On a Mission for the Statement

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 | Technical Communication, Writing Theory & Practice

Recently I worked on a mission statement for our user education team because I’ve tackled that kind of thing before. We want something that we can measure ourselves against to see how we’re doing in our role. Our organization has its stated mission, and our department has a vision as given by our CIO.

In a department meeting yesterday, he demonstrated a project that’s in the works, and he showed us a “purpose statement” that goes along with the project’s rationale and background work. I think I like that wording better than “mission statement” because it gets closer to the heart of things. A purpose is at the root of a mission.

What’s in a mission statement? To me, the term “mission statement” carries connotations of inflated language and feel-good rhetoric. It belongs coupled with a scenic photograph in a frame. With this attitude, it’s hard to take it seriously when you task yourself (or someone else tasks you) with writing one. We did some brainstorming as a team about what our purposes and aims are, and then I took the results and took a first shot at putting them together.

As I was writing, I was trying to be specific about what we want to accomplish for people. A previous post I wrote came out of that exercise. However, we’ve talked about following the pattern of the CIO’s vision for the department: starting with a fairly broad concept, then breaking it into a progression of specific goals that are tracked with metrics.

In a recent team meeting, I reported on my reading of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, and after I had explained the dysfunctions, Tom asked me to rate our team. That was hard to do because we’re not like a development team that is working together toward a product launch.

Before we can come up with the specific goals and metrics, we need that overarching vision that will make the goals cohesive and related. We need to ask ourselves what the user education team, while working on separate projects and teams, is working toward together. And our vision or purpose needs to contribute to the organization’s mission and the department’s vision. It may sound strange that we don’t have a team purpose statement, but I’m not saying we don’t know what our job is. We’d like to set down a statement that guides our goal-making and makes us feel more like a team even though we work separately much of the time.

So a purpose statement or mission statement ought to be more than a pep talk. It ought to be more than a nice idea. It ought to give focus and definition to a group of people. It should be short enough to remember and keep in mind. I’ve been focused on project work at the moment, so when I get back to the statement, I think it’s going to suffer from some good old-fashioned hack-and-slash action.

Now, if I can just find me a broadsword…

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