You Probably Need a Mission Statement

Which organizations need mission statements?

One might be inclined to think that if you’re selling cheeseburgers or manufacturing paper clips, you don’t need a mission statement—whereas if you’re trying to cure cancer or send astronauts to Mars, you do. But many organizations whose activities might seem fairly mundane have found it helpful to craft a compelling mission statement. A company that provides maintenance services to a hospital could view its mission as simply mopping floors—or, alternatively, as creating healing spaces in which patients thrive. I would argue that the latter framing is more likely to engage and motivate employees. I’m hard-pressed to think of an organization that couldn’t benefit in some way by having the right kind of mission statement.

What audiences does a mission statement have to reach?

The two principal audiences are internal stakeholders, like employees, and external stakeholders, like customers. It’s pretty challenging and perilous to articulate different missions to different audiences. If people perceive that the mission is different depending on who is listening, it invites skepticism about the organization’s seriousness. Part of a mission statement is that it reflects incontrovertible values, which need to manifest themselves in all facets of the organization’s dealings.

In that sense, a mission statement also reflects the organization’s willingness to impose limits on itself.

Absolutely. Any mission statement that doesn’t in some way constrain an organization is vapid and meaningless, because its whole purpose is to define a domain in which the organization strives to excel and a set of principles that are going to guide it on that journey. I helped write a case some years ago on the furniture company Herman Miller (now MillerKnoll), which at that time had a mission of creating “inspiring designs to help people do great things.”

When I went to visit them, they had a room in which all the projects they were considering were displayed on the wall. They showed me some examples of potentially profitable projects they had turned down because, after due consideration, teams of employees had concluded that the items proposed for manufacture were not likely to inspire people to do great things. For a mission to be credible, there have to be proof points like that.

What’s the story behind that Herman Miller mission?

The CEO at the time, Brian Walker, had asked employees to propose a new mission statement. But he wasn’t sold on the “inspiring designs” idea; he was worried that if it wasn’t backed by anything concrete, it would simply come across as a clever slogan. As he was deliberating, he happened to meet with a stem cell research scientist in a university laboratory working on a rare eye disease with which his teenage son had recently been diagnosed. The scientist, who had a lifelong back injury from a skiing accident, was sitting in a Herman Miller chair, and he told Brian it was the only one that let him sit at his desk for hours each day and sustain the focus needed to do this very demanding job. What Brian told me is that immediately after that conversation, he called back to Herman Miller headquarters and told them to go ahead with the mission statement. This encounter had convinced him that the aspiration the mission embodied was much more than a mere slogan.

What kind of leadership is expected in a mission-driven organization?

Leadership that emanates from a strong emphasis on mission and purpose is largely about tapping into people’s feelings, motivations, and values. The argument to get people to do stuff in a mission-driven organization is not “Do this and I will pay you,” or “Don’t do this and I will fire you.” It’s that you ought to want to do your job, because it will be good for everyone. Mission-driven leaders motivate people not through PowerPoint or Excel but, as Brian did, through very compelling stories. That work requires a leader who has more emotional intelligence, empathy, humility, and authenticity.

One caveat: when I talk about mission and purpose, one thing that sometimes comes up is the potentially exploitative nature of mission-driven leadership. I’ve had students who describe working for nonprofits with remarkable missions, which their managers used to justify demanding brutally long work hours for paltry wages. I’m certainly not suggesting that a compelling mission should be a rationale for not providing people with satisfactory—or even generous—compensation and working conditions.

What are some examples of bad mission statements?

The last time I checked, FedEx’s stated mission was to “produce superior financial returns for shareholders by providing high value-added logistics, transportation, and related business services through focused operating companies.” I would not hold that up as a truly compelling mission statement. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I would imagine it would be harder to jump out of bed in the morning if my purpose is “logistics” than if it is to bring people things that make a huge difference in their lives.

The Arizona Diamondbacks, a baseball team, state their mission online as follows: “[Our mission] is to provide industry-leading entertainment in a clean, safe, and family-friendly environment, and to make a positive impact on its fans and civic partners by focusing on team performance, fan experience, financial efficiency, workplace culture, and community contribution. In doing so, the organization will consistently compete for championships, treat its customers to quality service and entertainment, invest in its product, employees and fans, and establish and maintain a position of positive leadership in the community.” I doubt anyone could possibly remember this mission or even distill it. It is hard to imagine what it precludes the organization from doing. In essence, it says, “We want to be really good at everything we do and be rewarded for doing so.” In what way does that distinguish this organization from any other enterprise on the planet?

Once an organization creates a mission statement, how should it revisit it?

You’re more likely to be successful in revising a viable mission statement if you’re doing it in conjunction with a strategic reorientation of the business. It’s one thing to just come up with a new statement; it’s very different to take a close look at the business and decide to rethink what the offerings, operating principles, and audiences are.

There’s some interesting research showing that a downsizing announcement tends to have a negative impact on a company’s share price, unless that announcement is paired with a fundamental re-engineering of the business. What I take from that is that investors don’t believe that just cutting people puts a company on the right path, but they might see some virtue in a company recognizing what it’s been doing wrong and articulating how it’s going to act differently. Similarly, I suspect stakeholders respond less skeptically and more positively to a dramatic revision of an organization’s mission and purpose when it accompanies a significant realignment of its business and modes of operating.

Mission-driven organizations aren’t immune from needing to deliver on price, value, and all the other things the market demands. How do leaders make tough choices without compromising a mission?

The credibility of a mission lies in its ability to deter you from doing expedient things that don’t align with your values. To go back to Herman Miller, some years ago the company had to decide whether to provide domestic partner benefits to employees in non-heterosexual relationships. Doing so would benefit those employees and align with the company’s values of caring for people. At the same time, a significant segment of the workforce in western Michigan, where the company is based, holds very conservative Christian values and initially regarded this offering as unthinkable. Brian Walker, the CEO, had to reflect and decide whether Herman Miller was really serious about its mission and values. If it was, the company had to be willing to make costly decisions that might be unpopular with key constituencies. Ultimately, he did enact domestic partner benefits. The late James March, one of the titans of organizational theory, described this kind of step as organizations making decisions based on a “logic of commitment” or “logic of appropriateness”—considering whether an action aligns with a business’s identity and core values—rather than an exclusive “logic of consequences.”

When the mission creates tension because it limits the organization from doing things that might be required for it to survive, the only alternatives are to reinterpret the mission or recraft it. I did some work looking at the dramatic effects of COVID lockdowns on arts organizations. Many of them faced the dilemma of wanting to be an aesthetically pure organization focused on disseminating culture, but knowing they couldn’t continue to do so without revenue from visitors. There were a lot of proposals to do things like online concerts or museum tours—things that might once have seemed tawdry or not in keeping with the mission. Museum professionals had to debate whether the mission mandated creating spaces where wealthy patrons could come in and consume culture, or if instead they could broaden the set of appropriate activities and find ways to produce new revenues needed to remain viable. Organizations that haven’t been willing to do that have struggled.

When you’re visiting an organization, how do you discern if the mission really matters there?

I encourage my students to act like anthropologists during their job interviews in order to figure out whether the culture and the mission being articulated are more than just slogans. For example, they could ask an interviewer to tell them about a recent success that got everyone in the organization really excited, or what actions would most certainly get you fired. Employees might give you unsolicited examples of conversations, products, or hiring decisions in which the mission figured significantly. Stories like that reveal a lot about a company’s underlying premises and values. If the answer is, “Go look at our careers webpage,” well, it very well might be what economists call “cheap talk.”