and ask the question again, why we exist as an organization with information ideas we have on the table, synthesize it down, right. So you have a couple of the key ideas and then you might consider throwing out those keywords on some sticky notes, so you can move them around. Every time I work with people we always need to move the words around, we can like to do that so come up with those keywords and then move them around till you think you have got a great order and that sounds good. I recommend, don't word sniff, just come up with a key ideas, take that information from that meeting you are giving to the copywriter or take it yourself. Draft a couple of different ways to articulate the Mission Statement, come back together with that same group of people and select the one that you think best fits your organization. So lastly, my tip is the T-Shirt test. Would it fit on a T-Shirt and would you wear it? And if it did and you produce one, would your staff wear it? If the answer is yes, you have got a great Mission Statement.