This is a trick question. They’re BOTH important.
Yet, we want to believe that something needs to happen first, and then next. Something always has a higher priority, and we rank them in order of their importance.
The fact of the matter is that if they’re both important, they’re equally important and cannot be ranked.
This is, at a very basic level, the thinking we need to use today. It’s systems thinking, as opposed to linear thinking or process thinking.
But let’s say you decide to work on “Mission” first. Rather than looking at your school’s mission, here’s a “mission script” from an iconic television series:
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. It’s five year mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.
A mission statement describes what you do. It differentiates. So often, school mission statements can apply to other schools, and Catholic schools in particular have a penchant for using identical mission statements.
That’s not differentiating.
Mission statements are also too long.
Why would someone be familiar with the mission of the USS Starship Enterprise? It’s because viewers heard it every week before the program began (which ran for more than 5 years). Do you, your members of your staff and students recite your school’s mission statement everyday before school begins during morning announcements?
In sales, sales professionals are coached to present an “elevator pitch.” It should pique the listeners interest in 10 seconds or less to begin a conversation about that sales professional’s unique value proposition.
Sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer advises sales professionals to not use the company’s mission statement (since it focuses on the company and not on the customer) and to develop one’s own personal mission statement. This sentiment is also reflected in Lisa Earle McLeod’s “Selling With Noble Purpose.”
Once again, if you follow the prompts the experts give to create a mission statement, it will take up an entire page of one’s sales collateral, nobody will read it, and, certainly, nobody will want to memorize it.
A mission statement should be short. No more than 5 lines.
3 is ideal.
1 is perfect.
Sales expert Jill Konrath suggests spending time to create an “elevator pitch” and an “elevator speech,” with the “elevator” terminology coming from the length of the average elevator ride – about 20 seconds.
Think of getting into an elevator with someone and they ask you, “So…what do you do?” The elevator pitch should be long enough to describe what you do and how you do it differently than anyone else. The follow-up question to that pitch should be, “How do you do that?”
Once that happens, the mission statement “phase” is over, and you’ve entered the realm of the “vision statement.”
The vision describes where you and your organization is going and how you’re getting there.
Too many times, mission statements of corporations share how they’re going to achieve their mission with a phrase like, “By offering superior products and world-class service, Company X maintains its position as a market leader, delivering value to our customers and a positive return on investment to our stakeholders.”
Your reaction to that is probably, ‘Blah blah blah.” Corporate leaders like it because it’s about their company – not about the customers.
Once you make it about your customers – or more precisely, your students, their parents, your alumni, your donors and your community members – everyone will work together to achieve that vision. That’s the real goal of the mission statement.
No responses yet