C ritical to your company achieving success is your mission statement. Some companies don't have mission statements. Other companies have taken the time to craft one, but it's in a drawer somewhere, filed away after having been drafted during a management off-site three years ago. Some plaster it all over the walls of their office, where it's usually ignored by the longer-term employees, who know it's not how the company actually operates. Some companies have many mission statements. If one is good, then three is better, right? But a mission statement should not be just words on a piece of paper posted on the bulletin board. Done correctly, a mission statement should be a succinct, eloquent description of the soul and purpose of your company as a whole – not just what it does, but why it exists in the first place.
MISSION STATEMENTS GIVE CLARITY
A good mission statement gives you clarity – clarity of purpose and clarity of goals. It answers two questions:
• What is the purpose of the company?
• Why does the company exist?
The mission statement does not describe how the company accomplishes its goals. The mission statement is aspirational and designed never to be fully realised. In this way, it gives everyone in the organisation a shared goal
