Why Does Being “Mission-Driven” Matter?
We recently chatted with a startup founder who mentioned they "wrote their mission six years ago" yet couldn't recite the specific details. After years of fast-paced business activities, hard work, and long hours, it is common to overlook the need to review and likely revise the original mission.
You often hear, "we're a mission-driven company." A wide range of for-profit companies have stepped back to redefine, restate, and re-communicate their company mission (and there are some fantastic examples out there!). Why?
First, something matters behind all the work being done. There's often a more altruistic reason the company was created: striving for a more significant impact, making industry changes, or adding enjoyment for consumers. Another reason mission matters is because it gives everyone a baseline for decision-making. Suppose every single employee understands and is regularly reminded of the mission. In that case, every employee will make decisions that support the success of that mission.
Think about an example of a growth company. Suppose you are working at a durable goods company, and it's time to look at sales projections, the actions that support them, and adjust the quarter's key performance indicators (KPIs). Do you base these plans on some data that just came in? Not if you want growth and employee satisfaction. You examine the mission with the team, recalibrate appropriately, and decide what to pull back on. You make sure all market actions ladder up to goals and your mission, then make adjustments accordingly. This benchmark for decision-making matters because it gives you a guiding light that provides alignment with your executive team for all conversations related to projections and goals.
You might be thinking you want to sell your startup down the road. Does this still matter? Yes! If you founded your company based on a construction safety improvement that you learned from personal experience, you saw a window of opportunity. You built the company with a team. Everyone involved is behind the product to improve safety and the story, the mission, to protect others from a similar mishap. And it is making a difference. You see it in your monthly revenues, and you see it making a difference in people's lives. If you sell your company, it's a lot more attractive.
Some individuals get caught confusing mission-driven with nonprofit. Nonprofits often have intense rallying around their mission from the get-go. Many for-profit corporations often have clarity in mission at the executive level but forget to communicate it to the world (including internal teams); doing so helps every leader lead. Missions should be concise, repeatable, able to be memorized, and to the point - a paragraph is just too much! Missions evolve as companies learn from mistakes and successes. It is vital to revisit your mission statement quarterly to ensure this driving force of your business is accurate and communicated to your teams.
Don't forget that values go hand-in-hand with a company's mission. Be clear on what your top four values are at the company. It level sets conversations, customer interactions, purchasing decisions, goal and strategy setting, strategic finance considerations, and much more. When they're not just four words on paper but communicated internally and externally, repeated often, and demonstrated through leadership's actions, everyone at the company works to emulate those values. Those values lead to making the mission work, so they're critical too. When you, your boss, colleagues, or founding partners can't decide on a big move at the company, your lifesaver to keep the company on course is that mission statement.
In a recent EnticEdge blog, we provided "4 Tips that will help you put a critical lens over your data needs and achieve quality over quantity for your metric definitions." To add another layer of quality, make sure it all ladders up to the mission, supported by the decided upon company values, and you've got an all-star approach!
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