6.6 Crafting Mission and Vision Statements
Learning Objectives
- Determine the basics of the mission and vision development process.
- Analyze the content of good mission and vision statements.
At this point, you have an understanding of what a mission and vision statement is and how creativity, passion, and stakeholder interests might be accounted for. The actual step-by-step process of developing a mission and vision might start with the mission and vision statements, but you should think of this process more broadly in terms of multiple steps:
- the process
- the content of the mission and vision statements
- communicating mission and vision to all relevant stakeholders
- monitoring
Mission and vision statements are statements of an organization’s purpose and potential; what you want the organization to become. Both statements should be meaningful to you and your organization. It should be shared with all of the employees in the organization to create a unified direction for everyone to move in.
Mission and Vision-Development Process
Mission and vision development are require strong planning. Start with the people. To the greatest extent possible, let those people responsible for executing the mission and vision drive their development. This generally means soliciting their input and guiding them through the development of the actual statements, but ideally, it means teaching them how to craft those statements themselves. Involve as many key stakeholders as possible in its development; otherwise, they won’t consider it theirs. Assign responsibility so that it’s clear how each person, including each stakeholder, can contribute.
Content
Begin by describing the best possible business future for your company, using a target of 5 to 10 years in the future. Your written goals should be dreams, but they should be achievable dreams. Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) suggests that the vision be very bold, or what he likes to call a BHAG—a big, hairy, audacious goal—like the United State’s goal in the 1960s to go to the moon by the end of the decade, or Martin Luther King’s vision for a nonracist America.
Recognizing that the vision statement is derived from aspects of the mission statement, it is helpful to start there. Richard O’ Hallaron and his son, David R. O’ Hallaron, in The Mission Primer: Four Steps to an Effective Mission Statement, suggest that you consider a range of objectives, both financial and nonfinancial (O’Hallaron & O’Hallaron, 2000). Specifically, the O’Hallarons find that the best mission statements have given attention to the following six areas:
- What “want-satisfying” service or commodity do we produce and work constantly to improve?
- How do we increase the wealth or quality of life or society?
- How do we provide opportunities for the productive employment of people?
- How are we creating a high-quality and meaningful work experience for employees?
- How do we live up to the obligation to provide fair and just wages?
- How do we fulfill the obligation to provide a fair and just return on capital?
When writing your statements, use the present tense, speaking as if your business has already become what you are describing. Use descriptive statements describing what the business looks like, feels like, using words that describe all of a person’s senses. Your words will be a clear written motivation for where your business organization is headed. Mission statements, because they cover more ground, tend to be longer than vision statements, but you should aim to write no more than a page. Your words can be as long as you would like them to be, but a shorter vision statement may be easier to remember.
Communications
Communicate often: Internal communications are the key to success. People need to see the vision, identify with it, and know that leadership is serious about it.
Leaders must evaluate both the need and the necessary tactics for persuasively communicating a strategy in four different directions: upward, downward, across, and outward (Hambrick & Cannella, 1989).
Communicating Upward
Increasingly, firms rely on bottom-up innovation processes that encourage and empower middle-level and division managers to take ownership of mission and vision and propose new strategies to achieve them. Communicating upward means that someone or some group has championed the vision internally and has succeeded in convincing top leadership of its merits and feasibility.
Communicating Downward
Communicating downward means enlisting the support of the people who’ll be needed to implement the mission and vision. Too often, leaders undertake this task only after a strategy has been set in stone, thereby running the risk of undermining both the strategy and any culture of trust and cooperation that may have existed previously. Starting on the communication process early is the best way to identify and surmount obstacles, and it usually ensures that a leadership team is working with a common purpose and intensity that will be important when it’s time to implement the strategy.
Communicating Across and Outward
The need to communicate across and outward reflects the fact that realization of a mission and vision will probably require cooperation from other units of the firm (across) and from key external stakeholders, such as material and capital providers, complementors, and customers (outward). Internally, for example, the strategy may call for raw materials or services to be provided by another subsidiary; perhaps it depends on sales leads from other units. The software company Emageon couldn’t get hospitals to adopt the leading-edge visualization software that was produced and sold by one subsidiary until its hardware division started cross-selling the software as well. This internal coordination required a champion from the software side to convince managers on the hardware side of the need and benefits of working together.
Application
It is the successful execution of this step—actually using the mission and vision statements—that eludes most organizations. “Yes, it is inconvenient and expensive to move beyond the easy path” and make decisions that support the mission statement, says Lila Booth, a Philadelphia-area consultant who is on the faculty of the Wharton Small Business Development Center. But ditching mission for expediency “is short-term thinking,” she adds, “which can be costly in the end, costly enough to put a company out of business (Krattenmaker, 2002).” That is not to say that a mission statement is written in stone. Booth cites her own consulting business. It began well before merger mania but has evolved with the times and now is dedicated in significant part to helping merged companies create common cultures. “Today, our original mission statement would be very limiting,” she says.
Even the most enthusiastic proponents acknowledge that mission statements are often viewed cynically by organizations and their constituents. That is usually due to large and obvious gaps between a company’s words and deeds. “Are there companies that have managers who do the opposite of what their missions statements dictate? Of course,” says Geoffrey Abrahams, author of The Mission Statement Book. “Mission statements are tools, and tools can be used or abused or ignored.…Management must lead by example. It’s the only way employees can live up to the company’s mission statement (Abrahams, 1999).” Ultimately, if you are not committed to using the mission statement then you are best advised not to create one.
Monitoring
Identify key milestones that are implied or explicit in the mission and vision. Since mission and vision act like a compass for a long trip to a new land, as Information Week’s Hajela suggests, “while traveling to your destination, acknowledge the milestones along the way. With these milestones you can monitor your progress: A strategic audit, combined with key metrics, can be used to measure progress against goals and objectives. To keep the process moving, try using an external audit team. One benefit is that an external team brings objectivity, plus a fresh perspective (Information Week, 2008).” It also helps motivate your team to stay on track.
Exercises
- Who should be involved in the mission and vision development process?
- What are some key content areas for mission and vision?
- Why are organizational values important to mission and vision?
- Why is communication important with mission and vision?
- To which stakeholders should the mission and vision be communicated?
- What role does monitoring play in mission and vision?
Key Takeaways
“Crafting Mission and Vision Statements” in Principles of Management by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
