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Note: Each month, The Rosy Blog highlights a different theme in our weekly posts. In April, our theme is the power of an organization’s mission, vision, and values. We’ll provide a series of exercises to help you get started on drafting your own—and of course if you need some help, you can always give us a ring.
It’s workshop time! Whether you haven’t crafted a Mission statement before—maybe you’re just starting out as a company, or it feel by the wayside during your R&D phase— or are feeling like the Mission statement you wrote at the outset doesn’t fit you anymore, the process for writing one should be fairly simple.
And this is key: a Mission statement should be short, simple, and memorable. If it’s long or flowery at the end of this process, it’s time to redraft and refocus.
Ready? Let’s go!
Who should attend?
If you’re a small company, you may want to include every member of the organization in this process. But in many cases, you will want to choose a representative group of your company to lead the Mission/Vision/Values drafting process. If you have over 8 people in the room, you will want to split them into smaller working groups during the “Break it down” phase described below to encourage everyone’s participation.
What should you bring?
- Blank paper or our worksheet (download here).
- Post-its
- Pencils, pens, markers
- A blank wall, whiteboard, or table
- Your team
How long is this going to take?
We recommend setting aside 60-90 minutes for this exercise.
THE WORKSHOP
Begin by defining what a Mission is.
Your Mission answers the question “why do we exist, as an organization?” Or, in more detail: What do you do? For whom? And with what results?
Tell us a story.
Ask the group, “Can you think of a time when we did our work really well? Maybe we really delighted a customer, worked well as a team, or solved a problem? What was a great accomplishment or milestone we achieved, and why was it noteworthy? I want to hear those stories.”
Give the group about 5 minutes to write down 1-3 stories on either their blank paper or the Rosy Mission Workshop story worksheet. After they have finished writing, ask a few people to share their stories with the larger group.
Break it down.
Ask each person to place three Post-Its in front of them. With their first story in mind, as them to break the story into three pieces: WHO did the work benefit? HOW? What RESULTS can we report? Ask them to repeat this process for each story they wrote down during the “Tell Us a Story” stage.
Put it back together
As a whole or in smaller groups, have all members group their “WHO” Post-Its in one area, their “HOW” in another, and their “RESULTS” in a third. It’s now the group’s job to look for themes. Are we in alignment? Where are we in most alignment?
Note: for most organizations, the “WHO” should be (or at least include) your customer base.
Get writing.
Using those themes, it’s time to start writing! A simple formula for a mission statement is: “We exist to [serve WHO] by [HOW], [creating RESULTS]. Intel, for example, has the Mission to “Delight our customers, employees and shareholders [WHO] by relentlessly delivering the platform and technology advancements [HOW] that became essential to the way we work and live [RESULTS].’’
If you already have smaller groups working, ask each group to write 1-3 possible versions of the Mission statement. If not, you split into pairs at this point to draft some statements.
Ask each smaller group to share with the larger group, and record each statement. If there is strong alignment among the group already, you may be close to done! If not, ask the group to vote for the draft Mission that feels most authentic and important to them.
Congratulations! You’re well on your way to having a Mission statement of your own.
Photo by Yoann Boyer on Unsplash
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